Fired for Facebook…terminated for Tinder: dismissal for social media misconduct in New Zealand

This article reports the findings of a qualitative study of first instance New Zealand employment tribunal decisions concerned with employee dismissal for social media misconduct. There are two main findings. The first relates to the legal approach to employee dismissal for social media misconduct developing in New Zealand. The decisions show New Zealand decision-makers are following the approach in other jurisdictions of treating social media misconduct dismissals as involving a balance between public and private considerations of employment conduct and calculating harm in the employment relationship. However, the decisions do not only track the emerging legal approach to social media misconduct in employment. The decisions are also a record of how social media is affecting employment relations within New Zealand. They are not only legal but also social records. The second finding relates to what the decisions reveal about employment and social media in New Zealand. The sample showed something different from other similar studies. In New Zealand, there was a large cluster of decisions where social media facilitated gender-based harassment. This finding resonates with wider research into New Zealand workplaces that suggests an enduring toxic culture where gender-based harassment is normalized.

“Gambling With My Cards Face Up”: Vulnerability as a Risky Act Among Men

This study examines men’s lived experiences of suppressing vulnerability in a conflict. These moments of suppression happened during conflicts with friends, romantic partners, or family members. A phronetic-iterative approach guided an in-depth analysis of 16 qualitative interviews to illuminate the social conditions and expectations that prevented men from verbally expressing vulnerability. Men made sense of their own and others’ suppression patterns by naming cultural, relational, and individual factors. We argue that the toxic culture of masculinity is constructed collectively, such that men’s communication creates and reinforces expectations of what it means to be “strong” men. Reshaping the current culture into a safe space for men to express emotions will require intentional efforts from both men and their support systems.

FROM BUZZFEED CREATOR TO (IN)DEPENDENT YOUTUBER - MANAGING PRECARIOUS LABOUR THROUGH GOSSIP

Several known Buzzfeed Creators have left the company’s toxic culture by beginning a career as YouTubers. They hoped that their Buzzfeed audience would migrate to support their company-independent channel. Often represented as a move towards independence by creators, cultural production research (Nieborg & Poell, 2018; Burgess et al. 2020) has shown that creators are platform and audience dependent for viability. Therefore, we are questioning whether being an (in)dependent YouTuber would be more precarious than being an employed Buzzfeed creator. How does the migration from Buzzfeed to YouTube creator offer both independence and a host of new contingencies? Situating a content and discourse analysis of “Why I left Buzzfeed” YouTube videos and comments within academic and popular discourse, we understand these videos as sources of ‘gossip’ (Bishop, 2018) defined as “loose, unmethodological talk that is generative” (2590). Gossip can be beneficial to ex-Buzzfeed creators building on their Buzzfeed association to boost algorithmic visibility. Additionally, gossip is a valuable form of knowledge exchange for content creators to stay informed on discourse, support one another, and communicate their perspective on former Buzzfeed content. Gossip also allows us as researchers to break through the blackbox of YouTube content creation to better comprehend precarity as multifaceted. We hypothesize that creators have to balance different aspects of precarity depending on Buzzfeed as employer or YouTube as distributor. The imaginary of independence is a false friend as both employed and self-employed creators are dependent on platform governance and their platform public (Mniestri & Gekker, 2020) for success.

The Dark Side of School Culture

The extant literature evidences the link between incivility and workplace culture. Both have a symbiotic relationship whereby a change in one influences the other. When workplace cultures develop dysfunctional values and beliefs, negative traditions, and caustic ways of interacting, they have become “toxic cultures.” This study examined Irish post-primary school teachers’ experiences of incivility and toxic culture in the workplace through in-depth interviews with forty-two participants. Results show that toxic work culture had a negative impact on both the personal and professional lives of the participants. We conclude that antecedents in toxic school culture are linked to epistemological assumptions, group dynamics, and deficiencies in leadership, and we suggest that they act as causes and/or facilitators of workplace bullying.

What Does Safety Look Like for Young Women on the Internet?

On April 23, 2021, Chloe Bynoe presented What Does Safety Look Like for Young Women on the Internet? at the 2021 CASIS Generation Z Congress. This presentation was followed by a group panel for questions and answers, whereby congress attendees were provided with an opportunity to engage in discussion with Ms. Bynoe. Primary discussion topics included online safety and security with regard to minors and online activism combating toxic culture such as misogyny.

Re-evaluation of solutions to the problem of unprofessionalism in peer review

Our recent paper (10.1186/s41073-020-00096-x) reported that 43% of reviewer comment sets (n=1491) shared with authors contained at least one unprofessional comment or an incomplete, inaccurate of unsubstantiated critique (IIUC). Publication of this work sparked an online (i.e., Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit) conversation surrounding professionalism in peer review. We collected and analyzed these social media comments as they offered real-time responses to our work and provided insight into the views held by commenters and potential peer-reviewers that would be difficult to quantify using existing empirical tools (96 comments from July 24th to September 3rd, 2020). Overall, 75% of comments were positive, of which 59% were supportive and 16% shared similar personal experiences. However, a subset of negative comments emerged (22% of comments were negative and 6% were an unsubstantiated critique of the methodology), that provided potential insight into the reasons underlying unprofessional comments were made during the peer-review process. These comments were classified into three main themes: (1) forced niceness will adversely impact the peer-review process and allow for publication of poor-quality science (5% of online comments); (2) dismissing comments as not offensive to another person because they were not deemed personally offensive to the reader (6%); and (3) authors brought unprofessional comments upon themselves as they submitted substandard work (5%). Here, we argue against these themes as justifications for directing unprofessional comments towards authors during the peer review process. We argue that it is possible to be both critical and professional, and that no author deserves to be the recipient of demeaning ad hominem attacks regardless of supposed provocation. Suggesting otherwise only serves to propagate a toxic culture within peer review. While we previously postulated that establishing a peer-reviewer code of conduct could help improve the peer-review system, we now posit that priority should be given to repairing the negative cultural zeitgeist that exists in peer-review.

Ethical behavior is the antidote to toxic culture

Purpose In this paper, the author sought to explain why ethical behavior is the antidote to toxic workplace culture at a time where employees are forced to take their complaints through external channels when internal procedures fall short. Design/methodology/approach The author draws upon recent discussions around employer responsibilities in the wake of #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movements, using relevant case studies to outline where employers have failed to offer adequate protection for their employees. Findings The author found that by promoting a healthy speak-up culture within the workplace, employees are more likely to feel that their concerns are heard, and the issues can be dealt with internally, to the benefit of both individuals and their organizations. Originality/value HR departments will be able to access the merits of shifting workplace culture to a more transparent model that bridges the trust gap between employees and their organizations.