Ambiguous Worthiness and Reward Dissonance: Sociomotivational logic from the Protestant Ethic to high-performing African officials

• In Event: 20867 - Problem-Solving Sociology of Development

Abstract

Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is principally understood as a theory of the conditions that precipitated the world-historic emergence of capitalism, but I argue that we can extract from it a more general theory of social motivation that remains relevant in contemporary social settings. Drawing on this inspiration, I develop a theory of ambiguous worthiness and reward dissonance to help explain the emergence of usually strong performance among public sector workers across a surprising range of contexts. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data with public workers in lower-income countries, I demonstrate the utility of ambiguous worthiness for understanding unusually high performance among both professional and rank-and-file public workers in two different sectors (water and law) in two African countries (Ghana and Ethiopia) to demonstrate the surprising consistency of this phenomenon across discrepant contexts. I argue that understanding ambiguous worthiness and reward dissonance can shed light on unusual positive public sector performance innovations, contributing to cultural understandings of positive organizational performance in institutionally challenging environments.

Author

• Erin Metz McDonnell, University of Notre Dame