Stanley R. Barrett, Feud, Vendetta, Mobbing

Stanley R. Barrett
Late Professor of Anthropology
University of Guelph, Canada

This paper explores the degree to which feud in its classical anthropological sense illuminates two distinctive types of conflict in contemporary bureaucracies, especially universities. The first concerns the intense contests and rivalries that exist in complex organizations. The second focuses on a phenomenon which has only recently been conceptualized as the adult equivalent of adolescent bullying: mobbing in the workplace. It is shown that there are important similarities between classical feud and enduring animosities in academia, and that mobbing usually rests on a prior history of feud-like behaviour. The implication is that the distance between feuding societies of the past and contemporary bureaucracies, and between passion and rationality, is considerably less than what conventional wisdom would suggest

Less than a decade ago, an eminent colleague, at the height of his intellectual powers, passed away before his time. Highly regarded in the university where he had inspired several generations of students, he had served as chairperson of his department, and had been routinely sought as a member of various committees, not only because of his reputation as an outstanding scholar, but also because of his calm and fair-minded demeanor. Shortly after his death, some of his friends leveled a grave charge: the university administration had killed him. What had happened is that about two years before his death, his relationship with the administration, previously so amicable, suddenly soured. To my knowledge, there was no single incident that explained his fall from grace. Nor were any specific accusations of wrongdoing ever leveled against him, at least publicly. Instead there was a steady stream of innuendo and gossip wafting along the corridors implying that in reality he was an untrustworthy and despicable character, best avoided by decent men and women.(1)

When I first heard the accusation that the administration had killed my colleague, I was skeptical. Undoubtedly his transformation from admired academic to persona non grata was a source of enormous stress. Yet it seemed over the top to contend that it was the primary cause of his fatal heart attack. After all, acrimonious relationships—even what might be labeled feuds—are rather commonplace in the academy, but while they are often bitter, enduring and debilitating, nobody, surely, ends up in the grave.

My skepticism about the role played by the administration has been considerably tempered by a body of literature that has only recently entered the realm of scholarship. Its focus is mobbing in the workplace, notably in the university setting. Pioneered in the 1980s by a Swedish psychologist/physician named Leymann (1990 and 1996), and advanced significantly by the recent publications of Westhues (2004a and 2004b), the literature on mobbing draws a portrait of individuals, more often than not quite accomplished ones, who are drummed out of the workplace by committees of officials who see themselves as the guardians of morality and integrity while simultaneously resorting to ambiguous charges and character assassination to realize their goals. The targets of mobbing experience humiliation, loss of self-worth, sometimes marital breakdown, often severe health problems such as strokes and heart attacks; occasionally they even die.

The initial sign that not all was well in my former colleague’s life was that he uncharacteristically had begun to feud with various members of his department and others further afield even before the mobbing process materialized. Such feuds, as I have said, are not unusual in academe, and in fact I have been interested in them for some time as a result of my ongoing research on blood vengeance in Corsica (Barrett 2002: 94-98). My first task in this paper will be to evaluate the degree to which feud in the university overlaps with blood vengeance in its classical sense; to do this, I shall provide a brief overview of the main types of blood vengeance. My second task will be to examine the relationship between feud and mobbing.

The focus on feud and mobbing in the university setting has considerable theoretical significance. Durkheim selected suicide as his subject of study in order to demonstrate that what appeared to be an individualistic phenomenon could actually be explained sociologically, thus legitimating his disciplinary perspective. Feud and mobbing in the academy constitute a comparable key case study. Formal organizations or bureaucracies are supposedly characterized by rationality; universities, as one type of formal organization, would seem to be the epitome of rationality. If it can be shown that passion and violence are as much a part of the university as reason and harmony, they likely intrude into all organized human affairs.

Blood vengeance is a form of institutionalized violence which is bracketed by primitive warfare at one end and homicide at the other. The distinction between primitive warfare and blood vengeance concerns the units of conflict. In primitive warfare fighting occurs between two (or more) separate political or social units such as tribes. In blood vengeance fighting occurs within a political or social unit, such as opposed clans within the same tribe (Schneider 1950). The distinction between homicide and blood vengeance rests on the parties or institutions deemed responsible for addressing them and on the range of permissible retaliation. In societies with a functioning centralized judicial system, homicide is the state’s responsibility, and murder does not generate counter murder; or if it does, as in the case of states which have the death penalty, it is not labeled murder. In societies where centralized authority and a judicial system are absent or ineffectual, blood vengeance may emerge. In such situations, vengeance is said to constitute a form of self-help, a mechanism that regulates society (Black-Michaud 1975, Boehm 1984). Indeed, members of a victim’s group (the feuding unit) have a duty to exact revenge, often setting in motion a series of murders and counter murders that can endure for decades.

It should be added that even in feuding societies homicide is recognized as a distinctive type of murder. This occurs when a person assassinates a member of his own clan or family. Such an incident does not generate a counter murder. At the very most the murderer may be banished, often only temporarily. As was said in Albania (Cozzi 1980), a man can’t owe blood to his own group. Among the Bedouin of Cyrenaica (Peters 1967), the murder of a member of the same feuding unit was considered so horrible that it was labeled a sin, to be avenged by God, not by man.

Blood vengeance itself is divided into three types. These include two kinds of feud, which I shall refer to as Feud A and Feud B, and vendetta. Feud A occurs in nomadic, herding societies with a lineage organization, such as among the Nuer (Evans-Pritchard 1940) and Bedouin. There the feuding unit is the corporate group. That is, every member of the corporate group is obligated to contribute blood money when necessary, and to carry out blood revenge. Feud B occurs in sedentary, kindred societies based on agricultural production, or a combination of agriculture and pastoralism. Here the feuding unit is the extended family, and sometimes the clan. While writers such as Black-Michaud (1975) and Peters (1967 and 1975) suggest that the feud in such societies is restricted to close agnates, in Corsica (Busquet 1920 and Wilson 1988) the feuding unit included not only agnates but also affines and collateral relatives to the third or fourth degree of genealogical depth. It should be added that while women have been described as non-belligerants in Corsica (Marin-Maraccioli 1964), sometimes they were killed and even themselves took revenge if male relatives were not available. Moreover, in both Albania (Durham 1909, 1910, 1928 and Hasluck 1954) and Corsica, it was the women who assumed the responsibility of keeping the feud alive, saving the bloody garments and pounding the thirst for revenge into the hearts of their children.

