This research adopts a communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) perspective to examine how a case of resident abuse in a United Kingdom nursing home facility was reported but not investigated. We utilize a CCO approach to theorize how an abusive incident was revealed by a resident to a postdoctoral research associate, who then raised the matter with the nursing home manager. Despite the resident’s experience constituting abuse according to the nursing home’s own documentation, the manager decided she had not been a victim of mistreatment and the incident was not investigated. We show how ‘abuse’ acts as an authoritative text (Kuhn, 2008 & 2024), and highlight its ethical, moral and political quality, as a plurality of voices vie over its meaning. Our interview and field note data drawn from an in-depth case study display how conflicting meanings become attached to abuse until the discourse surrounding it is closed-off by the manager. We contribute to communicative understandings of ethical issues in organizations and to our knowledge of authoritative text as an analytical tool. We also offer some insight into the ethical dilemmas that can be encountered by researchers when researching vulnerable groups.
