Humiliation: A standard organizational product

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Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 1034–1053

Humiliation: A standard organizational product?!

Barbara CzarniawskaGRI, School of Business, Economics and Law at Goteborg University, Box 600, SE 405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden

Received 20 August 2006; received in revised form 20 December 2006; accepted 5 January 2007

Abstract

Humiliation is treated as a random event, an error in a modern organization. This paper claim is tothe contrary—that humiliation, legitimate or not, is a standard organizational by-product, consideredto be an unavoidable if regrettable effect of power. The paper presents examples of organizationalhumiliation and discusses it in the terms of a social act and of an emotion. Contrary to what might beexpected, humiliation is not limited to personnel issues; budget and accounting procedures are alsoarenas permitting humiliation to be produced. The pervasiveness of the phenomenon is scrutinized,ending with a plea for non-instrumental approach to negative phenomena in organizations.© 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Humiliation; Power; Constructionism; Narratives

To a certain degree, humiliation shares the fate of gender discrimination in the orga-nizational context. It is assumed that it happens by default, as a result of a deviation or afailure. It is here, however, that the similarity ends. Although gender theorists have convinc-ingly demonstrated that gender discrimination is built into modern organizations by design,humiliation is still treated as a random event. It is seen as an error in a modern organiza-tion, which, although no longer absolutely rational, saves itself by trying to be reasonablyhumane. Thus Dennis Smith, one of the few researchers who took up the issue of humiliation(from a macro-perspective) says: “In a human rights society, we do not accept humiliationas a ’normal’ mechanism built into the bone and muscle of society. Instead, we reject itslegitimacy” (2001, p. 546). My claim is to the contrary—that humiliation, legitimate or not,

! This paper was originally presented at the Subaltern Storytelling Seminar, University College Cork, Ireland,28–29 June 2002.

E-mail address: [email protected].

1045-2354/$ – see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2007.01.004


B. Czarniawska / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 1034–1053 1035

is a standard organizational by-product, even if it is also considered to be an unavoidable ifregrettable effect of power. What is more, even such apparently impersonal procedures asbudgeting and accounting are arenas where humiliation is manufactured.

The present text does not have an ambition to present an exhaustive theory of the phe-nomenon. It contains an excursion into the social psychology literature that might be helpfulin the theoretical framing of this topic. It also offers a collection of vignettes from my field-work. It is doubtful whether any systematic field study of humiliation is possible at all. Likemany other studies of what Vaughan (1999) so aptly called “the dark side of organizations”,a study of humiliation can hardly be planned. Unlike her study of misconduct and disaster,it is even difficult to be done retroactively, as it is seldom documented. The aim of this paperis therefore to elicit more such vignettes, and perhaps several promising frameworks, whichwill allow accounting and organizational scholars to amass a substantial collection of fieldexamples, enough to develop what here is but a tentative thesis.

1. Humiliation as a by-product of power

My first reflection concerning organizational humiliation emerged from a study of poweras an experiential concept (reported in Czarniawska-Joerges, 1994; Czarniawska-Joergesand Kranas, 1991). My colleagues and I asked students in seven European countries (Swe-den, Norway, Finland, Italy, Poland, Germany, and England) to write short stories illustratingthe phenomenon of power in work organizations. About 5% of them were stories of theways in which people in power humiliate their subordinates. I might have not paid specialattention to those stories were it not for the strength of the reactions they contained. Theyoung people who wrote the stories were clearly upset by such cases, saw them as revolting,and intended to change things when given the opportunity to do so.

The same phenomenon has been brought to my attention during another study, that ofbig city management, which included, among other things, “shadowing” the officials in themunicipality of Warsaw. Here is an excerpt from an observation of a meeting. There were10 people present, among them the Deputy Mayor and a Woman Top Professional, whoheld the highest staff position in her specialty.


1036 B. Czarniawska / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 1034–1053

In my report, I interpreted this interaction in the context of other events showing dis-crimination against women (Czarniawska, 2000). Afterwards, however, I began to wonder.For me, it was a clear case of public humiliation. But was it for her? Does it matter whethershe and I perceived it in the same way? Could such a thing happen to a man? Was it anexceptional organizational event? These questions sent me back to my earlier material, butalso to literature on humiliation.

