A government investigation into a company transforms workplace atmosphere into fear and secrecy
Evidence
While Schlichtmann was busy building his case against Grace, the federal investigation that he had set in motion with the help of Al Love was causing chaos at the Woburn plant. Barbas, Shalline, and four other employees, including a Grace corporate executive, received subpoenas to testify before a grand jury. On the plant floor, rumors traveled swiftly among the workers, who gathered in small groups and talked in low voices among themselves. Lawyers from Boston and the W. R. Grace office in Cambridge seemed to arrive every day. One after another, workers were summoned to the conference room for interviews. An air of gloom and secrecy hung over the plant. In the front office, lawyers searched through the files. Barbas and Shalline were often gone from work, called to Boston for more interviews. Word spread that they were now represented by criminal lawyers. Their fellow workers speculated in whispers about whether anybody would go to jail for dumping or for perjury. — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action, 977
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the Milgrom law-merchant and diamond-bourse material: where formal enforcement arrives, private reputation regimes collapse and everyone lawyers up. — connects to: Bureaucratic practices hinder effective management of information secrecy.; A colonial official pursued secret inquiry to avoid exposing colleagues — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 493; Organizations can enforce complicity through deliberately suppressed curiosity — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2385 (+17 more)
Broader Connections
- Bureaucratic practices hinder effective management of information secrecy.
#complicates(1.00) - A colonial official pursued secret inquiry to avoid exposing colleagues
#qualifies(1.00) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 493 - Fear of liability drives corporate concealment of known health harms to workers.
#expands(1.00) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4012 - Fear of retaliation drives collective blindness to workplace wrongdoing
#corroborates(1.00) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 483 - Explicit organizational warnings against information sharing produced chilling effects that were then punished
#expands(0.95) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1985 - Organizations can enforce complicity through deliberately suppressed curiosity
#complicates(0.90) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2385 - Workers in new bureaucracies become their own auditors under internalized surveillance
#expands(0.90) - The boundary between workplace and workforce surveillance is dissolving
#expands(0.90) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 229 - Corporate corruption of employees is often deliberately engineered by management
#qualifies(0.85) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4024 - Repeated corporate privacy violations indicate an intentional design rather than oversight
#complicates(0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 153 - The Patriot Act aggravated workplace discrimination by mandating employer investigations.
#complicates(0.80) — Sahar F. Aziz, Sticks and Stones, the Words That Hurt, 227 - Workers elicit client compliance by invoking their subordinate position within the bureaucracy
#complicates(0.80) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 492 - Bureaucratic desk work destroys people while hiding causal links from actors
#complicates(0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 97 - Citizen suspicion of government can trigger government suspicion of citizens.
#complicates(0.75) — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 959 - Workplace access restrictions function as organizational control over worker attention.
#complicates(0.75) — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 32