Finally, both versions of feud, according to Black-Michaud, occurred where an ideology of egalitarianism operated, where people lived at a subsistence level (what he labels “total scarcity”), and where honour was prized so highly that threats to it, more than anything else, explained why hostilities erupted. Black-Michaud contends that honour was even more significant in sedentary, kindred societies than in nomadic, herding societies. In the latter, there was a safety valve. Land was not scarce, and a feuding party on the verge of defeat could simply relocate some distance from the enemy. But in sedentary societies like Corsica, there was no place to go. If Corsicans fought principally, or overtly, over land or water holes, or over material possessions more generally, the population would be decimated (as it was, about one person in a little over 100 was assassinated annually when the feud there was at its height). Instead they fought over a nonmaterial factor—honour—and the consequence, according to Black-Michaud, was to generate a veneer of moral stratification which left untouched the scarce economic resources available to the islanders. As Black-Michaud put it (1975), among nomadic pastoralists feuds constituted what Coser (1964) referred to as realistic conflict, while feuds in Corsica and Albania were expressions of non-realistic conflict, and for that reason even more vicious.

Vendetta, like feud, emerges in settings lacking an efficient judicial system, and involves institutionalized retaliatory murder. That is about all they have in common. Vendetta, or vengeance killing to employ Black-Michaud’s terminology (1975), is an individual, not a collective, affair. When a man is assassinated, his clan or extended family has no obligation to seek revenge. Instead only the nearest male relative of the deceased, such as his son, will attempt to assassinate the murderer. Once this is accomplished, the vendetta is finished. Unlike feud, in either of its versions, vendettas do not generate an extended series of murders and counter murders over time.

Peters (1975: XIII-XIV) refers to another characteristic of vendetta that marks it off from feud. In two cases of vendetta in Lebanon, vengeance took place in a public place, in fact on the exact spot where the original victim was murdered. Whether or not this is a general characteristic of vendetta is not known, because little solid research has been done on this type of blood vengeance.

To summarize, associated with each of the three types of blood vengeance is a specific avenging unit. Among the nomadic pastoralists, it is the corporate group. In sedentary, kindred societies, it is the extended family, especially but not only agnates, and sometimes the clan. Where vendetta operates, it is the killer and his victim’s closest male relative. The type of avenging unit depends on several inter-related variables: ecological conditions, economic activities, and social organization. Feud A is found where land is not scarce, where population density is low, and where there are few social ties between lineages, including affinal ones. Feud B occurs where there is more overlap, or less discreteness, in terms of social and economic organization, such as in sedentary, kindred societies where different families intermingle in the same village, and must cooperate with each other in order to reach their gardens and communal pastures. In such a situation, the type of feud found among the Bedouin would be intolerable, because it would paralyze the economic pursuits of everyone, not just the feuding families. Vendetta occurs where social and economic relations are so dense and interdependent that if vengeance was allowed to escalate to the family level, as in Corsica, all commerce would come to a halt. Lebanon apparently is a case in point.

While honour is at the center of all three types of blood vengeance, it is most critical in societies like Corsica and Albania, where Feud B is found. Among the pastoral Nuer and Bedouin, not far below the idiom of honour lie straight-forward material motives such as competition for water holes and grazing land. According to Peters and Black-Michaud, the material motive is even more pronounced in vendetta, and it is partly, or largely, because individuals quarrel over material goods rather than primarily over honour that vendetta can be contained to individuals rather than groups: material goods are identifiable and finite; honour is diffuse and boundless. Yet a note of doubt must be injected regarding this neat analysis. It is certainly true that Corsicans themselves (and Albanians) treated feud and honour as inseparable. However, even in Corsica, as Wilson (1988) has pointed out, material advantage such as gaining control over a neighbour’s land was often the dominant, if not the overt, motive in feuds.

It is unfortunate that the same term, feud, is used for two quite distinct forms of blood vengeance. The ambiguity is compounded by the wider literature. In Corsica, blood vengeance is called vendetta by most Corsicans and most writers (Busquet 1920, Carrington 1971, and Marcaggi 1898). Yet according to Black-Michaud, the appropriate term there is feud. Just to complicate matters, that is the term preferred by Wilson (1988) for the Corsican case. Most writers on Albania have referred to blood vengeance as vendetta, not feud, but Albanians themselves had no such word in their vocabulary; they simply called it “blood.” In his study of Montenegro, Boehm (1984) uses the terms feud and vendetta interchangeably. One expert on Scotland (Cowan 1979, and personal communication) pointed out to me that both Feud B and vendetta existed there in the past. We also find references to vendetta as far apart as Japan (Shioya 1956) and Mexico (Friedrich 1965), although how precisely it is defined is not very clear.

In order to distinguish between the two forms of feud, I simply divided them into Feud A and Feud B, but that is less than satisfactory. If vendetta warrants a separate term, so do the two types of feud. One possibility would be to reserve feud for Feud A, replace Feud B with vendetta, and come up with a new term for vendetta as defined by Peters and Black-Michaud. Perhaps dyadic vengeance would serve. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to attempt to resolve the terminological ambiguity, it is important to point out that the ambiguity exists, because it will have an influence on my following evaluation of the similarities and differences between feud and vendetta in their classical senses and the contests that mark part of an academic’s life.

