Whistleblowing is an honorable but risky and complex process. It requires careful consideration and taking the right steps is crucial for your protection and the effectiveness of your disclosure. The norms around it varies from country to country and industry to industry; a legal professional or whistleblower advocacy group will be critical to help you naviate the process.
Ten Tips for Blowing the Whistle is an excellent 2-minute video from the Government Accountability Project (one of the global leaders in whistleblower protection and advocacy). Their resources page has additional information on this topic.
Basic but important information about whistleblowing (a short 2-page document prepared by my graduate assistant, Isabella Vallory).
Brian Martin has produced a free practical guide that: Whistleblowing- A Practical Guide. Page 3 guides readers to the most relevant place in the book for their situation. (You can make donate to support this project)
Whistleblowing Impact, a collective of university whistleblowing researchers, has a very comprehensive list of resources.
The surprising truth about what motivates us: A compelling video clip explaining how most of us are actually motivated.
Wall street: famous Oscar-winner movie by Oliver Stone.
Hard Nox: Documentary about the Volkswagen emission scandal (part of Dirty Money: an excellent Netflix series).
An Insider Trader Tells All: Excellent podcast episode about insider trading featuring Scott London, a very famous CPA accountant that engaged in insider trading.
Maus (by Art Spiegelman). Excellent graphic novel about the holocaust. While it is not directly about business ethics, it is a harrowing illustration of how organizations can shape and corrupt people’s behavior.
William Sanjour: Designed to Fail: Why Regulatory Agencies Don’t Work
Tariq Fancy (Chief investment officer of Sustainable Investing at BlackRock until 2019):
Wall Street ESG greenwashing. It discusses the future, promises, and especially the limits of ESG investing.
Secret Diary of a `Sustainable Investor’ (it provides a more comprehensive analysis of what he discusses in the previous document)
Alex Edmans: Is Sustainable Investing Really A Dangerous Placebo? (A response to Tariq Fancy’s article)
Dirty Money: an excellent series of documentaries in Netflix. I particularly recommend the following episodes about:
Hard nox: Documentary about the Volkswagen emission scandal.
Payday: Documentary abut Scott Tucker, CEO of a Payday company.
Drug short: Documentary about Valeant, the company most famou for their agressive price gouging.
Inside Job. A great documentary about the financial crisis of 2008.
Enron: the smartest guys in the room. A great movie about the culture at Enron.
Citizen Four. A documentary about the Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing of NSA.
Rotten. A very good Netflix series concerning ethical issues in the food industry.
Wall street: famous Oscar-winner movie by Oliver Stone.
Quiz Show: An excellent story that illustrates the slippery slope in unethical behavior.
The Wolf of Wall Street: Martin Scorsese and Leonardo di Caprio team up in this thrilling movie based on the financial crimes of Jordan Belfort.
An Insider Trader Tells All: Excellent story about insider trading featuring Scott London, a very famous CPA accountant that engaged in insider trading.
Why people do bad things. Excellent Planet Money podcast that really helps one see that while you may think you are moral, it may not be so difficult to end up at the center of a huge fraud scandal.
Dark Pattern: Excelent episode about the scary ways in which Turbotax used loopholes to extract more moeny from users and lobbied the government into passing a law that would only benefit them.
Maus (by Art Spiegelman). Excellent graphic novel about the holocaust. While it is not directly about business ethics, it is a remarkable illustration of how organizations can shape and corrupt people’s behavior.
The Jungle (by Upton Sinclair). An early portrayal of the dehumanizing life of low skilled workers in Chicago during the early 20th Century.
The surprising truth about what motivates us: A compelling video clip explaining how most of us are actually motivated.
Ethics Unwrapped: A video series on behavioral ethics from the University of Texas.
What really motivate people to be honest in business. Excellent TED talk by Alexander Wagner.
Why people do bad things. Excellent Planet Money podcast that poignantly illustrates why otherwise good people may end up doing very unethical things.
An Insider Trader Tells All. Excellent Planet Money podcast about insider trading featuring Scott London, a very famous CPA accountant that engaged in insider trading.
Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (A book length analysis of the famous Milgram experiment on obedience to authority).
Dan Ariely. The Honest Truth about Dishonesty.
Individual and Corporate Social Responsibility (by Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole). Excellent study about what the title suggests
(Un)Ethical Behavior in Organizations (by Linda Klebe Treviño, 1 Niki A. den Nieuwenboer, 2,∗ and Jennifer J. Kish-Gephart). Excellent review articles about ethics and orgnizational behavior.
Approach, Ability, Aftermath: A Psychological Process Framework of Unethical Behavior at Work (Celia Moore & Francesca Gino). Excellent review articles about ethics and orgnizational behavior:
The Normalization of Corruption in Organizations (by Blake E. Ashforth and Vikas Anand). Excelent article that explains why otherwise good people end up doing unethical things.
Two forms of capitalism: Excellent article on liberal capitalism in the west and political capitalism in the east
Antitrust in America. Excellent three-part NPR podcast series about antitrust in the USA.
Saving Capitalism from Capitalists (by Raghuram G. Rajan and Luigi Zingales) Excellent book celebrating capitalism but showing how we may not have it around for much longer.
Hidden order: the economics of everyday life. Excellent introduction to price theory (micro-economics) by David Friedman.
“Individual and Corporate Social Responsibility” (by Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole). In the second half of the paper (pp 9-15) they provide an excellent review and analysis of CSR (including a review assessing the relation between financial profitability and CSR, and a taxonomy and analysis of different conceptions of CSR).