Upon reading through Elliott’s accounts of whistleblowing, I thought I spotted a trend: a religious commitment expressed at an early age that exerted itself later in life on the whistleblower’s conscience, long after any official commitment to religion had waned. Two whistleblowers in Elliott’s story had a strong Catholic upbringing. A third had be...
Yet the religious angle probably falls short as an explanation for the whistleblower’s fanatical single-mindedness. While some of the book’s whistleblowers were raised in the church, including Elliott himself, it was often in the way that many people of their generation were. One whistleblower even insists it was his strong Italian immigrant commun...
More plausibly, Elliott’s whistleblowers might be described as inhabiting ideological fanaticism’s bright side.
Finally, there is institutional inertia, or that tendency within an institution to stay quiet in the face of injustice because everyone else stays quiet, because the institution’s solid reputation inclines employees to give the institution and all things associated with it the benefit of the doubt, and because the responsibility for any particular ...
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