Gossip, Organization and Work

A Research Overview

Kathryn Waddington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000548679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

The premise of this book is that research into gossip, organization, and work is an important idea whose time has come. A key feature of the book is the inclusion of 'practice points' showing how – and where – theory and/or research intersect with practice and vice versa. They are intended as signposts to future thinking and theorizing, tempting readers to venture outside of their 'home' disciplines and territories, conceptual comfort zones, and methodological mindsets. The overall aim of the book is to: (i) provide enough information for readers to decide where they might want to go next; (ii) offer some theoretical directions and ethical principles; and (iii) make suggestions regarding what academic-practitioner tools and techniques will help them along the way, including arts-based and mixed-methods research that focuses on real-world lived experience(s) of gossip.

It will be relevant to researchers at all stages of their career: from students at the start of their academic journey, to 'seasoned' scholars with more extensive experience. The book is also intended to be readable and relevant to practitioners with academic interests, who seek to reflect critically upon, and develop, their practice in times of turbulence and change and in the COVID-19 era.

1 IntroductionGossip, organization, and work

DOI: 10.4324/9780367652982-1

Gossip, organization, and work: a travel guide

This chapter takes as its premise that the study of gossip, organization, and work in the 21st century represents an important idea whose time has come. It includes a brief history of gossip as a background to the chapters that follow, which provide directions for future research in the field. In keeping with the brief for this series, the book should be read as a ‘travel guide’ through a new and rapidly evolving area of business and organizational research. Readers and researchers will need to travel light in order to travel far in this new and rapidly evolving field; or to use Weick’s (1996, p. 311) allegory, to ‘drop their heavy tools’, which means:

Focus on relationships, use abstract concepts, bridge observations and abstractions, and articulate the values that matter. … To remind ourselves of that is to restore lightness.

I hope the book will be relevant to researchers at all stages of their career: from doctoral researchers at the start of their academic journey, to ‘seasoned’ scholars with more extensive experience. I also hope the book is readable and accessible to practitioners with academic interests, and who seek to reflect critically upon and develop their practice in times of turbulence and change. The overall aim of the book is to: (i) provide enough information for readers to decide where they might want to go next; (ii) offer some theoretical directions and ethical principles; and (iii) make suggestions regarding what academic-practitioner tools and techniques will help them along the way, including arts-based and mixed-methods research. A key feature of the book is the inclusion of ‘practice points’, which aim to provide readers with insights into how theory and/or research interact with practice.

Gossip: an idea whose time has come

In 1852 the French novelist, poet, and dramatist Victor Hugo (1802–1885), in his essay ‘Histoire d’un Crime’ (translated as ‘The history of a crime’), legendarily said: an invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come (Robb, 1997). For business and organizational scholars, gossip is an important idea whose time has come, as this book hopes to illustrate. While gossip has featured in history, literature, and art (e.g., Fletcher, 2009; Martin, 2014; Tebbutt, 1995), it has – until relatively recently – been absent in organizational, management, and business research literature. This is both puzzling and ‘disappointing that organizational scholars have generally failed to acknowledge and engage with gossip’ (Oswick, in Waddington, 2012, p. xv). What is even more difficult to explain is why cognate areas such as organizational discourse, narrative, and communication studies have overlooked the phenomenon of gossip. Paradoxically, I suggest that COVID-19 has unexpectedly shed light onto gossip as an idea whose time has come, and which cannot now be ignored or overlooked.

COVID-19: bringing gossip into the foreground?

In 2020 and 2021, the coronavirus pandemic and associated lockdowns fundamentally altered the ways that people engage with work, and with each other. The term ‘Zoom fatigue’ – excessive amounts of close-up eye gaze, cognitive load, increased self-evaluation from staring at oneself on a screen, and constraints on physical mobility – has entered day-to-day conversations and research agendas (Bailenson, 2021). Overnight, the opportunities for casual conversations constituted as gossip before, during, and after face-to-face meetings (e.g., Hallett et al., 2009) disappeared, and with them the largely unrecognized benefits and consequences of gossip, such as the establishment of social bonds, strengthening of relationships, and as a means to promote cooperation (Dores Cruz et al., 2021). The functional role of gossip as a means of emotional expression and regulation (Martinescu et al., 2019; Waddington & Fletcher, 2005) has now been shown in sharp relief. COVID-19 has unexpectedly ‘shone a light’ on gossip. To paraphrase Joni Mitchell’s lyrics from Big Yellow Taxi: you don’t know what you’ve got (gossip as an organizational phenomenon worthy of serious scholarship) ’til it’s gone. An unforeseen, and ironic, outcome of the pandemic, therefore, has been to bring gossip into the foreground – as a phenomenon worthy of research in hitherto overlooked fields of organizational discourse, narrative, and communication studies. Another reason why gossip is now coming steadily into the foreground is the emerging literature surrounding gossip as an early warning of organizational failure, which is considered next.

