In his pioneering research on workplace bullying, Leymann (1990, 1996a,b, 2022) documented dozens of cases in which routine organisational conflicts escalated into systematic campaigns of exclusion. One of the most striking was the case of Helga, the director of a nursing home in Sweden. Initially recognised for her competence, she gradually became the target of her subordinates’ discontent. What began as minor disagreements soon evolved into insinuations that she was “difficult” and “unstable”. Meetings were convened in which administrators questioned her leadership, reframing institutional problems in terms of her supposed psychological fragility. As these insinuations solidified into an institutional narrative, her colleagues withdrew their support, her authority was eroded, and her credibility collapsed. Ultimately, Helga developed social phobia and was excluded not only from her workplace but also from her professional identity.

Leymann described similar processes in other cases. Hans, a kindergarten teacher, faced hostility after criticising organisational practices. What was initially framed as disagreement was quickly pathologised: colleagues interpreted his persistence as obstinacy or latent instability. Isolated and demoralised, he became persona non grata among staff. Elisabeth, a mid-level supervisor, was relocated to a basement office and deprived of tasks. When she protested, her withdrawal and visible distress were reinterpreted as signs of depression rather than legitimate resistance. Bertil, a researcher in a technical institute, was targeted by a superior who orchestrated subtle yet persistent attacks on his credibility. Each attempt to defend himself was reframed as a paranoid overreaction. These trajectories illustrate how pathologising responses consolidate as institutional narratives that erode authority and credibility, transforming perception into typification.

For Leymann, these were not anecdotal details but central mechanisms of mobbing, the term he introduced to describe sustained workplace harassment. His insight remains crucial: workplace bullying is not limited to overt hostility (isolation, excessive control) but also includes symbolic acts that progressively undermine reputation and identity (Leymann, 2022). Once a rumour that someone is “unstable” or “undesirable” begins to circulate, it functions as a powerful social weapon, restructuring the victim’s actions through that prism. In this sense, discrediting talk is not mere gossip, but a social transformation that alters the categories through which colleagues interpret one another. The more an identity is othered and pathologised, the clearer it becomes that one is facing systematic harassment.

The central thesis of this article is that reputational damage must be understood as a core mechanism of workplace bullying. Rather than prioritising typological distinctions, this analysis highlights the erosion of recognition as a transversal process that operates across different configurations of power. To conceptualise this, I draw on Alfred Schutz’s phenomenological sociology, which emphasises how social life rests on typifications: shared interpretive categories that allow individuals to make sense of others’ behaviour within a common stock of knowledge (Schutz, 1962, 1967, 1970; Schutz and Luckmann, 1973). In the workplace, such typifications underpin the fragile trust necessary for cooperation. From this perspective, what workplace bullying most profoundly undermines is the mutual recognition that underpins communicative agency and intersubjective reciprocity.

This article is primarily theoretical and conceptually driven, while grounded in ethnographic material. The argument unfolds in several stages. First, I review the foundational and recent contributions to bullying research. Second, I develop Schutz’s perspective in dialogue with theories of recognition. Third, I draw on ethnographic material to illustrate how these dynamics evolve in practice. Finally, I discuss the implications for future research on workplace bullying from a phenomenological standpoint.

Most participants in this study were members of the previously cited “anti-mobbing” association, which rented a modest room in a working-class district of Barcelona, where meetings were held (usually weekly but often fortnightly) with uneven attendance. During the fieldwork period, the association’s activity revolved around three functions: mutual support; legal, medical, and psychological advice; and lobbying public authorities to reform the legal framework in line with emerging guidance from the International Labour Organization and the European Commission, which urged member states to legislate against psychological violence at work (Di Martino et al., 2003). Pressure from associations of this kind contributed to gradual legal and jurisprudential developments in Catalonia and Spain, leading to the recognition of workplace bullying as a psychosocial risk. It was within this setting that participants narrated their experiences.

