Etnografía del «mobbing» en un departamento de la Administración Pública

Abstract

This article aims to use social anthropology and social science instruments in order to approach a very current problem: mobbing. The aim was to break with the stereotype that anthropology is the science dealing with what is far away, i.e. remote communities in Africa or the Amazon. Here, the issue under study is a new one belonging to modern society. With this study, we aim to ascertain whether there are more cases of mobbing in government than there are in private companies, and if so, what the causes are. The fieldwork was done in the first six months of 2002 in the Spanish Ministry of Health and Consumer Affairs. In this case, we cannot speak of concrete results in figures since the study was based on qualitative techniques. Nor have we found numerous cases of mobbing as such. Not a single complaint has been filed for mobbing, although what we refer to in this study as «borderline cases» are much more numerous than what was initially expected.