A Cold Pot Does Not Boil: A Case Study Of The Virginia Beach City Municipal Center Shooting To Understand Disgruntled Employee Violence

1 online resource (112 pages) : PDF

2021

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

The phenomenon of the violent disgruntled employee is a symptom of increasing mass violence in the U.S. Previous literature on mass violence in the workplace is mostly based on the individual psychologization of attackers. This case study is a reaction to the need for organizational leaders and scholars to critically address (1) the relationship between institutional environments and the development of violence, and (2) why pre-attack behaviors fail to trigger risk response thresholds in some organizations. This study of the Virginia Beach City Municipal Center workplace shooting ends with a discussion of a new approach to understand the cultural, structural, and larger socioeconomic influences that contributed to a violent outcome. The analysis uses high-reliability organizational theory as a central framework to understand how sensemaking within the organizational culture of Virginia Beach City enabled the conditions for violence to occur, and for the pre-attack warning signs to be missed. A focus on organizational culture departs from the dominant focus on individual risk factors and implicates a new critical exploration of how organizational culture can provoke or enable workplace violence in bureaucratic organizations.

masters theses

Organizational sociology

M.A.

Bureaucracy
Mass Shooting
Organizational Culture
Reliability
Sensemaking
Workplace Violence

Communication Studies

Scott, Cliff

Grano, Daniel
Norander, Stephanie

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2021.

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