1.1. Humiliation as a concept

AltaVista revealed more than 250,000 entries on “humiliation”. More than half of theentries focused on sexuality. Of the remaining, more than half were pages on religiousmatters (the humiliation of Jesus Christ and the saints). Of the remaining, most were polit-ical pages, mainly connected to war and the humiliation of the conquered enemy. Thesethree contexts were beyond the scope of my interest, however very few entries concernedwork and the psychology or sociology of humiliation. I will return to this literature in duecourse, but first I would like to present a text that I found on a home page of the US Navy.It read:



One conclusion that can be drawn from this text is that humiliation might be seen bothas a virtue and a vice, or perhaps always a virtue, only sometimes a virtue in the worldof vice. Such a concept of humiliation was surprising too, and this surprise revealed theimplicit assumption with which I began my search—the belief that humiliation is damagingto persons and demoralizing to organizations. Apparently, such a commonsense suppositionwas overly simplistic. The works of two social psychologists, John Sabini and Maury Silver,1

proved helpful in highlighting the complexity of the phenomenon.This is how Silver et al.(1986) began their article on humiliation:

From Argentina to Greece, from the Gulag to the Holocaust, an admitted aim oftorture was not only to extract information, instill fear, get sadistic pleasure, but alsoto humiliate the victim. Why? People have risked death in order to avoid humiliation(. . .) Why? What is the nature of humiliation such that both the torturer and the victimtreat it as important? Yet, humiliation is also provoked by the trivia of everyday life;being ignored, slighted, patronized, or even, being pitied or helped, is somethinghumiliating. How are these grave and apparently trivial humiliations linked? Andwhy is it that trivial humiliations don’t feel trivial? (p. 269)

Silver et al. started their search for answers pointing out that humiliation can be treatedeither as a social act or an emotion. The relevance of this distinction can be best illustratedby cases in which a person does not feel humiliated, but the observers perceive the event asbeing humiliating, or the other way around. The focus of the present text is on humiliationas social act, but Silver et al.’s insightful theory of humiliation as emotion is also valuablein understanding humiliation in work organizations.

Their theory is embedded in constructionist psychology, which rejects the Cartesianmind-body dualism and does not contrast emotion to cognition (see e.g. Gergen, 1999;Harre, 1986). All emotions have a cognitive and, therefore, a social aspect; all cognition isemotionally tinted. Whether humiliation is a positive or a negative emotion depends on itscognitive component. Most generally, say Silver et al., feeling humiliated is related to anassessment of a person’s socially relevant capacities, or powers. Feeling humiliated meansfeeling powerless—not of one’s choice.

Thus a person who willingly participates in sexual activities considered humiliatingby non-participants is actually arranging a social act of humiliation as a play; there is no

1 For general overview of their work see Sabini and Silver (1982, 1998); for an excellent use of their theories inunderstanding workplace envy, see Patient et al. (2003).



reason for this person to feel humiliated. As to the observers, they may perceive it as “evil”or “alien”. Therefore, say Silver et al., “what separates ‘humiliation’ from ‘the evil’, ‘thealien’ is choice and power” (1986, p. 274). The power to choose saves a person from feelinghumiliated, no matter what the observers might think. The latter’s negative opinions will begrounded in different standards or norms of expected behavior, be they moral, aesthetical,or simply those of appropriateness.

Similarly, a person who chooses to submit to humiliation while being able to withdrawfrom it, does not feel humiliated. The Pope washes the feet of the poor, and while thisaction is commonly recognized as potentially humiliating, its context and the standards ofa particular community do not make it so. “[A] flaw measured against the standard of onegroup may be a reason for celebration when seen against the standards of another” (Silveret al., 1986, p. 277). This can be the clue to reading the US Navy text: as suggesting thatthe norms for the Navy Chiefs are unlike the norms of other groups.

Silver et al. (1986) also claimed that, although humiliation is often public, it does not needto be so. It is possible to feel humiliated when alone, or when the only witness is the persondoing the humiliating. Public humiliation is the most strongly felt, however: “Knowing thata public knows your humiliation makes the story harder to reinterpret or forget” (p. 279).In sum, “humiliation involves not having the powers that we believe members of a groupshould have and this in turn involves standards of what is appropriate” (Silver et al., 1986,p. 277).

