Organizational Responsiveness to Entitlement in Everyday Requests and Complaints

• In Event: 228 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 07. Culture and Inequality

Abstract

Scholars of inequality have noted that individuals vary in their access to scripts and knowledge of the rules of the game for successfully navigating important organizational and institutional environments. Differences in the interactional styles that individuals employ as they engage with formal organizations to get their needs met have been posited to have significant implications for organizational responsiveness and, in turn, social and material outcomes. This paper examines whether organizations are differentially responsive to requests and complaints from customers and constituents that exhibit varying degrees of entitlement. Using data from a large set of customer service micro-interactions on Twitter between individuals and two sets of organizations, local government 311 centers and electric utility companies, this paper tests whether a style of entitlement is associated with greater responsiveness. It finds that while entitlement is not a significant predictor of the probability of receiving an organizational response, greater entitlement does predict shorter response wait times for posts that receive a response.

Author

• Simone Zhang, Princeton University