Whistleblowing as Disclosure Injustice: Testimonial and Structural Barriers to Being Heard

ABSTRACT Are all whistleblowers able to raise disclosures effectively and safely? Or do some workers encounter unfair disadvantage because of who they are? Thus far, the concepts we use in whistleblowing scholarship fail to capture whether and how a whistleblower's gender, race, class, or ethnicity might shape their experience of disclosure. We address this discrepancy by interrogating how a specific social category, gender, intersects with whistleblowing. Our analysis yields a new conceptual framing: disclosure injustice. Disclosure injustice comprises, first, the variability in how different whistleblowers are perceived as credible and thus their testimony is taken into account (whistleblower testimony justice) and second, how structural arrangements support or otherwise people of different social categories coming forward (whistleblower structural justice). Viewing whistleblowing as a scene of potential disclosure injustice challenges extant assumptions that whistleblowing is, more‐or‐less, a universal experience. Contributions for research include, first, disclosure injustice offering a dual approach, testimonial and structural, that shows how whistleblowing is unevenly accessible depending on one's social category. Second, collective shields are shown to provide salience to speakers who are otherwise vulnerable to reprisal. They work precisely because they hedge against the credibility and support deficits that accompany the experience of whistleblowing. At its core, workplace whistleblowing is the act of speaking “truth to power” to challenge an oppressive status quo. Workers of all description must have equal capacity to engage.