From Hire to Liar: The Role of Deception in the Workplace (review)

In From Hire to Liar, David Shulman casts light on workplace behaviors concealing or selectively revealing information – making the case that deceptions, large and small, are ubiquitous, mundane and woven into the fabric of organizational life. The study proceeds in two stages. The first explores deception as a formal job requirement in interviews with 20 private detectives. The second uproots examples of informal workplace deceit in interviews with 24 interns and 23 employees in a range of service-oriented industries (nonprofits, finance and marketing among others).

Chapters 1 through 3 document the deceptions private detectives routinely employ to accomplish their tasks, along with their means of building believable lies and justifying deceit. Deception is so much a part of the job that these chapters would also fit nicely in a more general ethnography of private detective work. Remaining chapters persuade the reader that informal deceit is equally pervasive elsewhere. Chapter 4 outlines the properties of informal deceptions, such as their administrative functionality and subtle collective implementation. Chapter 5 describes the "shadowy underworld" of informal procedures and the selective, and therefore deceptive, ways they are conveyed among workers. Chapter 6 meanders through a series of topics ranging from the social currency of cultivated workplace appearances to a tendency toward deceit among interns and nonprofits. Chapter 7 catalogs methods of avoiding work while pretending to do more. Chapters 8 and 9 expand the scope a bit – illustrating how mundane deceptions prime workers and organizations to engage in and to disown more serious violations, and presenting avenues for integrating deception into organizational perspectives.

Readers will doubtlessly be persuaded that much if not most of what happens at work is not exactly as it seems, as deception colors a spectrum of behaviors ranging from outright lies, to work avoidance, to selectively revealing "how things really get done around here." This portrayal could hardly have been avoided given the method (aimed at uprooting and documenting deceit) and sample (predominantly individuals whose work requires duplicity or whose structural positions deter investment, integration and oversight). Drawing heavily from Goffman, the author strengthens his case with a micro-level contextualization underscoring deceit's functionality for accomplishing tasks and strengthening relationships. I was particularly taken with the illustration of how sharing discrediting information about oneself, dangerous observations about others, and guilt for complicity in organizational misdeeds fosters trust and solidarity.

The scope and micro-level emphasis of this book, while strengths, also prove to be limitations in several regards. "Deceit," as a construct, houses vastly different phenomena (classified elsewhere as resistance, consent and solidarity, to name a few), making it difficult to pin down sociologically. Since action takes precedence in defining deception, intent recedes into the background, alongside the meanings workers attach to what they do. For example, informal peer training is classified as deceit owing to covert and selective exchange of information, despite ordinarily being experienced as a process of revelation and mutual support.

Importantly, the scope and emphasis on the micro-level in From Hire to Liar also downplay structural influences on deceptive workplace practices. To be sure, power, hierarchy, and networks make appearances throughout, but the bulk of attention is on description and micro-level interaction. While I was persuaded by the micro-level arguments and examples, I was troubled by (1. inattention to a large body of qualitative and quantitative research documenting how organizational arrangements and the nature of work influence workers' behavior, and (2. oversimplification of the few relevant pieces that are addressed. On the other hand, in his conclusion, Shulman calls attention to something structural accounts often downplay – namely, the influence of individual attributes on workplace behaviors. This is a timely consideration since now, more than ever, employers emphasize personality in hiring and worker control. Yet, the book's portrayal of workers is somewhat stagnant and unfortunately quite negative – a characterization spelled out with striking clarity in the final pages, where the author shares "private cynical aphorisms" on workers and...