Abstract
Misbehaviour by members of organizations is probably as old as organized society. It is easy to imagine a Palaeolithic horde with at least one or two goldbrickers among the hunters – skin-clad warriors who are visible and vociferous when the hunt sets out, but unobtrusively absent when hard work needs to be done. Taylor (1895) first brought this problem into the light of organizational theory, but it is still far too easy to find management training texts based on the assumption that a manager’s task is to motivate his staff rather than to police scrimshankers (and petty pilferers too – most former office staff will have had the facts of retirement finally driven home by discovering that they actually have to buy such things as paperclips).
Misbehavior in Organizations had its genesis in an MBA seminar: the first editor was teaching motivation from just such a text and was interrupted by a student saying ‘My job as a manager is not to make work more interesting or more satisfying. My job is to make sure people don’t waste time, don’t steal, don’t cheat their supervisors, don’t take drugs, and don’t fight with one another’.
When the first edition was published in 2003, there had been relatively little attention paid in management training circles to the topic of misbehaviour, so this book was more of a pioneering work. Over the past decade or so, however, there has been a considerable growth in the acceptance of the fact that people working in organizations have human failings which can be exacerbated by poor management and poor organizational structures. This has enabled the editors to streamline the book, while bringing in new or expanded sections on topics like bullying, harassment (including a discussion of cyberbullying) and information hiding.
While bullying, like scrimshanking, is probably as old as the human race (or actually older – chimpanzees display remarkably similar traits), the rapid recent development of social media on the Internet has raised it to a whole new level. In particular, the social media allow for anonymity and absence of personal contact, which makes an enormous difference. Military experts have found it extremely difficult to train recruits to kill face-to-face using bayonets, but far fewer psychological barriers to be overcome in training them to kill by pushing buttons. Most reputable printed newspapers say ‘letters will only be considered for publication if accompanied by a full name and address’ but Twitter can be used to hide anyone. Infostorms describes the case of Amanda Todd, who was driven to suicide by a campaign of bullying on FaceBook, YouTube and other media platforms. She went online to show what was happening to her. Her display achieved over 1,600,000 hits up to her death, but none of the people who read it and expressed sympathy by ‘liking’ it actually intervened. Her case gave rise to the macabre expression ‘todding’ to describe an online bullying campaign.
The first edition of Infostorms was timely and therefore influential. With a basis in logic, game theory, economics and social psychology, it showed how information technology can radically amplify and accelerate the normal human processes of personal decision-making and group thinking. Since then, a vast literature has built up, to the extent that when looking at e-health recently I found myself reviewing two books with identical titles – Mental Health in the Digital Age (Guha, 2017). Because of this growth in general awareness, this second edition has had to be a consolidation of existing thought rather than a pioneering text. As such, it is still a very useful tool for examining the information society in which we live, including the growing threat of anonymous bullying.
National governments in various countries have made desperate attempts to control social media, but unless they go to North Korean lengths it is difficult, as Infostorms points out, to prevent people virtually assembling in global public squares – ‘The weapons of revolution come at US $9.99’. The state is indeed withering away in a manner which Karl Marx had never predicted. US$9.99 does not only buy you a revolutionary weapon, however, it also buys you a tool for anonymously bullying people you may never have met. Most studies of bullying are, inevitably, based on the nation state, and nearly all are from Western countries. As Cyberbullying points out, young people especially are citizens of Twitterland as well as of individual countries. Cyberbullying includes papers comparing cyberaggression in Chinese, Indian and Japanese adolescents, as well as a cross-national examination of seven European countries. Cyberbullying was originally published as a journal special issue – Society 5[2] 2015. Readers may not feel the need to buy in hardback papers which are mostly available free on open access, but consolidated in book form it does show how bio/psycho/social factors can help in understanding the phenomenon of cyberbullying, and at least provides a basis for, though not a blueprint for, evidence-based intervention, prevention and damage limitation programmes.
Cyberbullying is primarily an invasion of privacy, but equally depends on the existence of privacy. Privacy is a fairly recent development in human existence. If you live in a remote Indian village, everyone in it will know who you have spoken to, when you last had a shit or what you had for breakfast, but similarly everyone will know who is bullying you. The Internet offers a unique combination of utter isolation coupled with the ability to whip up huge anonymous gangs. Stalker, Hacker, Voyeur, Spy attempts a psychodynamic study of people who feel impelled to invade the privacy of others. It does so, however, in a rather curious fashion, by analysing aspects of various films. It therefore ends up as a psychoanalytic study of film directors’ views of voyeurs, rather than a first-hand approach. This is therefore as much a contribution to cinematography as it is to the study of cyberbullying. This indirect approach to the subject seems common – the only other relevant psychoanalytic book that I have come across, Josh Cohen’s Private Life (2015) puts as much emphasis on Milton, Henry James and Snoopy as it does on real people. Both books would be useful for readers seeking a Freudian approach to the online invasion of privacy, but a more people-focussed book needs to be written.
Aggression and bullying can take place in a wide variety of contexts, but for most children it will be in school, and for most adults it will be in the workplace. Overcoming Mobbing echoes some of the concerns about bullying at work that were raised in Misbehavior in Organizations and tries to suggest some possible solutions. Both books strongly criticize the ‘bad apple’ explanation which is usually raised by organizations when something goes wrong. People with irrational (or even rational) grudges can be found anywhere, and there are people with personality disorders which give them an inbuilt desire to dominate or persecute the weak – Overcoming Mobbing suggests roughly 1% of adult females and 3% of males, though there is evidence that a higher proportion work their way into managerial positions. This is not enough ‘bad apples’ to affect a well-run organization. As Hannah Arendt (1963) pointed out, ‘most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good’. Most evil in schools or workplaces is likely to be the result of bad organization rather than bad individuals. It is more important to find a cure for ‘bad barrels’ than one for ‘bad apples’.
My main concerns with Overcoming Mobbing are, first, that it tries to do too much. There is some useful material here on creating a healthy workplace, supplementing the material found in Misbehavior in Organizations. There is also some useful material on the kinds of treatment, primarily psychological, that would help victims to recover from the effects of being mobbed. It might have been more useful to concentrate on one or the other. The fact that most of the treatments and support mechanisms on offer are psychotherapeutic in nature is typical – there are occasional publications on social work support for stressed or traumatized people, such as Social Approaches to Mental Distress (Tew, 2011) but the vast majority of relevant publications are psychology-based.
My other criticism, in line with the overall topic of this review, is the extraordinary absence of any mention of cyberbullying. The workplace activities described in Overcoming Mobbing are all rather quaint old-fashioned face-to-face set-ups, with people being verbally bullied by line managers or colleagues, rather than via text messages, e-mails or FaceBook entries. Google rates a mention in the book, but only, along with Starbucks, as a relatively ‘good’ bullying-free organization to work for, with no mention of what it actually does. We need a combination of all these books to cover the subject adequately.
Infostorms is the best of them for introducing us to the ways in which the social media are transforming the lives of all of us, adults and children. Misbehavior in Organizations, supplemented by parts of Overcoming Mobbing, gives us an idea of the differences between those organizations which nurture a bullying culture and those which are able to suppress bullying. Cyberbullying looks at the problems faced by young people, from an international perspective, usefully matching the international structure of the social media. Stalker, Hacker, Voyeur, Spy takes a rather odd cinematographic approach, but does give us a psychoanalytic view of those people who are most likely to force their way into other people’s privacy, and, with Overcoming Mobbing, gives some useful ideas for counselling, therapy and social support for people who have been victims of stalking, harassment, organized aggression and bullying.