This paper shall discuss the issue of whistleblowers. The objective of this paper is to give a sociocultural dimension to whistleblowers and their behavior. Recent cases illustrate the stakes involved in exposing grave circumstances within the institutions discussed. The paper will also attempt to trace the history of whistle blowing, even as far back as the Civil War. The legal basis for whistle blowing and laws protecting them will also be discussed as their evolution helped immensely in encouraging whistle blowing; being intimately intertwined with history, the two will be discussed simultaneously. Pivotal acts from the 1863 False Claims Act to the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 are mentioned. Since institutions such as corporations and banks were affected by these same laws, the impact of laws on them will also be discussed, namely the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The paper concludes that with most of the sociocultural and mitigating legal factors in place in individual-oriented societies such as the United States, it is no longer surprising that whistle blowing potential among the general population has existed all along.
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