Ethical Tensions Underlying Disclosure of Wrongdoing: A theorization of professionals’ whistleblowing decisions
How do professionals morally reason when they blow the whistle, and why does this form of reasoning emerge? While whistleblowing has been widely studied, how it unfolds in the context of regulated professions claiming to serve the public interest remains underexplored. Drawing mainly on 29 interviews with Canadian professionals (e.g., physicians, nurses, dentists, lawyers, accountants) who reported wrongdoing, this study examines how professionals navigate ethical dilemmas when confronted with organizational practices they perceive as illegal or unethical. Building on Applbaum’s (2000) theorization of the morality of professional roles, we show that when professional codes of conduct and institutional guidance fail to resolve ethical tensions, some professionals reinterpret what it means to act as a professional. We conceptualize this process as meta-professionalism: a form of moral reasoning through which individuals move beyond professional bodies’ role-relative, person-neutral prescriptions to reassert higher-order professional ideals. We further show that this reasoning emerges from the triadic interaction between the individual whistleblower, the professional body, and the employing organization. By theorizing whistleblowing as a site of contestation and transformation of professionalism, this study contributes to both research on whistleblowing and the sociology of professions.
Marion Brivot
Marion Brivot, CPA, PhD, is a Full Professor of Accounting at Université Laval’s Faculty of Business Administration in Québec City. Before entering academia, she worked in tax and legal practice at Fidal and KPMG Tax and Legal in Paris. She holds a PhD in Accounting from HEC Paris and also completed a Master’s degree in Philosophy at Université Laval.
Her research examines the ethical challenges faced by accounting and other regulated professionals in their everyday work, including issues related to professional judgment, whistleblowing, and the public interest. Her work has been published in leading journals such as Accounting, Organizations and Society, Human Relations, Organization Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, and Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory. She is currently an Associate Editor of Accounting, Organizations and Society.
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