Workplace harassment: Tomorrow has arrived (2/3)

We have criticised the perception of mobbing as a “conflict,” insofar as it is embedded within a body of sociological studies that tends to essentialise the phenomenon, and have highlighted the alienating effect of such a perspective. Mysterious as it is, the interpersonal relationship, even if it appears to obey natural laws, remains a space of dual subjective interiority and is therefore largely perceived as metaphysical. This explains the gap between the manager and the individual reporting events that may be qualified as harassment. It must be assumed that a lack of time or energy prevents the manager from undertaking a phenomenological inquiry—one that would trace causes and effects and question those involved in a meaningful investigative process. Yet harassment, by its very nature, requires a break from automatism: it calls for the recording, cataloguing, and analysis of diverse events, often subjectively experienced, in order to determine the presence or absence of an underlying fabric and to identify recurring patterns.

Moreover, reporting such an event already places the individual in a precarious position within the company. Neither casual nor directly related to operational processes, testimony about harassment is an awkward gesture: it suggests managerial failure, a toxic corporate culture, or errors committed by human resources during or after recruitment. Strongly characterised by its temporal extension, harassment necessarily calls for an investigation whose laborious nature and uncertain outcome are evident from the outset. As a textbook example, the BMAS study implicitly acknowledges a difficulty: it speaks of “conflict” much like a perplexed physician would speak of a syndrome, and struggles, beyond listing possible exposure factors, to theorise the multitude of epiphenomena that constitute the social phenomenon.

The textile metaphor should here lead us to remove harassment from a purely linguistic abstraction and to conceive of it as a technical system, thereby underscoring its necessary development. Like the loom or the invention of the crank mechanism, a technical system disrupts social relations, challenges institutions (here the employment contract and its legal framework), and generates tensions. At the same time, it spreads and responds—both initially and subsequently—to a compelling interest: first individual, then economic, and ultimately cultural. If the technical system imposes itself upon us in a manner comparable to a moral law, it is because it carries with it a system of values and representations: if we refuse it, we appear outdated, deprive ourselves of a competitive tool, and exclude ourselves from social reality, much like someone who refuses to use social media. The “rat race”—that is, the continual renewal of techniques through which we pursue a conventional interest—may appear irrational, yet it remains a structural foundation of our economies. If we consider harassment as a technical system, we may attempt to reintegrate it into this kind of process:

If harassment is thus a structuring element of emerging communities, enabling the production of an identity-based culture through the designation of one or more scapegoats within or outside the group, then it is a mobile object, subject to iterations, developments, and spontaneous disappearances. It may prove inadequate in the face of competing developments, and ultimately become obsolete. Forms of humour that accompany the formation of a community—by casting opprobrium upon an individual—also tend to foreshadow the opposite: they reveal a form of suffering and stress among the instigators themselves. The latter will not hesitate, once circumstances shift, to pass on this stress. As a technical system oriented toward exclusion, it brings with it the full range of fears inherent to closed groups: the figure of the traitor and that of the leader coexist fluidly within the moral imagination. The maverick, the eccentric, the member of a social minority, or the individual who stands out within the community’s culture is, while clearly the ideal breeding ground for identity-based impulses, also the precursor of the subversive minority that will, sooner or later, overthrow the active majority.

If we consider harassment as a technical system available to organisations, we may now reposition its critical study within the research of the 1980s—not as the product of an era that had reached a higher moral state and had finally become capable of identifying long-standing social problems, but rather as an inevitable development inherent to the technical system itself. When Heinz Leymann investigated a series of suspicious suicides among nurses and first coined the term “mobbing,” he discovered nothing new: integrated into the development of managerial toolkits in the 1970s, the phenomenon was already an institutionalised system adopted by a community of managers, and had become embedded in practice—much as the exploitation of domestic servants in “respectable society” in the nineteenth century or the provision of alcohol in steel factories once had. What was new was merely the public confrontation of this technical system with its criminal consequences, its counterproductive nature, and its danger to the entire structure. In this respect, it differs little from other revelations concerning the harms associated with radium-coated alarm clocks, building insulation materials, or mobile communication frequencies.

The adoption in German of the term “mobbing” to designate harassment follows the same dynamic of identity and exclusion, as the term gradually degrades over time, much like other subversive terms associated with institutional realities deemed immoral. Thus, terms such as rape, genocide, or racism undergo semantic shifts as a (new) majority appropriates their social critique. The BMAS study provides a striking example of this phenomenon, as the term “mobbing” abandons a decisive element of its original definition scarcely thirty years after its emergence. Now extended to include unjust criticism or inappropriate remarks made by a single individual toward another, “mobbing” absorbs “bullying,” which, from a technical and organisational standpoint, is an entirely different phenomenon. For instance, an apprentice butcher reporting on an online forum that his supervisor “mobbed” him describes the following: “He was short-tempered and relied on a heavy hand. He made it clear that an apprentice had no value. Insults such as ‘idiot’ or humiliating remarks targeting intelligence were commonplace. The peak was when he told me: ‘You should masturbate more often, it helps you concentrate!’” (profile “Metzger,” 2025, forum mobbing.net).

While such behaviour is undoubtedly inappropriate, it does not qualify as harassment within the definition established by Leymann. The dilution of the term and its intertextual expansion pose a problem for victims of harassment: those who assign greater significance to their own suffering by appropriating a term from a higher register simultaneously undermine what once constituted the only available defence for others, thereby, in a sense, playing into the hands of the harassers. A similar issue arises in the case of coercive control, which suffers additionally from a lack of intercultural consistency: “Einfluß,” “control,” and “emprise” coexist awkwardly.