Following Latour’s (1986) plea to search for performative definitions, I limit myattention to social acts and situations that are labeled by actors or observers as humil-iation. A performative definition that can be rendered in a text (rather than performedin practice) would therefore collect commonalities in descriptions of such situations.Intentions, motives, and feelings can only be represented in utterances—ascriptions ordescriptions.

From such a perspective, what is common both in the examples quoted by Silver etal. (1986) and the examples that follow, humiliation is the perceived inability to exhibita socially expected reaction to a situation in which a person is deprived of his of herdignity—again, as defined by a given community.

Here is an example from our own community. A couple years ago I participated in asocial science conference of an unusual format. All paper presentations were plenary, andeach three presentations were followed by a commentary of a discussant. The anomaly– in my eyes – lay in the fact that the presenters were given no opportunity to respond;neither was there a general discussion. One of the discussants set the three presentationsin a framework alien to all of them, and proceed to demolish the three papers, alternatingbetween ridicule and unfair critique.

Was it an insult to the presenters? Silver et al. (1986) did use an example of insults,and Gabriel (1998, 2000) discussed insults in the organizational context. But insult as suchdoes not have to be humiliating—it is the inability to meet the challenge constituted byan insult that is humiliating. While “inability” can be seen as a psychological state (this iswhy Gabriel, 1998, assumes that insults are humiliating), in what follows I focus on actioncontexts structured so that they permit or even invite humiliation, like in the conferenceexample above. In this way I hope to move from psychological to organizational aspects ofhumiliation.



1.2. Humiliation stories

Having been twice alerted to the presence of humiliation in work organizations, I returnedto my earlier material, looking for stories that described social acts perceived as humiliatingby an observer (including self-observation) or by the reader (including myself). Here aresome examples.







All the stories report events that fit the tentative definition of humiliation formulatedearlier: in our society, an adult person should be able to choose her facial expression (Story1), sit down (Story 2), be treated as innocent until proven guilty (Story 3), discuss hisduties and be able to carry them out uninterrupted (Story 4), be met by rational argumentsin case of disagreement (Story 5), be able to act upon a motivated decision (Story 6) andbe openly confronted in case their work is unsatisfactory (Story 7). In fact, these could be



regarded as “a chart of rights of an organizational citizen”. Humiliation consists in takingthese rights away from a person.

A question arises: Why didn’t they resist? An obvious, if speculative answer is that theyfelt powerless. This answer is almost tautological, but the present material does not allowfor a more elaborate one. It permits me to formulate two other questions instead: Why didit happen? and What could its consequences be?

Let us have another look at the seven stories. They all conform to the performativedefinitions of humiliation quoted before, but they are not identical. Stories 1 (woman topmanager), 3 (female workers accused of theft) and 4 (professor harassing and exploitingyounger colleague) can be seen as typical examples of bullying. Story 6 (Indian subsidiary)is a milder version of it: it shows a lack of respect on the verge of bullying. Bullying is animportant phenomenon that has its own literature (se e.g. Salin, 2003); work bullies can besadists in positions of power or they can be people with low sensitivity and lack of respectfor others. The motives are therefore mostly psychological, although the behavior is social.In the present context, however, especially interesting are stories 2, 5, and 7. All these arecases of staged humiliation, and although the persons carrying out the humiliating acts areprobably of the bullying type, something beyond bullying is happening.

Silver et al. (1986) were also interested in humiliation as a social act. They quoted aninterview by Gita Sereny with Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka concentrationcamp. Sereny asked Stangl why the prisoners had to be humiliated if they were goingto be killed anyway. “To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies’ hesaid. ’To make it possible for them to do what they did.” (p. 280). According to him,humiliation was used as a means of social control—not of those humiliated (although that,too; see Navy Chiefs) but of those who watched and/or participated in the humiliation.Smith (2001, p. 543) would have probably categorized it as a “reinforcement-humiliation:routine abuse of inferiors in order to maintain the perception that they are, indeed,inferior”.