1. Feuds are often initiated by trivial incidents. For example in Corsica if a man kicks his neighbour’s dog, or merely makes a disparaging comment about the dog, the neighbour may shoot the other’s dog, be shot in turn himself, and then avenged by his family, establishing a cycle of murder and counter-murder which may claim numerous victims over the course of decades.

Often the same is true in the university setting. In one case an acrimonious feud was launched when a person accused another of looking at him in a peculiar manner when they passed in the hallway. In another case two colleagues fell out when one of them failed to cite the other in a publication. Often the source of irritation, in my opinion still decidedly trivial, is paradigmatic orientation, in which a colleague’s scholarly preference is attacked by another almost as a personal failing. So delicate are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological distinctions drawn by scholars, that even those who embrace the same orientation—I have in mind two Marxists of my acquaintance—may cease speaking to each other. Often the reasons for feuding are so vague that there is little more that can be done than to label them personality clashes, but these too become fixated on trivial events and issues. As it sometimes is said, academic feuds are so vicious because the stakes are so low.

2. Feuds are interminable. As Black-Michaud and Peters argue, feuds are products of specific social structures, and will endure as long as the structural arrangements remain in place. Incidentally, this partly explains why the study of feud is so challenging; as Black-Michaud has pointed out (1975: 33), because feuds are interminable, no anthropologist can ever hope to observe the life course of even a single case.

According to one of my key informants, a former grievance officer in a North American university, the same is true of feuds among colleagues. The administration may succeed in establishing a truce, just as the payment of blood money may do likewise in Corsica or Cyrenaica, but the cessation of hostilities is only temporary. Of course, in feuding societies animosities can roll on for generations, but those in academe evaporate when the opposed parties meet their Maker; unless the source of enmity was paradigmatic rivalry, in which case feuding becomes a role set, recreated in the next generation, just like in Corsica.

3. Both Corsicans and Albanians contend that women are the major cause of feud. Men are said to possess honour, which they earn through courage and duty, especially in relation to feuds. Women are said to be born with shame, a sense of virtuous behaviour; if a woman loses the quality of shame, either willfully or as a result of another’s aggression, the honour of her family is besmirched. In such a situation a feud is virtually inevitable. In Corsica, if a woman was raped or committed adultery, her own family sometimes killed her, usually by forcing her to drink poison. In Albania, it was the custom in some regions for a woman’s family to present her husband with a cartridge on the day of marriage which he could use to kill her if she dishonoured him.

According to another informant, whose job was to monitor and redress human rights’ violations on campus, gender has been at the heart of most incidents, at least in recent years. The most prevalent form involves sexist males who in their language and behaviour create a chilly climate for women, at times a dangerous one. Yet men are not always the culprits. Consider, for example, a bizarre case which came to my attention where a woman kidnapped two vulnerable male students, and sexually assaulted them over the course of a weekend. The university officials apparently turned themselves inside out attempting (successfully) to cover up the incident. Some writers would argue that gender contests in the academy have been greatly exaggerated. Westhues (2004a: 163), for example, has suggested that both men and women are unfairly stereotyped. The slur against men is that they prey on women. The slur against women is that they sleep around. Yet even if stereotyping does play a role, it merely helps to explain the dynamics of gender contests rather than serving as a competing explanation.

4. Feuding occurs in amorphous societies which lack the institutional arrangements necessary to generate regulation and cohesion. Feuds help to reduce anomy. They serve as a form of communication among people which otherwise would not exist. In this sense, opposition constitutes a salutary social relationship.

Much the same can be said about feuds in universities. Despite the emphasis on collegiality and dialogue, there often is little communication among scholars. For example, a person may have to attend a conference in order to find out what his or her neighbour down the hallway in the same department is working on. Feuding relationships, indeed, may be the most robust relationships that exist in an academic unit.

5. Feuds occur when the criteria for performance are ambiguous. The ultimate goal in Corsica was honour, but it was unclear how to obtain it in everyday life. For example, one might aspire to high political office, but during the Genoese and early French regimes on the island, this was a dubious distinction. Much less risky in terms of reputation was to lead one’s clan to local prominence and prosperity via the control of graft. Similar complications informed the economic realm. An energetic and ruthless man might succeed in expanding his flocks and his land, but this did not necessarily do much for his reputation, because it ran counter to the ideal of egalitarianism; in the idiom of the zero-sum game, it meant that his neighbours were in the process impoverished. In this context, it should be pointed out that poverty in itself was not evidence of a lack of honour. This was equally true for the old feudal nobility whose failed fortunes meant that they could hardly afford a pastis at the local bar, and for shepherds living in a remote one-room stone cottage on a mountain plateau, at least if they owned it. If poverty did not negate honour, what affirmed it? The single, incontrovertible demonstration of honour was to assassinate the enemy of one’s family.

If there is one truism about university life, it is that the criteria for performance are hopelessly ambiguous. Teaching awards may be dismissed as popularity contests. Grantmanship may carry with it the connotation of the academic on the make, the self promoter with a shameless propensity to network. Then there is the matter of scholarship. An article which has been praised to the heavens by one group of colleagues may be dismissed by another group, wed to a different paradigm, as trite and lightweight. The process runs in the opposite direction as well. An academic can deflect criticism by insisting that her or his area of scholarship is so specialized that almost nobody else, even within the same discipline, has the credentials to judge it. Such ambiguity in the academy creates an environment conducive to feud and vendetta.

6. Feud occurs in situations of “total scarcity.” When ecological and economic conditions prevent a society from rising above the subsistence level, honour rather than material goods becomes the currency of stratification, at least according to writers such as Black-Michaud and Peters.

