An Egalitarian's Cautionary Note on Rent Theory

• In Event: 2451 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 26. Organizational Theory

Abstract

Rent theory is the dominant theoretical framework for studying distributional inequalities. However, its normative assumptions and implications have been largely ignored by most sociologists using the theory. In this article I scrutinize rent theory through the two dominant egalitarian frameworks in political philosophy, luck egalitarianism and relational egalitarianism. I find rent theory fails to align with either normative framework, operating in some cases orthogonally to the concerns of these frameworks but mostly contradictory to them. I conclude that rent theory uses an anti-egalitarian distributional metric, the perfectly competitive market, to pursue the egalitarian aim of eliminating structural advantages, and thereby fails to capture the way that distributional inequalities are normatively problematic or even what constitutes distributional inequality in the first place. Therefore, sociologists should move away from the rent theoretic framework, but those who continue to use it must find some non-egalitarian political philosophy on which to ground it.

Author

• Dustin Avent-Holt, Augusta University