The Bully-victim at work

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to map the contours of knowledge and interest that make the conceptualisation of the bully-victim at work possible. While the rise of the syndrome bullying-atwork has been premised on the binarisation of the bully and victim, the bully-victim is identified as a new formation of meaning. The crossing-over of polarities of bully and victim in the bully-victim points to limits of meaning in the syndrome bullyingat- work. The polar opposition of bully and victim is traced to projective identity-formation, naming, blaming, and labelling. On the one side, the victim may be depicted as weaker, fallen, even blamed. And on the other, the bully may be the subject of witch-hunts and criminalisation. The emergence of the hybrid bully-victim signals the limits of these attributions, revealing them as unable to account for the complexities of bullying.