Whether they reported upward, downward, or horizontal bullying, participants converged on a common feature: the gradual erosion of credibility and recognition. This convergence did not stem from a single decisive episode but became visible through the accumulation of recurrent micro-transformations in workplace life, such as silences, shifts in tone, minor exclusions, or malicious rumours. Mrs. B, a laboratory technician, described the first turning point in these terms:

What stands out in this account is that the action itself was not exceptional. Complaining about missing materials had previously been part of her routine conduct and, apparently, had not attracted negative attention. Yet after this episode, the same behaviour prompted indifference and, soon after, avoidance. Mrs. B no longer participated in the coffee breaks where workers collectively exchanged everyday matters; gradually, she was pushed out of this shared space through jibes and insinuations that made it clear it had become hostile to her presence.

More generally, participants often stressed this discrepancy: they did not feel they had changed their conduct, while the meaning attributed to that conduct had shifted. Initially, this change did not take the form of explicit accusation. Instead, it appeared through disruptions in ordinary cues of collegial recognition: replies stopped, requests went unanswered, and routine coordination began to falter. In Schutzian terms, something had shifted in the stock of knowledge at hand, enabling new readings and typifications.

In most cases, this displacement did not present itself as a recognisable conflict but as a period of interpretive uncertainty. Participants described an initial phase in which the change in their standing was sensed rather than understood, without a clear trigger to which they could respond. Only retrospectively, as similar reactions accumulated, did a pattern become legible. Crucially, this reclassification did not operate through open confrontation but through everyday interactional shifts: non-response, lack of acknowledgement, and the withdrawal of routine cooperation. As these micro-transformations sedimented, the altered reading of the person began to circulate beyond individual encounters. In several accounts, it provided the conditions for more visible and publicly staged forms of exclusion, in which discredit was collectively enacted.

Such escalation is evident in the case of Mrs. T, an administrative worker in an insurance company, who described how, over time, she was repeatedly spat at as she entered her workplace: “Sometimes it was discreet, from a window when they saw me arrive; other times it was plain and direct. Afterwards the aggressor and the onlookers laughed loudly so that I would hear them.” What is salient in this account is its repetition and public character. Spitting was not described as an isolated outburst but as a recurrent, collective gesture. The entrance to the workplace became the staging of a lynching and an expulsion from the umwelt.

While the explicit and physical humiliation described by Mrs. T was exceptional, it illuminates a dimension that recurred across narratives: the bodily inscription of discredit. Even when hostility remained largely within the symbolic register, many participants emphasised its corporeal impact. The problem was not only the act itself, but how it was lived through anticipation, exposure, and the impossibility of avoidance, leaving a durable temporal imprint. Some described changing their arrival times, routes, or bodily posture to reduce visibility; others reported taking anxiolytics or other medication to endure the situation. Such strategies rarely altered the dynamics at play. At most, they attenuated immediate exposure, at the cost of reinforcing the sense of being marked, of losing spontaneity, and of having to regulate one’s body differently from co-workers. What began as a change in how colleagues or managers read the person thus consolidated into a shared script in which the individual was treated as legitimately degradable. The repetition of these gestures did not merely express hostility; it sedimented it.

Participants consistently emphasised the implicit and insidious character of hostility. In their narratives, several noted that explicit aggression, however distressing, could be clarifying, in contrast to indirect allusions that generated doubt and prolonged disorientation. Mrs. D, a mid-to-senior public-sector employee, described how for months she tried to disregard veiled remarks and repeatedly questioned whether she was being overly suspicious of her colleagues. During this period, the problem remained suspended at the level of interpretation. The ambiguity eventually crystallised into an administrative decision. With little explanation from management, she was transferred to another office with no defined function, a move that amounted to a clear downgrading of her occupational standing. From holding responsibility for auditing public-works expenditure across several municipalities, she was relocated to a basement office with no concrete tasks.