From the perspective of lay people, the image of the sorely deprived scholar probably is ridiculous. But within the academy it is a different story: woefully inadequate departmental budgets, scarce funds for research, outmoded equipment, and salaries lagging behind those in industry. “Total scarcity,” in other words, is an expression that rings a bell among academics, and it may partly explain their tendency to metaphorically claw at each other’s throat.

7. Black-Michaud (1975: 178) has asserted that feud is ultimately all about power. Whether feuds are cast in an honorific idiom or fought over barely-concealed material resources, power is the prize. In Corsica, a popular saying was that murder is the ultimate expression of power.

Much the same holds for feud and vendetta in the university setting. When a man or woman locks horns with a colleague, he or she is minimally stating that they are equals, that he or she is a worthy opponent, not somebody who can be ignored; and in the event that the man or woman on the attack bests the opponent, his or her relatively superior power has been demonstrated.

1. The overt basis of feud is honour. This does not mean that contests over material goods never underlie a feud, or that at a deeper level the motive force is not power. But it is honour to which duty is attached, and which sustains the rhythm of murder and counter-murder for decades on end.

Honour is not the precise term behind feud and vendetta in the academy. Instead it is envy. In a setting where reputation is almost entirely a matter of the record of publication, rather than the type of car one drives or the size of one’s house, it would be most surprising if the record of publication was not the source of envy, or even if moderately talented individuals did not quarrel about whose accomplishments were the less meager.

This is not to deny that there are at times factors other than envy connected to feuds in the university setting. Sometimes they are set off by blatant acts of indecency, such as stealing a person’s ideas or plagiarizing an unpublished piece. Feuds can also be explained by virtue of the lack of mobility in contemporary university life. Due to market forces, the time has long since passed when academics moved at will from one institution to another. Like the small community or village, out of forced togetherness can spring crippling animosity, unless safety valves like witchcraft accusations recast social strain onto the nonmaterial realm. In this context, it is perhaps relevant to recall Malinowski’s observation (1941) that the smaller the cooperating social unit, the greater the degree of internal conflict. Nevertheless, from my reading of the academic scene, the overwhelming cause of strain is envy. Envy is to feud and vendetta in universities what honour is to blood vengeance in its classical manifestations.

2. Sometimes blood vengeance is temporarily halted (but not terminated) by the payment of blood money. In Corsica blood money was supposedly always rejected. The very thought that it could substitute for revenge was revolting. Yet blood money indeed was occasionally paid when the feuding parties became too fatigued to continue, when the number of dead on each side was high, and when intercessions from neighbours, religious leaders, and state officials proved persuasive.

If there is a form of blood money in the academy, it is remarkably different. First of all, its source is the university administration, not one of the feuding parties; I am referring, of course, to the buyout that sometimes is offered to a professor whose services no longer are desired. Secondly, the payment is provided to the “troublemaker,” the person deemed by the university to be the guilty party. In the classical feud, in contrast, guilt is not the issue; instead the family or clan which has suffered the greater number of deaths receives the payment of money. Finally, it should be pointed out that a buyout is only offered in cases where guilt is ambiguous, despite the fact that the university administration has taken sides. In a sense, then, the buyout is a sign that a person booted out may well be innocent of all charges.

3. When a feud has endured for decades, and claimed many lives, peacemakers sometimes emerge. In Corsica, they were called paceri, and there were two types. One consisted of officials appointed by the French government. The other was made up of notables, respected neighbours of the feuding parties. Occasionally the second type succeeded in persuading the opposed families to sign a peace treaty; almost never did the official peacemakers appointed by the state achieve comparable results.

In the university setting, it is the first type---departmental chairs, deans, academic vice-presidents and grievance officers—that dominate the process of reconciliation, or at least the process of settling acrimonious disputes. Not only do informal peace makers play a negligible role in university feuds and vendettas, but indeed they are strongly discouraged by the administration. Presumably this is partly in order to make explicit where authority lies, and partly because of the administration’s commitment to secrecy, on which I now turn the spotlight.

4. In Corsica and Albania, there was nothing secret about feuds, including who killed the latest victim, because assassinations were fully intended to be public statements about honour and power. Where secrecy (omerta) did operate was in relation to the state and its officials. One of the worst sins in Corsica was to inform the police about the location of a fugitive, especially one who had done his duty and avenged a kinsman.

In the academic world things are reversed. Feuds and vendettas are ubiquitous, but they are confined to the informal level of gossip, rarely recognized in formal settings such as departmental meetings. It is only in those cases in which the broader university administration gets involved that feud and vendetta become transported into the public domain. But when that transpires, so does something else. The university administration applies a veil of utmost secrecy over all of its deliberations. Rather than the feuding families and the population in general attempting to keep the state in the dark, as in Corsica, it is the equivalent of the state—the university administration—that imposes the gag order. In the case of Corsica, the intention was to circumvent the judicial order. In the case of the university administration, the motive is open to speculation.

5. Feuds occur in societies that lack adequate mechanisms to nullify strain. If feuding has not been universal, which is certainly what Black-Michaud and Peters have argued, presumably it has been because non-feuding societies have been blessed with adequate mechanisms to prevent it. In Corsica, for example, the only institutions that generated close social bonds beyond the extended family were godparenthood and the clan, which included kinsmen and others bonded to them by fictive kinship ties.

