When I began studying and writing about workplace bullying in 1998, I did so through a mainly legal lens. I saw the critical matters of stress, anxiety, and trauma as “supporting material” for my legal analysis and suggested legal prescriptions. During the past 11 years, however, I have become deeply enmeshed in the fascinating, challenging, and often troubling aspects of psychology that surround workplace bullying. I now understand that legal reform is only one modest component in crafting adequate responses to workplace bullying.
As noted in previous posts, I have cast my lot with the therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) movement (see below for link), which examines the therapeutic and anti-therapeutic qualities of our laws and legal systems. This new and welcomed association has brought me to the biennial Congress of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health, held this year at New York University School of Law, my legal alma mater. I presented a paper on Monday on injecting TJ into the law of the workplace, using workplace bullying as an example of why we need to do so.
Because I presented on the first day of this week-long conference, I’ve had the luxury of attending subsequent programs free of butterflies over my own talk. There are well over a hundred panels at this conference, and 18 of them are devoted to various TJ topics. I’ve stuck mainly to the TJ programs, and the experience has been like an intense, fascinating graduate and professional seminar.
But here’s a big concern: At this conference, there are very few panels and presentations related to employment law. Panels on mental health law, criminal law, and family law (among others) abound. The law of the workplace, however, has little presence here.
This state of affairs is not the fault of conference organizers. Rather, it’s a sign of how considerations of psychology and mental health are too disconnected from employment law and policy. Instead, as I have written in a recent law article (see below for link), a “markets and management” framework has predominated, whereby unfettered markets and unchecked management power are considered to be the most desirable states. Any incursions — such as protections against discrimination or bullying, or provision of a living wage — must be justified against those presumptions. We need to change that framework to emphasize the dignity of workers, and TJ insights can help light the way.
That said, it is heartening to be part of a global (42 countries represented!) assemblage of lawyers, law professors, psychologists, mental health workers, students, and others who are committed to more psychologically healthy law and public policy. There is a lot of exciting thinking and action going on here.
For the main Therapeutic Jurisprudence website: http://therapeuticjurisprudence.org
For a PDF of my article “Human Dignity and American Employment Law”: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1299176
So very much goes into the shaping of human behavior. I come out of a psychodynamic background, which looks at the influences early in life that form behaviors. The fields of social psychology, linguistics, systems theory, addictions theories, other behavioral sciences, economics, law, physics and neuroscience (to name but a few)are but bites of the apple.
I think that we have allowed ourselves to become “siloized” in our rigid defense of our chosen fields of interest.
Look at Workplace Bullying from a different perspective: It took many, many different people, beliefs, actions, laws, and distractions over our entire human evolution to ENABLE the behaviors indicitive of Workplace Bullying, we now see today, to survive.
It will take many, many different people, professions, theories, communications and actions to help heal the wounds of the past.
This website provides the vehicle for doing just that!
[...] there is a bold new movement called Therapeutic Jurisprudence (TJ). WBI colleague and law professor David Yamada introduced TJ in his July 2 blog. He reports that a recent conference of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health included [...]