As in Mrs. D’s case, most accounts showed exclusion taking shape through practices whose meaning remained ambiguous and whose effects only became legible over time. Sometimes, exclusion was enacted through everyday interactions that appeared benign at first. Mrs. J, a municipal employee who later took early retirement, described how ordinary sociability became a vehicle for discredit:

In this account, routine exchanges were retrospectively reinterpreted as strategic. The participant did not describe an immediate sense of threat, but a delayed recognition, once fragments of her private life began to circulate in distorted form at work. When she took medical leave for gallbladder surgery, for example, this absence was reclassified by the bullying group as a psychiatric admission linked to her supposed psychological instability. What had initially functioned as ordinary sociability was thus reworked into a mechanism of reputational erosion.

A related dynamic appeared in accounts centred on silence and informational exclusion. Mrs. H, an administrative worker in a service company, recalled:

Here, isolation and silence initially replaced any explicit accusation. At first, the participant oscillated between organisational explanations, misunderstanding, and self-doubt. Only later did she grasp that the absence of information had itself become the basis for attributing irresponsibility. Over time, what appeared as a mundane organisational malfunction was transformed into shared common sense, and a new, discrediting account of her competence was sedimented.

Participants often described an initial phase of confusion. Something had shifted, yet there was no clear language with which to name it. This uncertainty delayed response and made resistance difficult. The situation could be denied or reframed as coincidence, misunderstanding, or personal sensitivity. Over time, however, the accumulation of such episodes produced a growing sense of social disappearance. Several participants resorted to metaphors of erosion or emptiness to describe this experience. Mr. A, a senior civil servant at an upper-middle level, articulated this condition through a striking image:

This account captured a condition repeatedly evoked across narratives. What was described was not a conflict with specific colleagues but a transformation in social address: being spoken about rather than spoken with. Participants portrayed themselves as inhabiting a social limbo, physically present yet no longer recognised as fully legitimate interlocutors. The zombie metaphor condensed this experience of suspended social life and the withdrawal of recognition. Once the person came to be tacitly re-typified in this way, actions such as collective mockery or the circulation of rumours, which would normally trigger restraint, became permissible. Processes of reputational damage thus emerged as the cumulative reworking of everyday interaction through which gossip, silence, and selective communication sedimented a shared understanding of the person as unreliable, problematic, or deficient.

Several participants described this process in terms of experiential estrangement. While their sense of self remained coherent outside work, within the organisational setting they encountered a growing dissonance between how they understood themselves and how they were addressed by others. Participants often spoke of feeling like different versions of themselves across contexts: recognised and credible in family life, friendships, community engagement, or even other work settings, yet persistently questioned, diminished, or rendered suspect at work. From a Schutzian perspective, this experience reflects a breakdown in the continuity between finite provinces of meaning. Recognition available in one social world no longer travelled into the lifeworld of work, where altered typifications prevailed. This discontinuity intensified feelings of unreality and injustice, as participants struggled to inhabit everyday worlds governed by incompatible expectations and interpretive frames.

For most participants, attempts at response or resistance emerged once exclusion became unmistakable. These responses were diverse and often improvised, ranging from ironic self-labelling to open confrontation or strategic withdrawal. Mr. L, a middle manager, described how he sought to anticipate and neutralise insults by appropriating the label imposed on him:

Such strategies were described as attempts to recover a minimal sense of agency in an environment where interactions were already anticipated and scripted by others. Yet participants consistently emphasised that these responses did not disrupt the underlying intersubjective dynamic. Irony, humour, or open defiance were quickly reabsorbed into the existing narrative, becoming further confirmation of the very label being resisted. As the situation unfolded, the possibility of restoring reciprocity came to be foreclosed. Several participants reflected on this paradox with frustration. Efforts to clarify misunderstandings or defend professional competence tended to intensify rather than interrupt hostility. Emotional reactions were equally ambivalent: expressing anger, distress, or exhaustion risked reinforcing the image of instability, while suppressing them deepened isolation. As Mrs. MJ, a schoolteacher, succinctly put it: “Whatever you do, it all fits, because everything has already been made to fit.”

