Establishing a policy and building a culture that helps to protect organizations from financial wrong-doing, criminal or civil liability and permanent damage to corporate reputation has become a central theme of contemporary corporate policies towards 'whistleblowing'. This book is amongst the first to provide a detailed and full-length analysis of the meaning and various justifications of whistleblowing policies. While the legitimization of organizational whistleblowing suggests an adaptation of organizations to public opinion, this book examines the wider legitimization whistleblowing policies have been given, considering whether the establishment of 'policies' genuinely leads to the implicit institutionalization of whistleblowing itself. The book's particular focus is upon what kinds of 'whistleblowing' societies and organizations actually want, and whether policies developed as a result meet expectations.

Wim Vandekerckhove is a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Ethics and Value Inquiry (CEVI), Ghent University, Belgium. He researches and teaches in the fields of business ethics, organization ethics, social responsible investment, migration and trafficking, and recently in the field of global ethics. He published chapters in edited books on migration and NGOs and on organization and business ethics, as well as papers in the Journal of Business Ethics and other academic journals. He has edited three journal issues on corporate social responsibility.

Introduction; 1: Developing Research Questions; 2: Developing the Framework for an Ethical Assessment; 3: Possible Legitimation of Whistleblowing Policies; 4: Screening Whistleblowing Policies; 5: Towards what Legitimation of Whistleblowing?