Hospitality amid corporate whistleblowers’ exile: A call for business schools to act as places of refuge

Abstract

Building on decades of research evidencing retribution, isolation and exile as consequences of whistleblowers’ actions, we focus on exilic corporate whistleblowing, that is the exiled realities of whistleblowers who spoke out against corporate entities, not public ones. We suggest that rather than on societies more broadly, the subsequent responsibility for supporting such individuals falls, among other actors, on business schools as institutions critically implicated in the corporate world. In particular, building on the work of scholars like Arendt, Kant, and Derrida, we make the argument that business schools as employers could discharge their social duties responsibly by acting as hospitable places of stable refuge for corporate whistleblowers. We outline practical ways in which this could be done. We also highlight how providing such refuge could act as a fundamentally disruptive process of (re)considering how individual business schools are, through considering who they materially embrace.