Although the analogy must be put in proportion, such social control might be taking placein Stories 2, 5, and 7. “Conditioning others” seems to be the main point of the exercise,as is re-confirming of the hierarchical order: “I tell you when to sit”, “I make or unmakehotels as teaching places”, “I decide what is important and relevant” (see also Gabriel,1998).

So now it is time for another question: Why was there no resistance from the observers?Or, to paraphrase the famous title of Latane and Darley’s book from 1970, “The unrespon-sive bystander: Why doesn’t he help?” Surprisingly enough, the observers/story tellers didnot provide the clues. It is understandable that if they had no clues as to the lack of resis-tance from the humiliated people, the observers could not possibly know their motives.But the observers might have commented on their own behavior (also, some stories wereself-observations: Story 6, but perhaps also Story 5). Not only the story could contain acomment, but there was also an explicit requirement for comments after the story in theinstructions handed out by the researchers.2 Several of the story-tellers said that the eventwas “demoralizing”, sometimes adding that they chose it as a story of “power abuse”. The

2 The instruction run as follows: “Power is one of the phenomena that always interested social scientists, were theyare philosophers or organization theorists. Nevertheless, we do not really know what power looks like in concrete,



most startling is Story 7, which has neither a point nor a comment, and for that reason mightbe seen as not being a proper story. What did the narrator think while he was watching hiscolleagues being humiliated? Did he think that, as “incompetents”, they deserved it? Ordid he think that his turn would come soon? As there are no utterances that might providean interpretative clue, it must remain a puzzle. But why didn’t I react in Story 1? I washiding behind my status as a formal observer, an outsider. Story 1, however, actually has acontinuation that contains a kind of a resistance:

Has this redressed the trauma of Woman Top Professional? I do not know. What I couldunderstand, from this scene and other similar ones, is that people were “used to” the Deputy’sbullying behavior, and treated it as a nuisance that must be tolerated.

From the available material (including my introspective account), one could arrive atthree explanations, which need not be exclusive. The first is another emotion—the embar-rassment felt by the observers (but possibly also by the victims). Silver et al. (1987) suggestthat embarrassment “is a flustering caused by the perception of a fumbled or botched per-formance” (p. 48). And again, importantly: “a bad performance of a character is not thesame as the performance of a bad character” (p. 47). Embarrassment might result frombad performance. Observers may feel embarrassed by someone else’s botched performance(Silver et al., 1987, called it secondary embarrassment), in this case, of the victim (whoshould have acted as a proper organizational citizen, and protested), not of the bully (whois playing a bad character well).

The second explanation is perhaps the most obvious one, and has been clearly suggestedin the analogy with the concentration camp: fear. Observers (and victims) do not reactbecause they fear further humiliation or some other kind of retaliation.

The third explanation is that, in some organizational contexts, humiliation is perceived as“natural”, i.e., its occurrence does not cause surprise. Indeed, the format of the conferencethat I mentioned before was taken for granted by most of its participants. On anotheroccasion, an Italian woman politician, telling the story of her career to the participants of aworkshop on “Gender as social practice”,3 said: “It wasn’t that bad . . . I wasn’t constantly

contemporary organizations. Please think for a moment about an incident involving organizational power that yourecently observed. Take some time now, before reading further, to remember the details of that incident. [Nextpage] Now please describe, as fully as possible, the details of that incident, explaining the situation that led tothe incident, the people involved, what was said and done by whom, and the consequences of the incident. Takeas many additional pages as you wish [Blank page]. Why have you chosen this particular incident? Could youcomment on organizational power as you see it and as it is described in your incident? Thank you very much foryour cooperation!

3 Trento, Italy, 28 November 2003.



humiliated . . .”. This is what I meant by a “standard organizational product”: humiliationtaken for granted in an organizational context. But in order to corroborate this interpretationI must question my own results: How typical are they? And typical of what?

2. Do numbers protect from humiliation?

One possibility is that humiliation is most often produced in situations that can be definedas intensely personal, frequently connected to personnel decisions. After all, quite a few sto-ries concerned either establishing (or re-establishing) a hierarchical order, or else suspicionsof dishonest behavior. One would imagine that more impersonal procedures, for exampleusing techniques that are seen as technical or calculative (“numbers”, “facts”), minimizethe risk of humiliation as a by-product. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Already in Story3 the faulty accounting was the reason, or the pretext, for humiliating acts. The story wasnot exceptional, as the examples below reveal.

