‘Here be Monsters’: Bullies beyond discipline

How is workplace bullying understood as a social and organisational problem and how has it been addressed? Academic and professional interest in workplace bullying has grown extensively in recent decades, variously investigating its social costs, psychological features, health effects and cultural pre-conditions. Despite such extensive scholarship, there remains a pressing need for analysis into the ways in which the phenomenon has been understood and problematised through prevailing organisational discourses. By adopting a dispositional Foucauldian analysis, we investigate workplace bullying as a pathology of power. We advance current understandings of workplace bullying by addressing it within heterogeneous relations of power. We map the various ways in which workplace bullying has been problematised by key organisations, agencies and actors, illustrating how different dispositives (dispositifs) are mobilised in relation to the phenomenon. Our paper offers a new theoretical contribution to Foucauldian and workplace bullying scholarship by showing how the discourse of workplace bullying involves different and sometimes conflicting governmental rationalities. We make a novel contribution to Foucauldian scholarship in organisation studies by revealing how this phenomenon points to an overlap and interplay of dispositives of power: where the social problem of bullying is diagnosed as both a monstrous psychological abnormality that escapes control, and a managerial dysfunction that peculiarly appeals to neoliberal culture management as a remedy. These shortcomings are critical considerations in efforts to prevent and reduce bullying in the workplace.