Gossip as an early warning of organizational failure

Recognition of the links between risk and reputation, and the ‘sentinel function’ of gossip as an early warning indicator of failure in healthcare and other organizations, systems, and teams, is beginning to grow (Kewell, 2007; Waddington, 2016, 2020):

The sentinel function of gossip and rumour can be an early warning of serious issues within an organisation, including matters of patient welfare and safety. Clinicians in leadership and executive positions need to know how to manage gossip and rumour situations. (O’Connor et al., 2018, p. 32)

In healthcare, government-led inquiries/investigations illustrate the stark human, financial, and reputational costs of organizational failures. They also reveal that information about the antecedents of failure and scandal are often ‘common knowledge’ contained in gossip. For example, the UK Kerr/Haslam Inquiry (HM Government, 2005) into two decades of sexual abuse of female psychiatric patients asked:

• How could it happen that abuse of patients, evidenced by the convictions of William Kerr and Michael Haslam, went undetected for so long?
• How could it be that the voices of the patients and former patients of William Kerr and Michael Haslam were not heard?
• Why were so many opportunities to respond and investigate missed?

The inquiry revealed a widespread belief within the local medical community, circulating as gossip and rumour, that something was extremely wrong with the practices of the two consultant psychiatrists. One of the inquiry’s many recommendations was:

In answer to the question – when should rumour etcetera—be acted upon, and in what form should that action be taken – we can only invite further research.

(HM Government, 2005, p. 683, emphasis added)

There is clearly still much further research yet to be done; the above recommendation, as is so often the case with public inquiries, was neither funded nor implemented (Norris & Shepheard, 2017; Waddington, 2016).

Van Iterson and Clegg (2008) used the Cole Inquiry (2006) into the United Nations (UN) Oil-for-Food Programme as a case analysis of gossip, rumour, power, and politics. Their article makes an important research contribution in that it provides an organizational-level analysis of how gossip that spreads facts-based rumours can be understood in terms of their shifting role in circuits of power. A British diplomat with the UN identified that in 1999 she first heard gossip circulating in the UN that the Australian Wheat Board was in breach of the programme. In 2005 the UN Independent Inquiry Committee verified the information circulating as gossip and rumour. Van Iterson and Clegg (2008, pp. 1133–1134) concluded:

However much an organization may assume that it has stabilized the circuits of power flowing through a specific arena, that arena is always capable of being reconfigured by other circuits, other actors – and gossip plays a key role in these relations.

These illustrative inquiries illustrate two key points: firstly, the relationship, and difference, between gossip and rumour, terms which are often used interchangeably in lay conversations. McAndrew (2019, p. 174) makes the critical point that researchers need to be more precise about the differences and distinguishing features, pointing out that rumours are unsubstantiated bits of information that may involve future events, people, or some other topic of collective interest; ‘gossip is defined more specifically as talk about people’. However, Adkins (2017, p. 9, emphasis added), reflecting upon research into gossip episodes and narratives, argues that gossip is much more than just talk ‘about people’:

It’s clear that much of what conversationalists have self-identified as gossip isn’t simply or merely personal in nature. In other words when we gossip, we aren’t always just talking about people (let alone the behind their back part). To be specific … people gossip at work, a lot, and often what they’re talking about (evaluatively, confidentially, sometime angrily) are corporate or institutional events and actions.

Therefore, the second key point is that government-led inquiries/investigations – which relate to organizational events and in/actions – provide a rich source of gossip-related empirical materials at group/community and organizational levels, available in the public domain for further analysis. Further research could potentially pre-empt inquiries into organizational failure and scandals and associated economic costs. Since 1990, UK central and devolved governments have spent at least £638.9 million on public inquiries, and this figure is rising (Norris & Shepheard, 2017). More importantly, further research could potentially prevent the terrible human costs of such failures and scandals. It would, however, be naïve to claim that this short book will be able to address fully the latter points, and future research into the sentinel function of gossip is certainly not an easy option. The complex ethical issues related to researching gossip are addressed in more detail in Chapter 4: ‘Researching organizational gossip: ethical considerations’. Chapter 5: ‘Future directions and pathways to practice-based knowledge’ outlines methods and models of academic-practitioner inquiry, arising from recent research, and recommendations into creating ‘speak-up’ organizational cultures (Reitz & Higgins, 2019), which are now becoming part of the wider changing landscape of work.

The changing landscape of work

Dewe and Cooper (2021), in the Work and Stress title in this series, signalled that the future requires a change in thinking away from old and outdated models of ‘jobs’ and ‘employees’, which are ‘increasingly irrelevant and obstruct innovation, growth and opportunity’ (p. 179). How work gets done has changed fundamentally ...