In recent years, despite the progressive legal development of whistleblower protection systems, cases continue to be reported in which whistleblowers experience isolation, exclusion, performance downgrading, reassignment, or formal disciplinary action within their organizations. This study aims to theorize this phenomenon not as a series of isolated retaliatory acts, but as a dynamic process in which structural circulation and semantic reconstruction mutually reinforce one another. Existing research has been fragmented across domains such as retaliation, employee silence, harassment, narrative reconstruction, and moral disengagement. The present study integrates these domains and reconceptualizes post-whistleblowing exclusion as a dual-layer circular model. First, whistleblowing is positioned as an institutional disruptive event to organizational homeostasis, and the defensive structural circulation that is triggered in response is defined as the Reverse Silent Harassment Inversion Loop (R-SHIL). R-SHIL constitutes an institutionalized silence-based exclusion structure in which five elements—ignorance and exclusion, organizational neglect, role inversion, formal sanction, and ethical invisibilization—are cyclically linked. Second, as the semantic layer that sustains this circulation, this study theorizes the process of narrative inversion through which the whistleblower is redefined from a “victim-claimant” to a “disruptor of order,” and ultimately to a “perpetrator.” This process, mediated by moral disengagement, forms the cognitive foundation that ethically legitimizes exclusion and sanction. The Dual-Layer Inversion Model (DLIM), integrating both layers, is a three-dimensional model in which the structural layer and the semantic layer form bidirectional causal linkages and constitute a self-reinforcing circulation. The model reframes post-whistleblowing exclusion not as the product of individual malice, but as an overreaction of the organization’s homeostatic maintenance mechanism. Furthermore, this study reinterprets DLIM through an immunological metaphor, positioning organizational retaliation as an autoimmune-like defensive response. In doing so, it shifts the focus of intervention from individual punishment to the adjustment of institutional response thresholds. By connecting retaliation research, silence research, harassment research, narrative theory, and moral disengagement theory, this study presents an integrative theoretical framework that explains post-whistleblowing exclusion as a dynamic and self-reproductive process.
Hiraoka Koichi (Sat,) studied this question.