Unsilenced Employee Voice in South Africa: Social Media Misconduct Dismissals as Evidence of E-Voice

René Cornish

management revue - Socio-Economic Studies, 2022, vol. 33, issue 3, 356-396

Abstract: Social media has transformed various aspects of daily life, particularly influencing communication and interaction in both physical and digital spaces. The South African employment relationship is no exception. Social media also creates opportunities for the articulation of employee voice. Through the content analysis of 118 South African first-instance social media misconduct dismissal decisions, this paper argues that employees use social media as a mechanism to express dissenting employee voice. There is evidence of individual employee voice notwithstanding employers implementing rules and social media policies to curtail expressions of dissent. It also persists despite the dismissal of employees for expressing employee voice through social media. Significantly, employee voice in the form of racialised speech badmouthing and cyber-criticising employers continues in the digital realm despite the legislative prohibition of hate speech. Despite high power disparities, the sample reveals a perfusion of individual e-voice by South African employees.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/0935-9915-2022-3-356 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nms:mamere:10.5771/0935-9915-2022-3-356

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, Waldseestraße 3-5, 76530 Baden-Baden, Germany
https://www.nomos-sh ... w.aspx?product=29288

DOI: 10.5771/0935-9915-2022-3-356

Access Statistics for this article

management revue - Socio-Economic Studies is currently edited by Simon Fietze, Wenzel Matiaske, Ina Aust, Matthias Baum, Susanne Gretzinger, Sylvia Rohlfer and Florian Schramm

More articles in management revue - Socio-Economic Studies from Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG ().