Sex-based harassment and silencing in academia : how people are led to reluctant acquiescence

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Abstract

The #MeToo and the ‘Time’s Up’ movements have raised the issue of harassment encountered by women to the level of public consciousness. Together, these movements have captured not only the ubiquity of harassment in the everyday functioning of workplace settings, but they have also, concomitantly, demonstrated how victims are all too often silenced about their experiences with the phenomenon. Inspired by the political and the social currents emerging from these movements, and theoretically informed by the concepts of discursive hegemony, rhetorical persuasion and affective practice, this article draws on a qualitative study of early and mid-career women academics working in UK business schools to explore the question: How are victims who start to voice their experiences of sex-based harassment silenced within the workplace? Based on our findings, we conceptualise organisational silence as the product of the collective efforts of various third party actors, who actively mobilise myriad discourses in their daily interactions to persuade employees to not voice their discontent, thereby maintaining the status quo in the organisation. In doing so, we argue that sex-based harassment is accomplished by the complicity of various third party actors rather than the corollary of the isolated behaviours of unscrupulous victimizers. In highlighting features of academic work that facilitate complicity, we heed to calls to better contextualise sex-based harassment specifically and other forms of workplace mistreatment more broadly.

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