Although I am somewhat skeptical about this argument—even in feuding societies such as Albania mechanisms of an extra family nature such as blood brotherhood existed—there can be no doubt about the remarkably different situation in the academy. Conflict resolution mechanisms abound. When a student complains about a grade, or a professor runs amok, there is a clear and elaborate institutionalized procedure to be followed. Depending on the severity of the case, different levels of the administration will be mobilized, from the departmental chair to the academic vice-president, as well as grievance officers, faculty associations, ethics committees, and committees of appeal.
The elaborate administrative machinery to cope with conflict would appear to recognize both its ubiquity in the university setting and the commitment to resolve it rationally and expeditiously. There is another possible interpretation. In my research in West Africa (Barrett 1977), I lived in a village where a handful of prophets were famous for their capacity to catch witches, whose numbers were remarkably higher than in surrounding villages. One of my conclusions was that there existed a direct correlation between the power of the prophets and the frequency of witchcraft. That is, to justify their roles and demonstrate their gifts, the prophets had a vested interest in expanding the witchcraft problem. Is it possible that in order to maintain its muscle tone and to justify its existence, the administration is predisposed (largely unconsciously) to spotting troublemakers where few exist? If so, this would be ironical, because in today’s academic setting hard-pressed administrators have enough to do without having to deal with problems which they may have partly created.

It sometimes has been suggested that given one kind of conflict, such as warfare, another kind, such as feuding, can not flourish. In this context, Faure (1858) has speculated that had the duel operated in Corsica, feuding may have been greatly reduced. Perhaps what is required is a form of the duel in the university setting; especially appropriate would be the Inuit singing variety, in which victory was judged on the cleverness of one’s words and the capacity to keep one’s temper under control. However, I must point out that in Montenegro (Boehm 1984: 168) the duel co-existed with the feud; indeed, when the state attempted to ban feuding, and made it an offense punishable by death, people simply renamed their feuds “duels,” and carried on business as usual.

6. A common feature of peace treaties involving feuds was the matrimonial clause. That is, a marriage was arranged between the families in order to encourage future amity. This was especially significant in Corsica where preferential cousin marriage existed. Following Lévi-Strauss, such endogamy, by severely restricting affinal exchange, may have been one of the factors that fueled the feud.
There is nothing equivalent to the matrimonial clause in the university setting, but perhaps its time has come, or at least a semblance of it. Imagine Marxists and structural functionalists forced to share an office, positivists and phenomenologists urged to co-write a conference paper, and long-time antagonists commanded to spend their holidays together.

7. In feuding societies high achievers are especially at risk. The preferred target of blood vengeance is usually the murderer or his closest male relatives. Almost as enticing is an accomplished, high-status individual in the enemy camp, such as a lawyer, medical practitioner or priest. In both Corsica and Albania, however, there was a price to be paid for assassinating a high achiever: the aggrieved family, by the rules of blood vengeance, could in turn murder two members of the other family.

In the university system, the element of envy assures that high achievers are particularly vulnerable to the aggressive actions of colleagues. However, because feuds are not based solely on envy, and because envy itself can flourish when the scholarly records of two people are only marginally different, or simply in their imaginations, they can spring up anywhere. The high achiever is almost the exclusive target of a related phenomenon—mobbing—to which I now turn.

What is mobbing? Westhues (2004b:4) defines it as “…an impassioned, collective compaign by co-workers to exclude, punish, and humiliate a targeted worker.” Mobbing is to the adult world what bullying and swarming are to the adolescent world.

Where does mobbing occur? It is concentrated in bureaucracies, or formal or complex organizations. A factory is an example. But it is especially pronounced in public sector bureaucracies where work is complex, standards of competency vague, and the discipline of the market place only dimly visible. The university is an example.

How frequent is mobbing? Leymann (see Westhues 2004b:5) estimated that between 2-5% of adults in Sweden are mobbed during their working lives. He also estimated that about 12% of people who committed suicide in Sweden had been mobbed at work. Elsewhere Westhues (2004a: 42) reports that Leymann’s figures are 1-3% and 10-15% for mobbing in general and suicides related to mobbing. Yet even if only 1% of Swedish adults were victims of workplace mobbing, this is identical to the percentage of Corsicans who were murdered when the feud was at its height.(2)

Who gets mobbed? The most likely victim (Westhues 2004a: 163) is the high achiever, the academic star who makes his or her colleagues look bad. Also at risk according to Westhues are individuals who don’t run with the herd. But this profile is not without ambiguity, at least in the university setting, because the top gun who thumbs his nose at convention and duty and parades his quirks is often insulated from meaningful criticism. In some of the reported cases of mobbing (Westhues 2004b), ethnic and racial prejudice appear to have played a part. Yet mobbing is generally indiscriminate regarding ethnic background, and gender too.(3) Any of us at any time could be mobbed, given that we possess a moderate level of competence. This qualification is important, because grossly incompetent colleagues rarely have been subjected to mobbing. In other words, mobbing is not a mechanism for ridding a bureaucracy of deadwood.

There is another type of colleague who, perhaps surprisingly, avoids the mobbing phenomenon. This is the person renowned as a troublemaker, the kind of individual who gives the administration a constant headache. One reason why such persons are insulated from mobbing is that they have already clearly signaled that they are willing and even eager to fight back. Another reason is that mobbing is more often than not a surprise attack; it is aimed at individuals who have had no reason to prepare their defenses. Add to this the probability that the troublemaker will ridicule any attempt by administrators to impose secrecy over the proceedings, and we can understand why such a person often escapes unscathed.

It was shown that for each of the three types of blood vengeance, there was a vengeance unit. Is there a mobbing unit? Yes, and it has been implied already. The mobbing unit, at least in the academy, is the administration. Feuds are prevalent in universities, but until the administration becomes involved they do not mutate into mobbing. The activities of the administration convert a feud from the informal to the formal realm, and also relocate the locus of power away from the faculty. The last statement is important, because it hints at the tug for control between faculty and administration, with the latter in recent years more often than not the victor.(4)

What is the goal of mobbing? It is not to determine whether a person accused of wrongdoing is innocent or guilty. Nor is it to mediate between feuding opponents in order to effect a reconciliation, or at least to terminate open hostility. Instead the goal is nothing less than to destroy or eliminate the person under accusation. The explanation is that by the time a person faces the higher administration, guilt has already been assigned by his or her colleagues, and it is the responsibility of the administration to make certain the ultimate penalty is applied. If rational and open-minded deliberation, or efforts at mediation, do characterize the actions of a committee, which presumably will usually be the case, then mobbing by definition has not occurred.

