The Relationship Between Organizational Dissent and Organizational Bullshit
Bullshit, in Frankfurt's sense, is not lying: the liar tracks the truth in order to avoid it, while the bullshitter simply does not care what is true, which makes indifference rather than falsehood the thing that corrodes. This brief report is the first attempt to connect that idea to Kassing's communication-studies tradition of organisational dissent, and it finds what the theory predicts.
Across 424 US employees, all three dimensions of the Ferreira organisational bullshit scale (the boss, disregard for the truth, and bullshit language) are negatively associated with articulated dissent, which is dissent expressed openly and upward to people with the authority to act. The mechanism the authors propose is futility rather than fear: where discourse is indifferent to truth, employees conclude that a well-made argument will not move a decision, and upward dissent stops looking worth its cost. Crucially, it is not extinguished. It is redirected into circumvention (going around the supervisor) and latent dissent (saying it sideways, to peers).
This map reads the result as evidence for a distinction the authors do not draw. Articulated dissent is the vertical channel; latent dissent is the horizontal one. What the study documents, then, is an organisation in which the vertical channel has closed while the horizontal one carries the traffic, and a team in that state can score perfectly well on the team-level instruments that dominate this field, because peers who have given up on being heard upward talk to each other more, not less. The shared eye-roll is real warmth. It is also the watermelon effect arriving from a different discipline: green on the outside, and the greenness partly produced by the failure it conceals. Follett made the vertical and horizontal distinction a century ago, and the suppression of a channel is not the same as the absence of a problem.
One irony is worth noting, gently. A construct defined by indifference to truth and inflated language is here operationalised as a Likert scale with a dimension called the boss, two of whose factors correlate at .88, and the paper claims distinct pathways for them anyway; Frankfurt's argument was partly that bullshit resists this kind of measurement, since what is wrong with it is not its truth value. The other caveats are ordinary and real: cross-sectional, single-source and wholly perceptual, so the headline R-squared of .50 is generous, and five items were dropped post hoc to make the model fit. None of that sinks it. The value here is the connection drawn rather than the precision of the estimate: the first evidence that an environment can suppress upward voice without anyone threatening anyone, purely by making truth beside the point.
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