Fostering Constructive Action by Peers and Bystanders in Organizations and Communities

Peers and bystanders play important roles in organizational and community conflict management. Bystanders often learn relevant information and have opportunities to act in ways that can affect three of the basic functions of a conflict management system (CMS.) They can help (or not help) to identify, assess, and manage behaviors that the organization or community deems to be “unacceptable.” Examples in which bystanders play important roles include sexual and racial harassment, safety violations, unethical research, national security violations and insider threats, cyber‐bullying and cyber‐sabotage, violence, fraud, theft, intimidation and retaliation, and gross negligence. Bystanders often are a missing link in conflict systems. For the purposes of this article, I define peers and bystanders as people who observe or learn about unacceptable behavior by others, but who are not the relevant supervisors, or who knowingly engage in planning or executing that behavior. I define CMS managers as all those people, including line managers, who have responsibility for managing conflicts. Conflict managers face many challenges in fostering constructive behavior from bystanders. The interests of bystanders may or may not coincide with the interests of conflict systems managers in an organization or community. Bystanders often have multiple, idiosyncratic, and conflicting interests, and experience painful dilemmas. In addition, peers and bystanders, and their contexts – often differ greatly from each other. Blanket rules about how all bystanders should behave, such as requirements for mandatory reporting, are often ineffective or lead to perverse results. Bystanders are regularly equated with “do‐nothings,” in the popular press. In real life, however, helpful bystander actions are common. Many bystanders report a wide variety of constructive initiatives, including private, informal interventions. In this article, I report on forty‐five years of observations on bystanders in many milieus. I present what bystanders have said are the reasons that they did not – or did – take action, and what can be learned to help organizations and communities to support bystanders to be more effective when faced with unacceptable behavior.     

The Unexpected: Bionic Woman at the Millennium

Wilfred Bion's A Memoir of the Future provides a point of departure for feminist thinking about the millennium. Bion problematizes hopes for the future and associates thought with catastrophic change. Women play an unexpected role in Bion's experimental autobiography, posing provocative questions and unsettling the status quo . Since Bion has little to say about women in his clinical writings, A Memoir sheds light on his thinking and on the post-Kleinian culture of the 1970s. Book I of A Memoir depicts a class- and sex-nightmare played out between men and women, and women and women, in an age of anxiety whose setting appears to be the fascist 'pacification' of Middle England during an unspecified period. In this hallucinatory drama, all encounters are reduced to a brutal fiction of dominance and submission. The violence of the action suggests the primitive mental world of psychosis. Book II of A Memoir satirizes 'the brilliance of masculine thought' through the voices and criticisms of women. But this is the purgatorial movement of Bion's autobiography, inhabited by 'idées mères' (untransformed beta-elements) and haunted by the ghosts of Bion's traumatic war-time experience. A monstrous plot is hatched to kill primitive, fascistic Man, who retaliates and takes the female spoils. Is this the prelude to catastrophic change? Book III stages a country-house debate between different characters who represent aspects of Bion's personality, recapitulating the concerns of his later writing. The debate includes a meditation on childbirth as compared to war trauma, but Bion takes his distance from feminine intuition or common sense. Women fight on both sides of the barriers in the Bionic revolution - becoming, however, figures for the 'unexpected' and precursors of emotional upheaval. The gendering of millennial thought in Bion's Memoir provides an opportunity to scrutinize our own unthought fantasies of change.     

Gender and Evidence in Family Law Reform: A Case Study of Quantification and Anecdote in Framing and Legitimising the ‘Problems’ with Child Support in Australia

Despite claims of ‘evidence based policy’, the place of empirical evidence in family law reform is ambiguous. There is ongoing socio-legal analysis of the differential value and uses of quantitative data and anecdote in detailing women’s experiences and advocating for change. In this paper, we engage with these issues through a focus on how data were constructed in a key government report, Every Picture Tells a Story, which was used to officially define the problem and outline recommendations in the controversial 2006-08 reform of the Australian Child Support Scheme. Our discussion focuses on two questions: what legitimacy is accorded to different kinds of evidence in family law reform processes?; and, how is this legitimacy gendered? We applied feminist critical discourse analysis to the type, source and claims of the data included in the child support chapter of the report. Our findings indicate that both quantitative data and anecdote were used to privilege fathers’ financial interests and autonomy; in contrast, women’s voices and interests were marginalised. Thus, we argue the legitimacy of data is ascribed through its relationship to the gendered definition of the ‘problems’ of child support, rather than the type of data per se.