We Have Received a Complaint: The Fraught World of Workplace Justice, US Edition

We used to go to court to enforce our rights. Now we do it at the office.

Workplace investigations are everywhere. From complaints at Fox, BBC, TVO, and The Ellen DeGeneres Show to sports teams like the Seattle Mariners, the Boston Celtics, and the Dallas Mavericks, as well as Fortune 500 companies, governments, universities, and schools, seemingly every week brings a new announcement of another workplace under scrutiny.

As conflicts increase in a new era of behavioral expectations, offices are being transformed into forums of informal justice. Investigators are summoned to adjudicate and peers become witnesses in poorly understood, often opaque proceedings. The shift is fraught for all involved: complainants often feel the investigations fail to right wrongs; respondents regularly decry them as exercises in shunning; employers wonder how they fell into this role.