Story 8 is told by an Economic Director, a woman, working in the headquarters of abusiness group in Italy.



In Poland, we find another woman Economic Director, this time in a public sectororganization:





This person, a woman in her mid-40s, half a year later lost her job to a younger manduring a city reform, and suffered a heart attack. It is impossible to prove that there was acausal connection between these events, but it is a possible inference.

One observation that can be drawn even from such a small sample of examples is that thehumiliation produced in budget and accounting processes is more likely to strike women,and persons new in their jobs. Again, no statistics can be ever produced on such matters,but this is very likely so. It does not mean, however, that men and experienced workersare immune to it. My next example is taken from an observation conducted in yet anotherEuropean country – Sweden – during a discussion of an annual budget proposal to bepresented to a Board of a city utility. Most of managers present were men and engineers,and the Economic Director was a man.





I cannot prove that the Economic Manager felt humiliated; I could not ask him. Also,I am unable to render the eye-rolling, sighs and meaningful smiles of the engineers in mynotes. Although they could easily become hostile to one another when it came to discussthe necessary economizing, like when Manager 3 accused Manager 2 of not controlling hiscosts, it was obvious that they saw the Economic Manager as inferior to them in the termsof his calculating skills: engineers do not count like that!

The three situations are similar enough: when whoever has the responsibility to acceptthe budget or accounting does not like the numbers they see, the blame is on the accountant.As it is obvious that accountants cannot influence the activity as such, an interesting questionis, what are the accountants guilty of? Not playing creatively enough with the numbers?

It seems that humiliating acts connected to accounting acquire an additional controlfunction, apart from the two mentioned above: re-establishing the hierarchy and teachingobedience to the audience. They deliver a feedback that cannot be made explicit: you failedin your job because you didn’t help us to avoid paying the taxes/didn’t make us look goodin the eyes of the voters or shareholders. These things must not be said, but can be madeunderstood by inflicting punishment through humiliation. One thing is therefore certain:numbers do not automatically protect from humiliation, and are often used in its production.

An opposite strategy can be also depicted: the subordinates might “enlist” numbers indefense against insults, thus avoiding potentially humiliating situations. This was, in fact,a strategy chosen by the Economic Director from Story 8, who learned to safeguard herselfwith all kinds of “untouchable” numbers, defendable by a chartered accountant, at eachBoard meeting. However, as the case of the fiscal expert indicates, there are no numbersthat cannot be “touched”—by an arbitrary power-holder.

3. How standard is the product?

The expression “standard product” is not meant to suggest that humiliation always looksalike. I allude to the meaning of “standard” as “normal, typical, usual, ordinary, regular,customary, everyday” (Encarta World English Dictionary). But is it, for example, also“prevailing”, which is another synonym of “standard”? In other words, how pervasive isthe phenomenon of humiliation in work organizations?

Students explaining power in organizations reported humiliation in nine stories out of223 (Czarniawska-Joerges and Kranas, 1991). These are not many, which must mean thathumiliation is not a frequent phenomenon in organizations known to those students, or elsethey did not report it very often. One needs to remember, however, that with the exceptionof the MBAs, these students had little organizational experience.



Is it worth paying so much attention to a possibly marginal phenomenon, even if it isnot unusual? Let me answer in a roundabout manner first: it has been generally decidedthat bullying in workplaces, marginal as it is, deserves the most serious attention. Even inmy small collection of stories, humiliation can be seen as a type of bullying. Accordingto Ellis (1997), humiliation is the second most frequent type of bullying, after aggres-sive shouting. He quoted the results of a survey indicating that one in two UK employeeshave been bullied at work during their working lives. In his own research in the Britishretail industry, he conducted a questionnaire study: of the 30 questionnaires returned, 17reported cases of bullying, of which 70.6% were cases of “public humiliation of the victim”(www.stressatwork.ac.uk, accessed 020515).

Interestingly, Ellis reported a comparison with Sweden “where you are more likely tobe bullied by your peers than by your manager. One explanation for this may be that lawsrelating to workplace bullying are much tougher in Sweden and as such employers maybe spending resources on training managers in effective management techniques includingthose techniques needed for managing people (?)” (1997, p. 18).

