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The Reproduction of Exploitation Within Anti-Exploitation Discourse: Ethical Bonds, Closed Family Systems, and Workplace Power

Organizational Psychology
Ejder Atlas Akmaner Author: Ejder Atlas Akmaner
7 minreading time
The Reproduction of Exploitation Within Anti-Exploitation Discourse: Ethical Bonds, Closed Family Systems, and

Methodological Note

Drawing on experience and observation, this text aims to make visible patterns of bullying and instrumentalization that may emerge within certain organizational structures that define themselves as anti-exploitation. Identifying details have been modified, and the discussion is situated within the literature on psychology, closed family systems, and organizational behavior. The aim is not to reach conclusions about individuals’ intentions, character, or psychological states, but to examine observable relational patterns.

Businesses founded with the claim of offering an alternative to exploitative systems do more than provide products or services; they also create the sense that “another kind of relationship is possible here.” This ethical claim may generate institutional trust among both customers and employees. People may assume that they are engaging with an organization that shares similar ethical concerns. Yet the gap between values displayed “in the shop window” and everyday practice is highly significant in terms of trust and legitimacy (Wagner et al., 2020).

Ethical Capital, Knowledge, and the Closed Family System

At times, an organization’s ethical credibility is produced not by the institution itself, but by particular employees. A worker with research, field, or professional experience may answer questions, listen to customers, and contribute knowledge, language, trust, and economic value to the organization. When that same person is belittled internally with remarks such as “they have an answer for everything,” while their knowledge is simultaneously appropriated and presented as institutional knowledge, an epistemic power problem emerges: the knowledge is taken while the status of the knower is diminished.

In family businesses, cycles of exploitation do not operate solely from the organization toward the employee. When one family member continuously carries a disproportionate share of work and domestic responsibilities while the system continues to generate new demands, the structure may begin to benefit from that person’s overfunctioning. The same individual may then redirect accumulated exhaustion and anger toward others. In this way, a person can occupy both exploited and exploiting positions within the same system. A systemic family perspective, however, encourages us to understand such cycles not through the figure of a single “bad person,” but through boundaries, differentiation, and triangulation (Dallos & Vetere, 2012).

Boundaries, Shifting Rules, and the Erosion of Reality

An organization may present warmth, understanding, and friendliness in public-facing settings while less visible spaces contain complaints, angry outbursts, belittlement, and gossip. If a customer or employee asks, “Would it be a problem if I stayed here?” and is told, “Not at all,” only to be criticized afterward for having stayed too long, this cannot meaningfully be described as a boundary violation by that person. Instead, an imagined boundary has been articulated retrospectively, and responsibility for the other party’s unexpressed discomfort has been assigned backward in time.

Similarly, when a behavior accepted on one occasion is later reframed as a violation, when rules are produced only after an event, or when previous practices are denied, employees may become uncertain about the standards by which they are being evaluated. Consistent application of procedures is one of the central dimensions of organizational justice (Colquitt & Zipay, 2015). Minimizing, denying, or reframing what occurred may also overlap with patterns described as workplace gaslighting (Popat & Pandey, 2026).

Indirect Control, Ageism, and Epistemic Devaluation

In closed systems, control is not limited to direct commands. Encouraging people in the surrounding environment to observe another employee, report information about them, or pre-interpret their behavior may transform third parties into extensions of the relationship. Triangulation in closed family systems, together with research on workplace gossip, can help illuminate this structure (Dallos & Vetere, 2012; Coyne et al., 2019; Pheko, 2018).

Likewise, referring to competent adults as “children” or “kids who were born yesterday” simply because they are younger may be understood within the framework of ageism (Chasteen et al., 2021). At the same time, benefiting from a person’s knowledge or expertise while dismissing the value of their voice constitutes another layer of epistemic devaluation. The issue here is not who is more valuable, but how hierarchy may attempt to determine who is entitled to speak and who is recognized as a legitimate knower.

When Lived Experience Becomes Knowledge: The Stories of Those Who Leave

Finding scientific concepts that correspond to lived experience should not be equated with everyday gossip or loosely formed claims that have not been critically examined or grounded in evidence. A researcher’s critical engagement with personal experience—including questioning not only the behavior of others but also one’s own boundaries and position within the process—is central to reflexivity (Finlay, 2002; Berger, 2015). In other words, scientific thinking first places upon the individual a responsibility to examine their own role and contribution.

Conceptualizing experience can also provide language for others who have lived through similar processes, allowing them to say, “There is a name for what I experienced.”