What is the process by which mobbing unfolds? The first step is to focus on the incident or issue at the heart of the charge of wrongdoing to such an extent that it becomes impossible to think of the accused person without thinking of the incident or issue. Curiously, if this step is successful, the incident or issue eventually slips away to the edges of the controversy, and may in time disappear altogether. This is because the focus has shifted to a more inviting target: the victim’s alleged despicable character.

While unscrupulous or power-hungry individuals may be part of the administration’s team, mobbing does not depend on their presence. Indeed, as Westhues (2004a) has demonstrated in the case of a renowned professor who taught at the University of Toronto, none of the administrators or committee members who did him in could be called bullies. Instead, the mobbing process in which they were unwittingly involved blinded them to counter-evidence, and smuggled passion into what should have been a rational exercise. The upshot was that the guilty verdict of the accused professor was virtually predetermined.(5)

A central feature of mobbing is unanimity. No matter what section of the administration is involved, from ad hoc committees and tribunals to deal with a case, to deans, provosts and presidents, as well as faculty associations and appeal committees, not to speak of the on-campus and off-campus media, there is overwhelming agreement that the accused person is despicable and guilty as charged. To both manufacture and sustain such universal condemnation, the accused person’s apparent virtues are turned into vices. For example, a tribunal whose task was to decide the fate of the professor at the University of Toronto (Westhues 2004a: 213) found fault with his exceptional “eloquence, enthusiasm and intellectual breadth.” It also criticized the professor for being too concerned about and generous towards his students (the professor in question, remarkably well published, had been the recipient of a teaching award).

Another key feature of the mobbing process is the time factor. The administration does not need to be in any hurry. It has the resources: money and specialists such as lawyers. In contrast, its target must spend her or his own money on lawyers, while living under a cloud of constant humiliation. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that many of the targets suffer severe health problems. Indeed, what is mildly astonishing is that even a small percentage of them manage to survive the ordeal and rebuild their lives. Such is the peculiar nature of mobbing, Westhues has observed (2004a:350), that after a target has been eliminated from the workplace the attack does not necessarily cease; even the fact of surviving may be interpreted by the eliminators as an affront.

Finally, throughout the mobbing process, secrecy plays its part. From the outset, the administration demands silence on the part of the accused. Nothing said or decided behind closed doors is supposed to be revealed to the wider community. There can be few situations where such secrecy can be beneficial to an individual under trial, and one can only wonder if mobbing could flourish if the veil of secrecy was removed. Ironically, because mobbing takes place in bureaucracies, there usually is a sizeable paper trail, which means that a postmortem can uncover at least part of the strategies and tactics that were employed.

Why does mobbing occur? Westhues (2004a: 5 and 10) implies that it is a manifestation of our primate inheritance, rooted in our biological makeup, a form of “savagery” out of step with the civilized world. Humiliation, he suggests, can be put on a par with food and sex as one of our three basic appetites. Such biological reductionism, in my judgment, adds little more illumination to mobbing than a somewhat comparable observation occasionally made about Corsicans: the urge to murder was “in their blood.” Westhues (2004a: 29) also turns to the social psychological notion of the fundamental attribution error. This is the tendency to interpret one’s behaviour in a specific social context as representative of one’s entire character or personality. Given the manner in which the focus shifts from the alleged wrongdoing to the person himself in the early stage of mobbing, this is an apt explanation, but it hardly tells the whole story.

Westhues (2004b:9) refers to mobbing as scapegoating, which temporarily produces group solidarity at the expense of the target’s ruined life. With little effort, it would be easy to convert this psychological explanation into a sociological one by arguing that mobbing generates mechanical solidarity. Durkheim (1933) wrote that as societies are transformed from simple to complex, so too does the form of solidarity change from mechanical to organic. He also suggested that associated with mechanical solidarity was repressive law, and with organic solidarity restitutive law. What is interesting about mobbing is that it seems to throw a monkey wrench into Durkheim’s theorizing, because everything about mobbing suggests that the punishment is meant to send a message to the entire community, not merely to a part of it. In other words, it is an example of repressive law forcing its way into organic solidarity.

Scapegoating and mechanical solidarity may help us to conceptualize the phenomenon of mobbing, but as explanations they too fall well short of the mark. In order to take us closer analytically, it is necessary to consider the university as an institution. The goals of the university consist of independent scholarship (often for its own sake), responsibility to the wider community (the usefulness of research), and teaching. These competing goals account for some of the strain in the academy, but they are less related to mobbing than two other features of the institution: the fact that it is both a formal organization and a community of scholars (the element of collegiality). Following Weber (1964), we should expect rationality to be the dominant feature of administrative behaviour. Yet mobbing is the polar opposite of rational deliberation; it is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. How to explain? My guess is that it is somehow connected to the community dimension of the university. In fact, I would argue that the reason why the academy is an especially hospitable environment for mobbing is that more so than in most bureaucracies it is also a community. But why should “community” be of any significance to mobbing? A large part of the answers to these questions can be found in two brilliant books written by F.G. Bailey, Morality and Expediency (1977) and The Tactical Uses of Passion (1983).

Bailey (1977: 103) observes that in formal organizations people “are expected to behave in an impersonal fashion, using only that part of themselves which is the bureaucratic mind and closing off all emotions.” In bureaucracies, rationality dominates. Community, Bailey writes (1977: 103), is quite different: “To belong to a community is to treat others and to be treated by them as a complete human being, to be given moral status.” In communities, emotions rule, people are treated “in the round,” and human relationships are ends in themselves, not means to ends subject to rational calculation.

