New Publication: The Double-Failure Trap – Workers’ Sensemaking as Insiders and Victims of Life-Threatening Organizational Wrongdoing

Read about The Double-Failure Trap: Workers’ Sensemaking as Insiders and Victims of Life-Threatening Organizational Wrongdoing published in Administrative Science Quarterly by Elisa Giuliani and Andrew Spicer.

Abstract: 

Workers in many industrial settings remain in jobs that expose them to life-threatening harm, occupying a dual position as insiders within the firm and victims of its consequences. We examine how workers make sense of organizational wrongdoing from this dual position, through an inductive study of the ILVA steel plant in Taranto, Italy, where public scandal revealed chronic toxic emissions. We find that workers’ sensemaking cannot be explained by insider or victim status alone but, instead, emerges at their intersection. While external actors interpret as complicity workers’ continued participation in the firm following the exposure of wrongdoing, workers frame remaining as a survival-oriented response to life-threatening harm, condemning the organization as the source of injury while depending on it for survival. At the same time, as workers fail to secure recognition as victims beyond the firm, they come to view institutional inaction in the face of their suffering as evidence of systemic abandonment and injustice. We theorize that these processes—survival-based resignation to continue working and perceived institutional abandonment—reinforce each other, creating a double-failure trap in which workers endure life-threatening harm not because they fail to recognize its dangers but because they no longer believe protection or escape is possible.