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As I was teaching to my students the passive voice, we were talking about present or current problems in a company, I said to my students as follow:

e.g Management have been ignoring complaints/suggestions.

but one of my students argued that this is not passive voice. What is the explanation for this case?

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Management have been ignoring complaints/suggestions.

If I were your student, I would argue the toss too.

This is clearly an active voice because there is no form of BE+Past participle1 to indicate passive voice. "Been" in this example marks a progressive aspect.

The progressive passive form should be,

Complaints/suggestions have been being ignored by the management.

1 This is the typical form of passive. But actually, not all passive constructions are marked by BE because we have bare passive and get-passive. There is also a form of passive that doesn't need a past participle; it's concealed passive.

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    "Argue the toss" is a bit aggressive/confrontational here.
    – Araucaria - Him
    Commented May 21, 2017 at 18:14
  • 1
    @AraucariaMan it's meant to be aggressive :)
    – Mohd Zulkanien Sarbini
    Commented May 21, 2017 at 19:02
  • Why do you want to sound aggressive?
    – Araucaria - Him
    Commented May 21, 2017 at 19:59
  • @AraucariaMan I think the disapproval should be expressed more emphatically when a student disagree with their teacher.
    – Mohd Zulkanien Sarbini
    Commented May 21, 2017 at 23:52
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Your student is right. Management have been ignoring suggestions is in active voice because Management is doing the ignoring. The passive version of this sentence would be Suggestions have been ignored by Management.

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    The passive version would be *Suggestions have been being ignored by Management." The progressive form of a passive came into use in English recently, around 1900.
    – Greg Lee
    Commented May 21, 2017 at 15:38
  • @GregLee Recently, but not so recently as that. There are one or two mid-18th-century instances, but it seems to have been brought into wide use by the Coleridge-Southey circle in the 1790s. The construction encountered both acceptance and violent antipathy among two generations of writers on grammar, but was completely accepted by about 1860.
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Commented May 21, 2017 at 16:40
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The passive forms of perfect progressives are rarely used. The structures of the Present perfect Progressive Active and Passive voices are as follows:

Subject + have/has + been + -ing participle + Object. (Active Voice)

E.g. Management has been ignoring complaints/suggestions.

Subject + have/has + been + being + past participle + (by + Object). (Passive Voice)

E.g. Complaints/suggestions have been being ignored (by management)

More detailed explanations and examples of the Passive voice are available here.

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As others have said, the sentence is not in the passive voice.

I will give you an easy way to check whether a phrase is in the passive voice or not. Check whether you can omit the name or description of the person carrying out the action. If so: you are looking at passive voice. For example:

The question was asked in the 9:00 class by the tall boy in the front row.

Let's check whether the description of the person doing the asking can be omitted:

The question was asked recently.

Yes, "the tall boy in the front row" can be omitted. Hence, passive voice. (Who did the asking? The sentence doesn't explicitly say.)

Let's try another one.

John brought home some fish for dinner.

The person bringing the fish was John, and we can't omit "John" from the sentence -- it would fall apart. So, active voice.

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