However, it is obvious that Bailey regards these portraits of formal organizations and communities as partly fictional. Focusing on how committees operate within a formal organization, he states (1977: 66) that decisions are always based on extra-rational factors such as gossip and personal matters which produce “the full roundedness of the moral person.” In other words part of what is meant by community has penetrated the walls of the bureaucracy. But there is more to it than that. According to Bailey, “…such committees cannot work effectively unless they use such information, without formally admitting that it exists.”

Community also is more complicated than it might appear. The community is where we find the moral person, the person in the round. But, fueled by emotion and passion, the community is host to both solidarity and hostility, to both friends and enemies. Within a family, Bailey observes (1977: 104), relationships may be warm and supportive, but the family is also the setting for a lot of murders. In other words, hostility is no less an end in itself than friendship.

Finally there is Bailey’s argument (1983:77) that when the passion of the community collides with the rationality of the bureaucracy, which in his analysis cannot be avoided, passion emerges as the victor. This is because human beings find it easier or more comfortable to retreat into the realm of emotion and passion than to countenance the skepticism and complexity that accompany rationality.

The implications of Bailey’s work for mobbing are far reaching. Most importantly, it appears that there is nothing exceptional about the practice in mobbing of focusing on the accused’s character as an end in itself rather than on the alleged wrongdoing; or allowing emotion and passion, contrary to Weberian theory, to intrude into the realm of rational, impersonal decision making. Nor is it necessary to invoke our primordial past in order to explain mobbing. Mobbing is simply a polar expression of the manner in which bureaucracies operate—not only in contemporary times but presumably as far back as bureaucracies have existed. Earlier I suggested that the community aspect of the university somehow seems to be related to the relatively high incidence of mobbing there. The explanation may be that the collegial dimension increases the probability that the moral person, which includes both the admired and the despised, dominates closed-door deliberations.

Complementary explanations of the mobbing phenomenon include the ambiguity of academic work, which makes it possible for administrators, and colleagues, to put a positive or negative spin on a scholar’s record of publication (and on teaching and administrative duties). Then, too, there is the matter of resources. Administrators in public sector institutions can stretch out an inquiry as long as it takes to eliminate the target without being concerned about their own pocketbooks. Finally, there is the issue of academic freedom. When most of us think about this issue, it is the freedom that tenure provides to speak and write what we wish. But as Westhues stresses, there is another face to academic freedom: the freedom of universities to do what they want without outside interference. Of course, all professional organizations demand the right to police themselves. However, if university administrators had to keep a constant eye on the courts, the media and the wider public, and provide full disclosure, exposing even the nonrational elements of their deliberations, their taste for mobbing might turn sour.

Does mobbing serve any useful purpose? According to Harris (1975) and Malinowski (1941) both primitive and modern warfare are “functional” in the sense of adjusting the population level to the economic and ecological capacity of its setting, promoting the circulation of ideas and innovations across cultural boundaries, and even creating new forms of political organization. Similarly, the literature on blood vengeance is saturated with its supposed functions. Feud is said to constitute a form of communication in an otherwise amorphous society, thereby enhancing cohesion. Feud also has been portrayed as a form of moral stratification which poses no threat in societies where economic differentiation would decimate the population. In my judgment, both of these “functions” are highly debatable, but there is a third possibility that is more plausible: self help. Feud is said to be a type of self help in societies lacking an adequate system of justice. In this sense, feud is a substitute for justice, a regulator of behaviour. Does mobbing provide a similar service? Improbable. Consider the already-available elaborate judicial machinery that exists in the academy. Remember also that mobbing does not get rid of the deadwood, for the simple reason that incompetent colleagues fall below its radar. In Westhues’ view, mobbing is decidedly dysfunctional. It not only destroys the lives of individuals, but also is a monumental waste of scarce resources. My conclusion is that mobbing does not substitute for an inadequate system of justice: it circumvents justice.

It may be retorted that some acts and beliefs are so despicable that mobbing is justified. Examples might be people who distribute child pornography, drug dealers, and those who promote hatred towards an identifiable group. But even here judgment is somewhat relative. Norms, values and attitudes change from one generation to another. The racism, anti-Semitism and gender oppression of the 1940s and 1950s are officially prohibited in today’s world, and who knows whether, for example, in the next generation pedophiles will gain a measure of respectability? But the bottom line has much less to do with shifting mores than with the nature of mobbing itself. Mobbing by definition involves a collective attack against individuals who are either innocent, or have been charged with offenses on the basis of evidence which would be thrown out of a public court. If these conditions are not present, mobbing has not occurred.

How can mobbing be stopped? If Bailey’s analysis is sound that emotion, passion and moral status not only intrude into the bureaucracy but actually push rationality aside, and if mobbing is a polar manifestation of these dynamics, then perhaps little at all can be done. Laws and policies against mobbing in the workplace can be established, but Westhues (2004a: 304-6) doubts their effectiveness; indeed, his worry is that such laws and policies will be manipulated by management to attack the target from yet another angle. Westhues (2004a: 307-9) puts all his hope in education. By this, he means exposing the mobbing process which is always shrouded in secrecy and rules of confidentiality, and pushing the mobbing phenomenon to the forefront of scholarly consciousness where it can be examined and dissected. Perhaps education can have some impact—laws and policies aimed at preventing mobbing in the workplace could be said to be “educational”—but I have less faith in it than does Westhues. My own research experience—especially my studies of racism—has taught me that advanced education can accommodate the immoral and the pathological as readily as the ethical and the sane.

