Employees are often best positioned to uncover unlawful or unethical practices within organisations. Ensuring that employees feel able to report such concerns—and that management responds appropriately—is essential for a well-functioning labour market and organisations. This project places employers at the centre of the analysis. Currently, there is limited knowledge about what influences managerial assessments and handling of reported misconduct, both in terms of facilitating whistleblowing and responding to concerns raised. We also lack insight into the dilemmas and tensions that whistleblowing cases may trigger, and how considerations related to employers’ legitimate managerial prerogatives and expectations of employee loyalty affect workers’ freedom of expression. This project aims to generate such knowledge.
The study is being conducted within banks and hospitals in Norway, Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. It will provide insights into fundamental aspects of Norwegian working life, including the relationship between labour market organisation and the processes and mechanisms that contribute to competitiveness and innovation. It is particularly important that misconduct is uncovered in sectors that are central to the functioning of Norwegian society—such as those covered by this project: healthcare and banking.
Throughout 2024 and 2025, we have continued to analyse findings from a survey conducted across the four countries, as well as qualitative interviews from the same national contexts in finance and hospitals. During the last year, we have published two journal article and one book chapter.
In addition, work has progressed on a scholarly anthology within the Comparative Social Research series, to be published by Emerald Publishing in 2026. The anthology will include three chapters based on this project. Over the past year, researchers affiliated with the project have participated in a number of national seminars and international conferences, where findings have been presented and discussed.
Our aim is to obtain new knowledge on what makes employers suppress or encourage workers raising concerns. This will contribute to a better understanding of how employers balance two fundamental but possibly conflicting democratic principles: the property right and freedom of speech. We employ a multilevel and inter-disciplinary comparative approach inspired by institutional theory. The project combines legal method and social sience, and will make use of survey data, document analyses and qualitative interviews.
WP1 will study how the right to manage and the protection of whistleblowers are balanced in national law, both identifying the intention of the legislator, how this is played out in preporatory work and case law. The countries included (Norway, Denmark, Ireland and the UK) have different law systems and employment systems. Different regulations, such as the level of overall employment protection, may reinforce or curb the exercise of whistleblowing.
WP2 will examine how national law are filtered through sector level characteristics and transposed into guidelines at organisational level in banks and hospitals. In both sectors, law and professional ethics impose a duty on staff to raise concerns in certain situations. One question is how this duty is reflected in internal procedures. Drafting procedures can mobilise power resources of the parties involved, who will try to adapt and apply rules in a way that is consistent with their interests. The outcome can thus deviate from legislative intentions.
WP3 will identify and explain observed conformity or tensions in organisations, and the impact of different employment systems when it comes to how legal rules and guidelines are practiced at organisational level. Can whistleblowing and its responses, be linked to the design of procedures, how the notion of the right to manage is translated into practice and whether the raising of concerns is supported by co-workers and workers’ representatives?