Ellis believes in effectiveness of management courses more than I do. My explanationof this observation – shared by the Swedish researchers collaborating with Ellis – is that theSwedish labor unions are powerful and have support in the law. This situation, reaching backto 1938, the historically important victory of the Swedish unions, is enough to contribute toa development of a working place where humiliating subordinates “is not being done”. Ellis’observation is supported by the fact that, although I checked and re-checked, I could notfind a humiliation story coming from a Swedish or a Norwegian organization. Neither couldI recall any such event in my 25 years as an employee and a field researcher in Sweden.4

It should be added, though, that “bullying by peers” refers to the formal hierarchy: womenand ethnic minorities are bullied more often (Salin, 2003), and in Ellis’s study the personswho humiliated others were predominantly men (10 out of 12).

But it is not only subordinates who are humiliated. Sims (2003) acute insights into thelife of subalterns – junior officers – show that this kind of position is especially vulnerable,as people in middle management can also be humiliated by their subordinates. Similarly,Salin (2003) revealed that women were often bullied by their subordinates. Still, even insuch cases humiliation is a by-product of power: not enough of it, in subalterns’ and womenmanagers’ case. Humiliation might not be a mass product, but it certainly is manufacturedin work organizations.

Critical accounting and management scholars often protest against making a “businesscase” of what is a basic human right: equality, diversity. I believe that respect is a basic rightof each “organizational citizen” and that humiliation violates this right. It is not enough toadopt the standard justification for protesting against evil in organizations: “workplace isnot only unhealthy for those being bullied but also for organisations which are allowing thisto continue” (Ellis, 1997, p. 1). The implicit assumption here seems to be that poor healthis a problem because it diminishes the value of the labor, and that treating people badly isbad for business. More explicitly, it has been stated that bullying might lead to higher costsfor organizations, due to increased absenteeism, high turnover and decreased commitment

4 To the contrary, in the course of my study of Stockholm (Czarniawska, 2002), I witnessed a meeting when twomanagers handled with extreme tact a situation that seemed to me structurally prone to humiliation.



and productivity (Ashford, 1997; Salin, 2003). Let me therefore be as clear as I can: evenif humiliation was very good for business, it should be prevented and condemned becauseit is morally wrong.

As the classic studies by Dalton (1959), Crozier (1964), Kanter (1977), and Burawoy(1979) all demonstrate, people may be working for money or for power and prestige, butthey seem to place the highest value on their dignity (see Czarniawska-Joerges, 1992,for elaboration). Humiliation is an act of taking someone’s dignity away—temporarily orpermanently. Margalit claimed that “[t]he wounds of insult and humiliation keep bleedinglong after the painful physical injuries have crusted over” (2002, p. 120). This is becausehumiliation is relived when recollected. Pain is remembered, humiliation is experiencedagain.

Humiliation (. . .) is not just another experience in our life like, say, an embarrass-ment. It is a formative experience. It forms the way we view ourselves as humiliatedpersons—very much the way a serious failure in a project that matters to us greatlybrings us to view ourselves as failures. Humiliation, in the strong sense, in being afundamental assault on us as human beings, becomes constitutive of one sense of whowe are (Margalit, 2002, p. 130).

There is no clear-cut distinction between living in humiliation, and reliving it, althoughthe latter might happen less often. Therefore Margalit pleaded for “the politics of dignity”,a negative politics, “since eradicating cruelty and humiliation is more urgent than promot-ing and creating positive well-being” (2002, p. 114). Such politics should be visible andpresent in work organizations, if they are to function as moral communities. Respect, nothumiliation, should be a standard organizational product.

Humiliation in organizations is possible due to social tolerance of certain ways of exertingpower. The law and the unions must support people resisting humiliation, but only a collec-tive resistance will stop using humiliation as control tool. Such a collective resistance canbecome an important part of exercising a professional code of ethics, where the accountantscan play an important role opposing their own humiliation in the hands of organizationalsatraps, and helping other professionals to defend themselves from it.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank David Cooper for his tremendously helpful comments, and the tworeviewers for providing me with readers’ responses.

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Humiliation: A standard organizational product

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