Doing Trust: Intersections of Power and Inequality

• In Event: 3520 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 3. Workplace and Professions

Abstract

Researchers have previously identified interactional mechanisms, such as homophily and bias, through which trust (re)produces workplace inequalities. However, much of this previous scholarship has centered on the interactional recipient, detailing when, why and how people pull upon homosocial characteristics and social stereotypes to categorize, interpret and evaluate others. In this study, I draw upon ten months of ethnographic data and ninety in-depth interviews with workers and managers to examine the other side of the interaction, asking: how do people “do trust” and what are the implications of these performances? Specifically, I detail performances of trust within three dominant workplace relationships: manager-worker, worker-manager and peer-to-peer. I also identify tensions of trust that exist when different axes of inequality overlap and when performances of trust across relationships contradict one another. In doing so, I provide a comprehensive and dynamic understanding of this interactional mechanism of inequality within the workplace.

Author

• Sarah Elizabeth Mosseri, University of Virginia