The Relationship Between Organizational Dissent and Organizational Bullshit
A brief empirical report that connects two literatures this map otherwise holds apart: Frankfurt's account of bullshit as communication indifferent to truth, developed for organisations by Christensen, Spicer and the Ferreira perception scale, and Kassing's communication-studies tradition of organisational dissent. Using survey data from 424 US employees, the study finds all three dimensions of the Ferreira scale (the boss, disregard for the truth, and bullshit language) negatively associated with articulated dissent, together accounting for half the variance. The proposed mechanism is futility rather than fear: where organisational discourse is seen as indifferent to truth, employees conclude that evidence-based argument will not move decisions, so upward dissent stops looking worth its cost and is redirected into circumvention or lateral venting rather than eliminated. That mechanism converges with the finding elsewhere in this corpus that perceived impact and safety operate as separate gates on the voice decision (Sherf, Parke and Isaakyan), and with survey evidence that futility is the most commonly reported barrier to speaking up. The methodological caveats are real and worth carrying. The design is cross-sectional, single-source and wholly perceptual, so common method variance plausibly inflates the headline R-squared of .50; the boss and language dimensions correlate at .88, which leaves their separate regression coefficients, and the paper's claim of distinct pathways, hard to sustain; five scale items were removed post hoc to achieve acceptable fit, putting the three-factor structure under visible strain; and the sample's reported tenure distribution is implausibly narrow for its age range, suggesting panel artefacts. Read as a first empirical bridge rather than a settled result: the direction of the relationship is exactly what longitudinal work would need to establish, and the value here is the connection drawn, not the precision of the estimates.
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