Workplace bullying as the erosion of recognition: ethnographic insights from a Schutzian perspective

This article proposes to understand workplace bullying as the erosion of recognition from a phenomenological perspective. Drawing on Schutz’s sociology of knowledge, it examines how rumours, silences, and informal labels reorganise the typifications through which colleagues are perceived. Once a worker is reframed as unstable, incompetent, or undesirable, ordinary interactions are filtered through this new categorisation. In Schutzian terms, the victim is expelled from the umwelt of reciprocity and relocated into the anonymous sphere of “they,” losing not only credibility but also the community of affect that sustains belonging. The analysis is based on ethnographic material from Spain, including in-depth interviews and participant observation in an association of workers affected by workplace bullying. Findings show that processes of misrecognition are not collateral but central to workplace bullying, and that reputational harm emerges as one of their key manifestations. Minor gestures such as exclusion from information flows, disparaging jokes, or subtle task reassignments accumulate into enduring forms of exclusion. These dynamics chronically reorganise common sense, undermine legitimacy, and often persist beyond the initial conflict, revealing why those affected experience long-lasting damage and why institutional responses frequently reproduce rather than repair harm. Conceptually, the article advances workplace bullying research by opening a Schutzian phenomenological line of inquiry that highlights the intersubjective structures through which harassment becomes effective.