Whistleblowing is increasingly understood as an institutionalised practice, with organisations now commonly setting up tools to help their employees raise corporate issues. However, whistleblowers often do not succeed in raising concerns within their organisations and external whistleblowing usually follows unsuccessful attempts to blow the whistle internally. This article investigates the organisational answers that are produced and addressed to the whistleblower. We suggest that, rather than straight forward replies, the organisational answers provided to the whistleblower take the form of various “signs” that the whistleblower perceives and which inform them about whether one’s claims are intelligible within the corporate environment. We draw on the conditions of critique by Luc Boltanski in our analysis, with a specific interest in the concepts of “truth and reality tests” he develops, through which, as we argue, the organisation displays these signs. An analysis of a high-profile case of tax justice, in which the corporation was found guilty, illustrates our argument. Our contributions are threefold: We build on the whistleblowing literature by giving a detailed account of the organizational answers produced in a case of internal whistleblowing, showing that organisations‘ answers (and non-answers) to whistleblowers provide for a continuum of reactions of various kinds and intensity (Vandekerckhove et al., 2014).We also build on Kenny and Bushnell’s latest work on hegemony (2020) to show how the organisations manage to maintain the status quo, preventing the whistleblower from having her reality adopted by 14858 1 others. We also give an empirical explorations of the concepts offered by Boltanski. Indeed, as we argue in the findings, the whistleblowing context leads to “truth and reality” tests in which the organization seeks to confirm their narrative and defend their vision of what the truth is.
