Bastards at Work

Le harcèlement moral au travail se définit comme toute conduite abusive (geste, parole, comportement, attitude …) qui porte atteinte, par sa porte à répétition ou sa systématisation, à la dignité ou à l’intégrité psychique ou physique d’une personne, mettant en péril l’emploi de celle-ci ou dégradant le climat de travail.

[Workplace bullying is defined as any abusive conduct (gesture, word, behaviour, attitude, etc) which, by its repeated or systematic nature, undermines the dignity or the psychological or physical integrity of a person, threatening that person’s employment or degrading the working climate.]¹

This study is for anyone working in an organisation and for observers of organisational behaviour. It is written from the standpoint of someone who has spent over forty years working in some seventy complex organisations, variously as a researcher, management consultant, HR director and interim manager in the UK and internationally. Its modest ambition is to provide a fresh perspective on workplace bullying whose incidence reduces productivity (including the need to spend time on finding a replacement for an absent worker), causes much individual suffering and results in considerable cost to public health systems. It is not a manual on how to deal with workplace bullying or a sociological study of what it looks like. Neither is it critical of the value of HR texts and social science studies. Its modest ambitions are to answer the following five questions:

• Why is fictional storytelling about workplace bullying important?
• Why is it different from case studies in social science research?
• What’s notable about the French experience?
• Why is it different from the Anglo-Saxon one?
• What’s the value of these stories for bullied individuals, organisations and society as a whole?

In France, workplace bullying has emerged as a subject of intense interest and controversy among scholars, policy makers and cultural producers – notably novelists, playwrights and film directors. It has a high public profile as reflected in specific legislation, a wealth of critical literature on workplace suffering, and an extensive range of novels, plays and films. It is a social phenomenon that defines the contemporary workplace with much of the emphasis on psychosocial rather than physical suffering.² Bullying behaviour has a nebulous quality in the way it can manifest itself as, say, mocking, group exclusion, shaming, as well as managers allocating useless or impossible tasks to its targets. This study contends that storytelling has the capacity to make workplace bullying practices, generally hidden from public view, visible to the community at large in ways that specialist studies, often couched in technical terminology, seldom do – thus affording the issue broader currency.

The real extent of workplace bullying is unclear because national definitions vary and there is a considerable amount of ‘self-labelling’ by workers, that is, one worker may view a particular behaviour as a form of bullying, while another may not.³

Aucun salarié ne doit subir les agissements répétés de harcèlement moral qui ont pour objet ou pour effet une dégradation de ses conditions de travail susceptible de porter atteinte à ses droits et à sa dignité, d’altérer sa santé physique ou mentale ou de compromettre son avenir professionnel.

[No worker shall be subjected to repeated acts of psychological bullying whose purpose or effect is to degrade their working conditions and which are likely to infringe their rights and dignity, to alter their physical or mental health or to compromise their career future.]⁴

This approach seems a perfectly appropriate starting point for a detailed examination of such a multi-headed concept, but it does raise a number of key practical issues including whether, because of lack of specificity in statute law, a worker who believes they have experienced bullying can have total confidence that a court will agree, before they initiate expensive legal proceedings.⁵

Olivier Saïssi provides some insights here with an examination of workplace bullying, using the organisational life cycle as a basis for classifying different types of bullying, simultaneously determining the roots of such behaviour and the position of the bully in the organisation.⁶ Using ←3 | 4→eight case studies drawn from published sources, he argues that workplace bullying can be sparked equally by external and internal events. For instance, deregulation of air transport in Europe, which led to the part privatisation of Air France, exposed the airline for the first time to commercial pressures and the requirement to improve individual productivity for it to compete effectively in the private sector. On the other hand, bullying can also have its origins in the organisation itself, through, say, the threatening behaviour of shareholders, some or all senior executives, or indeed by the action of a single individual. The bully may see themselves as acting as a representative of the organisation, that is, where they perceive that behaving like a bully has become routinised in the organisation and is therefore part of the job. Saïssi labels this phenomenon ‘institutional’ bullying. Slavoj Žižek, in his critique of capitalism, calls this ‘systemic violence’. Arguably, within the neoliberal workplace, such behaviour manifests itself as routinised and predominantly psychological bullying.⁷⁸

Bullying may arise from enforced changes to a subgroup within an organisation, such as where members of a previously exclusive male vocational group, notably in the military and the prison system, put pressure on new female recruits, through, among other things, jokes, insults and rumours. Saïssi calls this ‘cultural’ bullying. A further variant, ‘pathological’ bullying, arises where an outsider is brought into an organisation because of their particular expertise and knowledge, while at the selection and recruitment stage, their ‘capital psychiatrique’, including any phobias and anxieties, are ignored – and once recruited their actual capabilities are disregarded too. A clear fictional representation of this type of bullying is to be found in Joëlle Delange’s novel, Le tragique du fou [Tragedy of a Madman] where ←4 | 5→a gifted but intemperate surgeon is described by the target of his bullying in the following terms: