Explaining Suicide in Organizations: Durkheim Revisited

• Published date: 01 September 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/basr.12092
• Date: 01 September 2016
• Author: Arménio Rego,Miguel Pina E Cunha,Stewart Clegg

Explaining Suicide in

Organizations: Durkheim

Revisited

STEWART CLEGG, MIGUEL PINA E CUNHA, AND ARM 

ENIO REGO

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Durkheim’s concept of anomie, we address the

under-explored phenomenon of anomic suicide in contem-

porary organizations and discuss the consequences of soli-

darity for organizations and society. The relations of social

solidarity to issues of identity and insecurity are explored

through the cases of France Telecom Orange and Foxconn.

Remedial implications for organizing, considered as com-

munity building, are discussed. Durkheim wrote not only

about anomic but also altruistic suicide. We will also ana-

lyze examples of this type of suicide. Some tentative sug-

gestions are made for how to organize to minimize the

incidence of suicidal violence in organizations.

INTRODUCTION

The contemporary news media regularly project overwhelm-

ingly violent images into our homes and lives, including

images of work-related violence (Flannery 1996; Kelloway

Stewart Clegg is Professor at Management Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University

of Technology, Sydney, NSW, Australia. E-mail: s.clegg@uts.edu.au. Miguel Pina E Cunha is at

Nova School of Business and Economics, Lisboa, Portugal. Arm

enio Rego is at Cat

olica Porto

Business School, Universidade Cat

olica Portuguesa, Porto, Portugal.

V

C2016 W. Michael Hoffman Center for Business Ethics at Bentley University. Published by

Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington

Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.

Business and Society Review 121:3 391–414

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et al. 2006), such as workplace shooting and homicide (Fox and

Levin 1994; Lankford 2013), revenge (Jones 2009), human traffick-

ing (Chuang 2006), and modern slavery (Crane 2013). Some expres-

sions of workplace violence, however, are less spectacular and more

private, less other-directed and more self-directed, yet in no way

less tragic. These cases assume symbolic value but do not find

expression in collective action, ethics, or membership premised on

alternate and opposition al values (Beale and Mustchin 2014). These

include the recent suicidal waves at France Telecom Orange and at

Foxconn (Lucas et al. 2013), which we use to reflect on our topic.

They express an important but under-researched side of literal,

rather than metaphorical organizational death (see Bell et al. 2014),

which may be best understood through a reconsideration of the

classical sociological work of Durkheim (see also Cullen 2014).

In this article we contribute to the organization and manage-

ment literature by contributing to the “hugely under-researched”

(Cullen 2014, p. 42) topic of suicide as a work and organizational

phenomenon. Doing such investigation is valuable, considering

recent empirical evidence suggesting the upward trend of suicides

in the workplace (Germain 2014; Tiesman et al. 2015). Despite the

recent focus on positive approaches to management and organiza-

tion (Cameron and Spreitzer 2012), several features and practices

of workplace contexts that diminish the potential for human flour-

ishing and that at the extreme provoke bursts of destructiveness,

are still recurrent. For instance, socially unsustainable organiza-

tional environments (Pfeffer 2010, 2011) characterized by the pov-

erty of human relating (Mel

e 2012); the lack of integrative

relational organizing (Carmeli and Gittell 2009; Gittell and Doug-

lass 2012); the absence of a logic of care (Garvin 2013); the creation

of organizations as pure economic entities, as production functions

devoid of some basic features of humanity that reduce resilience,

and the presence of workplace stressors with perverse consequen-

ces for psychological and physical health (Goh et al. 2016; Pfeffer

2011; Tiesman et al. 2015). Such practices, we suggest, can be

partly explained by total institutional spaces that strip people of

their individuality and human bonds of solidarity (Goffman 1961;

Lucas et al. 2013); in such circumstances a lack of solidarity

results from changing disciplinary regimes that unsettle and dis-

connect organizational members from each other and from collec-

tive meaning.

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