In some cases, the reputational frame exceeded everyday interaction and entered clinical or bureaucratic domains. Mrs. MA, a nurse, recalled how, after months of exclusion and rising anxiety, she sought medical help: “I told the doctor everything, step by step, together with my husband. I had it all written down and ready. The response was: ‘It’s all in your head.’” For her, this moment marked a qualitative shift. Interpretations that had circulated informally among colleagues were now reproduced in a clinical setting, acquiring a different authority and durability. Several participants described comparable experiences in which workplace narratives of instability resurfaced in occupational health assessments or administrative procedures. At this point, reputational damage was no longer confined to everyday interaction but became embedded in institutional records and expert judgements.

Other testimonies underscored the public and performative dimension of lay pathologisation. Mr. M, a university lecturer, described how insinuations about his sexuality gradually transformed into veiled accusations of instability. A joke made during a staff committee that included student representatives triggered a process of harassment. It drew them in as accomplices for some academics seeking to displace him from internal competition for a permanent post. Anonymous notes soon appeared under his office door, “always ambiguous enough that, if I reported them, they would have taken me for an unbalanced person overinterpreting a tasteless joke; a trap I did not, of course, fall into.” Despite this, the same colleagues who initiated the aggression claimed behind his back that he suffered from a mental health problem in order to discredit him, an attribution that he only became fully aware of years later. Although his wife, a psychiatrist, later stated clearly that Mr. M did not have a mental disorder, her medically informed account did not interrupt the ongoing harassment. The episode illustrates how narratives of pathologisation can persist and solidify independently of factual evidence when what is at stake is the symbolic expulsion of a person from the umwelt of collegial interaction.

Mr. G, a construction worker with a mild stutter, described a different but related trajectory of collective targeting: “Every morning my colleagues, including the foreman and the owner, greeted me together: ‘G-g-g-good morning.’ The more they mocked me, the more I stuttered.” Here, mockery did not simply reflect a supposed deficiency; it actively intensified it. Several participants pointed to this circularity, noting how reactions produced by harassment were later cited as proof of delegitimation. What was initially reactive and situational came to appear fixed and inherent, distorting identity and eroding recognition.

Across narratives, a recurrent pattern emerged. Once a negative reading had consolidated, it tended to organise subsequent interactions across contexts. Attempts at resistance, explanation, or withdrawal did not reset interpretation but were absorbed into the shared order of meanings already established by the bullying group. Participants often described feeling trapped in a loop. At this stage, several clinicians interviewed for the study stressed the difficulty of reversing such processes. Dr. Z, a psychiatrist, explained:

For those affected, leaving was rarely experienced as a neutral solution. Some saw it as capitulation; a confirmation of the narrative that had been imposed on them. Others described it as the only way of escaping a situation in which their presence had become socially untenable. In both cases, departure did not merely mark a change of employment but the end of a form of social belonging that had previously been taken for granted.

Resignation, however, was not always framed as withdrawal. In some accounts, it was explicitly rejected as unacceptable, both morally and materially. Mr. S, a security guard, expressed this position with clarity:

Here, resistance and documentation were framed as counterstrategies aimed at restoring a minimal sense of justice or recognition through legal means. Recording and filing complaints were described as ways of interrupting the existing interpretive asymmetry, forcing what had circulated informally to become publicly accountable. At the same time, this stance illustrates the costs of staying. Persistence required vigilance, self-monitoring, and constant anticipation of further aggression, turning everyday work into a space of continuous alertness.

