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The purpose of this paper is to report a study of bullying on online labour markets (OLMs), highlighting how abuse unfolds in digital workplaces and depicting the trajectory of target resilience.

Adopting van Manen’s hermeneutic phenomenology, targets’ lived experiences of bullying on OLMs was explored. Data gathered from Indian freelancers located on Upwork via conversational telephonic interviews were subjected to sententious and selective thematic analyses.

The core theme of “pursuing long-term and holistic well-being” showed how targets tapped into yet augmented their resilience while navigating the features of OLMs as they coped with their experiences of bullying. The interface between targets’ internal and external resources, including platform support, vis-à-vis the concreteness and permanence of the site as targets asserted agency, sought control and realized positive outcomes while preserving their reputation, relationality, success and continuity was captured. It may be noted that bullying in digital workplaces is exclusively virtual in form.

Alongside theoretical generalizability, statistical generalizability of the findings should be established.

Recommendations for action for platforms and targets are forwarded. In particular, the critical role of formal workplace support in influencing employee resilience is emphasized.

The paper makes several pioneering contributions. First, it reports the first empirical inquiry examining bullying in digital workplaces. Moreover, OLM research on abuse and harassment has not been undertaken so far. Second, it furthers theorization of resilience, especially with regard to workplace antecedents. Apart from identifying the new organizational antecedent of formal workplace support, it uncovers the complexities of resilience. Third, it extends knowledge on workplace cyberbullying, positive outcomes of workplace bullying and OLMs in India.

This paper analyses how social workers in the German child protection system rhetorically frame their cases, and how their rhetoric defines its categorical labels corresponding to positions of gender and generation: to what degree are mothers considered as perpetrators and children as victims? Seventy case narrations of social workers on the frontline are analysed regarding the rhetorical idioms they applied. The results show that violence is an irrelevant interpretive framework for the social problems at work in child protection. Instead, irresponsible mothers and their limited agencies are staged front and centre. Categories of limited agency serve as rhetorical devices for the social workers to justify diverse decisions ranging from implementing interventions to terminating the professional-client relationship due to the labelling of the mother as mentally ill. As the rhetorical idiom of unreason does not operate with categories of perpetration and victimization, equivalences for the labels of the practical objectives of victimization are analysed. Consequently, the responsibility of the mother is deflected as her limited agency is seen as a product of troubling conditions. In turn, children are either ignored as victims or even treated as a troubling condition for the mothers’ limited agency. This may lead to the blacking out of the adverse consequences of child abuse and neglect as well as of possible resources for the children to avoid or prevent violent situations. In this way, child protection helps the reproduction of the generational order, which is the basis for child abuse and neglect.