Westhues is on firmer ground when he recommends that current judicial and quasi-judicial procedures in universities be dismantled. His argument is that if a case of wrongdoing merits an official response, it should occur in a public court, out of reach of the university administration. This makes a lot of sense, but obstacles remain. The legal and judicial system, as Marx asserted, reflect the reigning power system; given the prestige which advanced institutions of education enjoy, they begin the battle with a surplus of credibility. The advantage that they possess in terms of resources during in-house deliberations also extends to the public court: the capacity to hire the best available lawyers and investigators. Finally, it must be remembered that the target of mobbing is usually a single individual. If the general public, or at least the vast majority of members of a formal organization, could be motivated, by education or otherwise, to altruistically embrace the target’s pain as their own, mobbing would never have found a toehold in the first place. One of the ironies related to mobbing is that its targets often exhibit a great faith in the goodness of human beings. They expect that eventually people of high principles, both academic colleagues and administrators, will stand up and put an end to the nonsense. My guess is that if the targets of elimination were mobbed a second time, their reactions would be decidedly more aggressive.

My final question: what is the relationship between feuding and mobbing? Feuding is much more prevalent than mobbing. Most feuds never mutate into mobbing. Yet most cases of mobbing rest on a prior history of feuding. When what appears to be mobbing does bypass feud, it means one of two things. Either the attack on the target is justified on overt legal grounds such as employing false credentials to land a job, in which case mobbing—again by definition—has not occurred; or the alleged wrongdoing amounts to such a grave threat to public values that no defense is possible. In both cases, the process of elimination is likely to be short.

The basis of feud is envy; as argued earlier, envy is to feuding in the university setting, and quite possibly in formal organizations generally, what honour is to classical blood vengeance. In contrast, the basis of mobbing is the elimination impulse, the relentless effort to reduce the target to the status of a non-person.

Another difference is that when two individuals in a formal organization become locked in a feud, or more precisely in a vendetta, in a sense they contaminate each other; that is, the vendetta phenomenon almost guarantees that the reputation of each individual will take a hit. In this manner, vendetta can be regarded as a social leveling mechanism. Its message is that each of the parties is a worthy opponent, and each must pay a similar price. Something quite different transpires in mobbing. Its message is that the world is divided into the good and the bad: the mobbers and the mobbee. Rather than sharing the target’s humiliation, the eliminators, by their actions, reaffirm their superior moral status.

Where feud in the academy seems to diverge sharply from classical blood vengeance, but overlap significantly with mobbing, concerns the element of physical violence. When academic colleagues fall into a state of extended enmity, the experience may well be distressing to both parties, but only rarely does anyone pull out a pistol or a knife. Similarly, the mobbing process relies on gossip, humiliation, distortion of the record and character assassination, all the while parading reason, fairness and moral concern in order to realize its goals. It is a social death, not a physical death, that mobbing seeks, even though the latter is sometimes the tragic outcome. Yet one of Westhues’ strongest and most persuasive arguments is that unless it is appreciated that violent and non-violent tactics and weapons can produce similar results, mobbing cannot be understood. In his words (2004b:6): “…even without the blood, the bloodlust is essentially the same….”

Feud and vendetta, of course, constitute only one type of conflict found in the academy, and conflict is only one type of behaviour that occurs there. In some respects feud and vendetta in the university setting are similar to their classical counterparts, in other respects different. While it is a judgment call whether there is enough in common to justify the classical terms, at the very minimum it can be concluded that feud-like and vendetta-like behaviour claim a corner of the academic’s world. Although mobbing often is preceded by feuding, most feuds do not progress into the mobbing state. Feuds and vendettas are certainly more prevalent than mobbing; in fact, the latter occurs so infrequently that the vast majority of academics, and presumably workers elsewhere, never feel its sting. No doubt its rarity (and its subtlety) partly explains why it took researchers so long to recognize it, and why efforts to eradicate it may be confronted with indifference.

There is no way in which I can know whether it was mobbing that caused my colleague’s fatal heart attack. However, it is evident that he had begun to feud with specific individuals, and that at the time of his death these feuds had crystallized into what is called mobbing. The vast majority of those who were ranged against him would presumably be shocked and aggrieved to find themselves described as mobbers; but intrinsic to the process is its insidious, quasi-conscious nature, in which individual judgment is sacrificed to the collective will, and no single individual can be held responsible, or even have to countenance the possibility that his or her actions were morally suspect. In this regard, the fact that there is a mobbing unit—the administration—comparable to the blood vengeance units is especially significant.

In terms of the larger picture, what feud, vendetta and mobbing in the academy, and in formal organizations in general, indicate is that the distance between the blood vengeance societies of the past and the bureaucratic societies of today—and between passion, violence and rationality—is markedly less than many of us may have imagined. In a rather peculiar manner, feud, vendetta and mobbing stretch across time and space to evoke the universality of the species Homo sapiens.

He was a Marxist in a rather conservative department, but that had not prevented his previous prominence. One of his loyal friends insisted that he had been undermined by ambitious colleagues encouraged by the administration. Even if that was true, and it may not have been, the basic question remains unanswered: why did the administration turn against him in the first place?
I have only been involved, and then unwillingly, in one serious feud during my career. While it had the potential of being transformed into a mobbing, this fortunately did not happen. Such a happy outcome seems to have been mostly a matter of luck. In Durkheimian terms, feuding is a social fact, bound to claim at least 1% of the teaching faculty. Without good fortune, any of us could become a mobbing statistic.
There is at times an unfortunate reactionary bent in Westhues’ two books, especially in some of the contributions to the edited volume, implying that conservative white Western males are particularly prone to being mobbed—a reflection of Marxist, feminist, and politically-correct biases in the academy. Ironically, this narrow portrait of the mobbing victim is contradicted within these books themselves by case studies of targeted women, people of colour, and liberals (if not Marxists).
For evidence of the leading, and at times vicious, role administrations play in mobbing, see the chapters by Stronach and Hexham in Westhues (2004b).
This is the appropriate place to state that I have been treated royally by the university administration where I have worked for most of my career. There is nothing autobiographical, thus, about my analysis of the role played by administrations in mobbing, which has relied heavily on the case studies of mobbing in universities across North America and elsewhere contained in Westhues’ two volumes.

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