Relational Injustice at Work and Inequality Beliefs

• In Event: 40426 - What's the Difference? Exploring Mechanisms that Create and Maintain Inequality

Abstract

Inequality scholarship has made clear the tangible consequences of one’s position and status within the context of employment, focusing less attention on unjust relational encounters at work and their impact on beliefs about inequality. We do so in this article, building from classic theory on organizational socialization experiences, recent conceptions regarding relational power dynamics, and research that touches on the spillover from work to other domains of social life. Drawing from five waves of the General Social Survey, our analyses highlight how experiences of injustice in workplace organizations—i.e., experiences regarding incompetent management, unfair promotional practices and unjust pay—erode beliefs about meritocracy and encourage progressive orientations toward inequality, including whether or not the government should intervene. Notably, these relationships hold even when accounting for intrinsic and extrinsic rewards of work, demographic attributes, and other potentially relevant controls. Moreover, they vary little by occupational status, race/ethnicity and gender and are robust to alternative modeling strategies. We conclude by highlighting our most central findings in these regards and how they expand the sociological conception of relational inequality experiences, their impact on beliefs, and their foundation within organizational contexts.

Authors

• Martha Crowley, North Carolina State University

• Vincent J. Roscigno, The Ohio State University

• Jill Evelyn Yavorsky, University of North Carolina at Charlotte