To understand an organization’s culture, attention should not be limited to those who remain within it. It is equally important to consider those who previously left following conflict or difficulty. Have similar cycles of closeness, devaluation, conflict, and rupture occurred across different employees? Are narratives constructed about those who leave in ways that portray them as solely responsible for what happened?

If a prolonged process is erased and only the person’s final reaction is emphasized, the first question should not be “What kind of person were they?” but rather “What happened before they left?” Gossip may function as a tool of social undermining (Pheko, 2018), while workplace bullying has also been associated with turnover intentions (Sun et al., 2025).

Conclusion

Consistency between ethical discourse and organizational practice is closely connected to how power asymmetries are produced and maintained. Tensions concealed through deflective smiles, laughter, or mechanisms of pseudo-mutuality, the retrospective imposition of rules, and one-sided narratives surrounding departures may all create conditions in which the very hierarchical dynamics being criticized are reproduced.

Similarly, when participation is framed not as a hierarchical employment relationship but through the language of “friendship” or “shared values,” it may generate strong expectations of belonging and intellectual equality within the context of a relational psychological contract (Rousseau, 1995). This is understandable. Individuals may enter such environments assuming a degree of mutual value congruence based on the ethical and conceptual stance presented on the organization’s “cover image.”

However, in closed systems where roles, boundaries, and operational expectations are not objectively defined, this discourse can create a structural vulnerability: professional safeguards become blurred while boundary violations become more difficult to recognize.

The harm is not limited to internal organizational conflict. People who enter an anti-exploitation organization as customers, employees, or potential future participants may reasonably believe that they are engaging with others who share similar ethical concerns. Yet when some of those inside the organization become part of the very exploitative dynamics the structure claims to oppose, the trust and goodwill of both customers and employees can become instrumentalized.

When those who explicitly claim to reject exploitation themselves occupy exploitative positions, the result may be a profound rupture of trust and significant psychological harm for both customers and employees who are attempting to resist such dynamics.

For this reason, organizations that claim to offer an alternative should be evaluated not primarily through the attractiveness of their discourse, but through more concrete criteria: the predictability of boundaries, the consistency of rules, and the extent to which epistemic justice is protected for those who actually produce knowledge.

Kaynakça

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Ejder Atlas Akmaner Ejder Atlas Akmaner
Ejder Atlas Akmaner is an interdisciplinary writer, Logotherapist and Existential Analyst, as well as a Somatic Meaning Guide. Akmaner holds two undergraduate degrees, in Archaeology and Philosophy, and completed a thesis-based postgraduate degree in Comparative Literature. Akmaner also holds an associate degree in Marketing and chose to leave an associate degree programme in Laboratory and Veterinary Health on ethical grounds. In addition, Akmaner has completed certified training in psychology and related fields through a range of international institutions and universities, as well as advanced training in Logotherapy and Existential Analysis accredited by the Viktor Frankl Institute. Drawing on diverse fields of science and art, Akmaner developed the Somatic Meaning Guidance approach, which explores meaning across mental, bodily and relational dimensions. While grounded primarily in Logotherapy and Existential Analysis, the approach also draws on somatic practices including fascia-sensitive yoga, mindfulness and breathwork. Somatic Meaning Guidance understands established patterns of thought, behaviour and relating not as fixed structures, but as processes that can be reshaped through awareness, experience and new learning. Scientific findings on neuroplasticity and the nervous system’s capacity for experience- and learning-dependent change provide one of the scientific foundations for this understanding of transformation. Akmaner carries out this work under the independent brand Ejderhane. Akmaner is also a Dynamic Ving Tshun practitioner. Direct embodied experience within this discipline — including contact, distance, centre, orientation, balance, boundaries and response — is incorporated into training and explored through the perspective of Somatic Meaning Guidance. In writing and creative practice, Akmaner uses worldbuilding, myth, narrative, symbolic systems and poetic expression as tools for exploring psychological and existential meaning. Through different narrative and conceptual models, Akmaner examines identity, relationships, values, culture, transformation and the search for meaning. Akmaner also develops public-facing work through the Atlas of Meaning and İletişim Çıkmazları (Communication Impasses) series, as well as the podcast series Bedenin Bildiği Anlam (The Meaning the Body Knows). Across these projects, Akmaner explores how language, historical concepts, social categories, boundaries, interpersonal patterns and embodied experience shape the lives of sentient beings, while also examining the possibilities for change that can emerge within these patterns. Through an academic connection with the University of Iceland, Akmaner remains open to developing this interdisciplinary work within an international academic setting. Alongside independent fieldwork, training, creative practice and applied work, Akmaner also writes for Psychology Times.