It is a ‘ganging up’ on someone using tactics of rumor, innuendo, discrediting, isolating, intimidating, and above all, making it look as if targeted person is responsible. As is typical of many abusive situations, perpetrators maintain that victim ‘deserved it.’

Mobbing is emotional abuse that results in depression, isolation, paranoia, physical and/or emotional illness, sometimes suicide, sometimes overt acts of retaliation and aggression. At very least, it leaves permanent scars. Many targets suffer from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). There is always injury.

Mobbing has no age preference, no gender preference, no race preference, and no work preference. It can happen to anyone. It can happen to you, someone you care about, or person sitting next to you in any environment. It may have already happened to you or to someone you know and you didn’t understand what it was. When a mobbing is in progress it can be one of most confusing situations in which you will find yourself. It is so subtle that you begin to wonder if perhaps your abusers are right and that you aren’t person you always thought you were. It shatters self-esteem. How many of us saw bullies picking on kids in school yard while we were growing up? Everyone saw that! Since shooting in San Diego, after which perpetrator stated that he had been bullied, a huge public awareness campaign was launched. Many articles recently have been written on subject.

Mobbing has been a household word in German-speaking countries for many years. The original research on workplace mobbing was done in Sweden, beginning in early 1980’s, by industrial psychologist Dr. Heinz Leymann.

Two years ago, my co-authors and I published a book called Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in American Workplace. After Columbine High School incident, I developed dignity and respect communication workshops for teens and created mobbing awareness posters for schools and businesses.

The response to these efforts has been minimal. Unfortunately, people usually don’t become interested in an issue until it personally affects them or threatens their immediate interests in some way. For example, we may not worry about pollution until our own drinking water is fouled. In this case, someone had to die and a finger directly pointed at this type of behavior before anyone would pay real attention to this issue, though all of us have been aware of this type of problem for years.

Yet, what may be true for blue collar workers or state employees - is not necessarily so for white collar members of liberal professions. It is not rare for these people - lawyers, accountants, consultants, managers, academics - to put in 80 hour weeks.

The phenomenon is so widespread and its social consequences so damaging that it has acquired unflattering nickname workaholism, a combination of words "work" and "alcoholism". Family life is disrupted, intellectual horizons narrow, consequences to workaholic's health are severe: fat, lack of exercise, stress - all take their lethal toll. Classified as "alpha" types, workaholics suffer three times as many heart attacks as their peers.

But what are social and economic roots of this phenomenon?

Put succinctly, it is outcome of blurring of boundaries between work and leisure. This distinction between time dedicated to labour and time spent in pursuit of one's hobbies - was so clear for thousands of years that its gradual disappearance is one of most important and profound social changes in human history.

A host of other shifts in character of work and domestic environments of humans converged to produce this momentous change. Arguably most important was increase in labour mobility and fluid nature of very concept of work and workplace.

The transitions from agriculture to industry, then to services, and now to knowledge society, increased mobility of workforce. A farmer is least mobile. His means of production are fixed, his produce mostly consumed locally - especially in places which lack proper refrigeration, food preservation, and transportation.

A marginal group of people became nomad-traders. This group exploded in size with advent of industrial revolution. True, bulk of workforce was still immobile and affixed to production floor. But raw materials and finished products travelled long distances to faraway markets. Professional services were needed and professional manager, lawyer, accountant, consultant, trader, broker - all emerged as both parasites feeding off production processes and indispensable oil on its cogs.

The protagonists of services society were no longer geographically dependent. They rendered their services to a host of geographically distributed "employers" in a variety of ways. This trend accelerated today, with advent of information and knowledge revolution.

Knowledge is not geography-dependent. It is easily transferable across boundaries. It is cheaply reproduced. Its ephemeral quality gives it non-temporal and non-spatial qualities. The locations of participants in economic interactions of this new age are transparent and immaterial.