Mrs. MC narrated a comparable impasse, highlighting the silence of workplace “observers”:

Considered together, these divergent orientations towards leaving or staying expressed the same dilemma. Whether through resignation, resistance, or legal confrontation, participants described themselves as operating within a narrow horizon of possibilities. What was lost was not only a job or a position, but recognition as a legitimate participant in a shared world of work. The harm exceeded emotional distress or dissatisfaction. Participants described a deeper alteration: remaining organisationally present while becoming relationally absent, expelled from the logics of reciprocity and trust that ordinarily sustain workplace life.

From an ethnographic perspective, these narratives point to a transformation that cannot be adequately captured by focusing solely on overt acts, individual vulnerability, or formal organisational structures. What becomes visible instead is a gradual reorganisation of everyday common sense, through which people are reclassified, interactions lose reciprocity, and exclusion comes to appear reasonable or inevitable. It is this experiential texture, marked by the erosion of recognition, that calls for a phenomenological interpretation.

Read through Schutz’s phenomenology of the lifeworld, the ethnographic cases examined here show how sequences of hostile acts acquire social force through changes in shared interpretive frameworks. Across narratives, the ordinary conduct of targeted individuals comes to be progressively reinterpreted through frames of discredit that gain plausibility within the shared stock of knowledge of the bullying group (Schutz, 1967). As these frames consolidate, hostility no longer depends on the severity of individual acts but on the intersubjective reorganisation of meaning through which actions are anticipated, read, and responded to. These interpretive schemes operate largely at a pre-reflexive level, reshaping common sense and altering the reciprocity of perspectives that sustains everyday cooperation. Over time, this reorientation expels the targeted worker from social belonging and from the community of affects that underpins collegial interaction. Participants repeatedly described this displacement as a movement from being encountered as a “you” within the umwelt of shared projects and proximity to being positioned as a “they,” an object of categorisation rather than a participant in collective sense-making. In this way, reclassification itself comes to legitimise hostility.

A central feature of this process is its temporal structure. Exclusion rarely emerged through a single decisive rupture but unfolded through the accumulation of minor interactional shifts: unanswered messages, delayed replies, silences in meetings, or the gradual withdrawal of routine cooperation. Taken individually, such gestures appeared trivial or ambiguous. In combination, they produced a durable alteration in how the person was read and addressed. In Schutzian terms, these experiences illustrate how typifications sediment through repetition until they acquire the status of institutional facts (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973). As encounters accumulated, the altered reading of the person no longer required explicit justification. Relevance structures silently reoriented, and recognition ceased to be actively withdrawn because it was tacitly presupposed as unwarranted. Workers remained physically present in organisational spaces but increasingly absent from the intersubjective order that sustains cooperation. Table 2 synthesises these recurrent intersubjective dynamics, linking ethnographic cues to shifts in typification, reciprocity, and relevance within the lifeworld of work, and to their effects on recognition.

The ethnographic material further shows that reputational displacement rarely remained confined to everyday workplace interaction. In several cases, interpretations that initially circulated informally among colleagues migrated into clinical, bureaucratic, or administrative domains, where they acquired greater durability and authority. Narratives of instability were reproduced in occupational health assessments, medical consultations, or evaluative procedures, amplifying their effects. Fricker’s (2007) notion of epistemic injustice helps to specify this transition. Participants described both hermeneutical injustice, in the absence of a legitimised semantic register to make sense of what was happening in the early phases of bullying, and testimonial injustice, as their accounts lost credibility in institutional encounters. When a physician dismissed Mrs. MA’s detailed chronology of harassment as delusional, an interpretation forged in the workplace was effectively ratified in a clinical setting. What had been an informal discrediting frame thus became institutionally consequential, reshaping the conditions under which the person could be heard and believed.

Read through the ethnographic material, the erosion of recognition can be specified as a compound injury with analytically distinguishable but empirically entangled dimensions. It is phenomenological in its intersubjective constitution, insofar as bullying consolidates through typificatory displacement and the weakening of reciprocity, relocating the targeted worker from the umwelt of collegial address to the anonymous realm of “they” (Schutz, 1967). It is epistemic, because this same shift undermines the authority of the person’s word and narrows the shared interpretive resources through which their experience can be rendered intelligible and credible, producing patterned forms of epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression (Fricker, 2007; Dotson, 2014; Byskov, 2020; Medina, 2013). And it is moral, because the withdrawal of social esteem corrodes the evaluative conditions under which belonging is sustained over time (Honneth, 1996, 2010, 2014; Schweiger, 2025). Across cases, these dimensions did not appear as separate layers but as mutually reinforcing aspects of a single process unfolding across interactional and institutional settings.

From a Schutzian perspective, stigma and scapegoating are best understood not as sequential stages following typificatory change, but as crystallisations of this erosion of recognition within everyday interpretive practices. As typifications shift, actors’ “because motives” (grounded in past experience) are progressively reinterpreted as “in-order-to motives,” so that ordinary actions come to be read as intentional, strategic, or suspect. As altered readings of the person circulate and sediment, stigmatising categories provide moral shorthand through which exclusion becomes normalised and justified (Goffman, 1963; Yang et al., 2007). In some organisational contexts, scapegoating further concentrates diffuse tensions and uncertainties onto a single figure, rendering symbolic lynching and exclusion naturalised and reproduced through mimetic escalation (Douglas Creed et al., 2014; Faldetta and Gervasi, 2024). What Schutz’s phenomenology makes visible here is not causal priority but the sedimentation of misrecognition as common sense.

This conceptual framing has implications for how workplace bullying is understood at an organisational level. If typifications are the medium through which bullying consolidates, early signs of exclusion are likely to appear not only in overt hostility but in subtle routines that reshape interactional expectations. Selective flows of information, exclusion from informal coordination, or the recoding of previously neutral behaviours as disturbances emerge analytically as warning signs of reputational erosion rather than as neutral organisational malfunctions. Documentation practices also warrant critical attention. Evaluative records, clinical descriptors, or informal notes can function as sites where sedimented biases acquire ontological solidity. Without contextualisation and periodic review, such inscriptions risk transforming the effects of aggression into enduring stigma. These observations do not amount to a prescriptive toolkit but illustrate how phenomenological insight can inform organisational reflexivity by clarifying how exclusion becomes self-reinforcing.

The central contribution of this article lies in showing that workplace bullying cannot be fully understood by focusing only on hostile acts, individual vulnerability, or formal organisational structures. What the ethnographic material brings into view is a gradual reorganisation of everyday common sense, in which recognition is withdrawn, reciprocity erodes, and exclusion comes to appear inevitable. By situating these processes within Schutz’s phenomenology of the lifeworld, the analysis specifies how misrecognition operates as an intersubjective transformation that destabilises cooperation and belonging in working worlds.

Conceptually, this article introduces Schutzian phenomenology into the study of workplace bullying, a perspective that, to the best of my knowledge, has not previously been systematically developed. By bringing phenomenology into dialogue with hermeneutical, epistemic, and moral theories of injustice it shows how typifications reorganise the lifeworld of work. By treating recognition as the elementary medium of cooperation, it clarifies how seemingly minor acts restructure the stock of knowledge and initiate processes of sedimentation through which exclusion becomes durable and self-evident. The ethnographic cases illustrate how credibility is gradually withdrawn until colleagues are no longer encountered as “you” within the umwelt of reciprocity but as “they” within the anonymous realm of classification. This passage from reciprocity to typification highlights the compound nature of recognition damage (phenomenological, epistemic, ethical, and interactional).

By reframing workplace bullying as the erosion of recognition within what Schutz would term the finite province of meaning of work, this article opens a line of inquiry into the phenomenology of psychosocial risk. Such an approach invites future research to examine how organisational practices might interrupt the temporal consolidation of typifications before they sediment into forms of institutional exclusion. Ultimately, what is at stake is not only protection from hostility, harm and exclusion, but the conditions under which persons should be recognised as legitimate participants in the shared world of work.