Relational Inequalities - An Organizational Approach

Relational Inequalities argues that inequalities in resources, rewards, and respect are relational, produced within and between workplaces. Generic inequality processes are identified and multiple qualitative, quantitative, and historical case studies developed to demonstrate organizational variation in the types and levels of inequalities, as well as the institutional contexts shaping this variation.

List of contents

• Chapter 1. Generating Inequalities


• Relational Inequality Theory


• How Else Do Social Scientists Think About Inequality?


• Status Attainment and Human Capital Theories


• Conventional Economics


• Heterodox Economics


• Institutional Political Economy


• Thinking Relationally


• Plan of the Book


• Chapter 2. Observing Inequalities


• From There to Here?


• Comparative Organizational Research Exemplars


• Class Inequality Regimes in Institutional Context


• Inequality Regimes in Interactional Context


• Comparisons of Ethnographic Cases


• Chapter 3. Relational Inequality Theory


• Building Blocks of Relational Inequality


• Categorization


• Organizations


• Generic Inequality Generating Processes


• Exploitation and Social Closure


• Claims-Making


• Contextual Variation in Generic Processes


• Organizational Resources


• Institutional Variation


• Chapter 4. Organizational Inequality Regimes


• The Ubiquity of Regime Variation


• Gender Wage Gaps in Japan and the U.S.


• Immigrant Status and Skill Distinction in Sweden


• Education, Gender and Immigrant Status and German Wage Gaps


• Elements of Inequality Regimes


• Resource Levels


• National Institutions


• Organizational Rules and Practices


• Local Organizational Cultures


• Intersectionality


• Chapter 5. Exploitation


• Conceptualizing Exploitation


• Observing Exploitation


• Comparing Firm Productivity to Wages Paid and Profits Extracted


• Rising Income Inequality


• Exploitation across Categorical Distinctions in Linked Employer-Employee Analyses


• How does Exploitation Happen?


• Exploitation on the Shop Floor and in the Office Corridor


• Total Exploitation


• Exploitation in Institutional Context


• Chapter 6. Social Closure


• Conceptualizing Social Closure


• Observing Closure Processes


• Organizational Data Matched to Employees


• Ethnographic accounts of closure processes


• Integrating Science and Engineering Fields


• Gender and Engineering in the Age of Affirmative Action


• Chapter 7. Relational Claims Making


• Conceptualizing Claims Making


• Legitimacy and Claims-Making


• Observing Claims Making


• Claims Making and the Labor Process


• Negotiating Work-Family Relationships


• Claims Making and Wages


• Claims Making and Dignity


• Neoliberalism and the Legitimacy of Claims


• Organized Labor


• Financialization


• Mobilizing Claims in Cultural Context


• Chapter 8. Organizational Surplus and Rising Inequalities


• Market Power


• Closure, Exploitation, and Power in Markets


• Relationality and Market Closure in Biotech Innovation


• Institutionalizing Airline Monopolies


• Embedded Exchange and the Limits of Exploitation


• Linking Organizational Inequality and Resource Pooling


• Financialization and Shifting Claims


• Reconfiguring Organizational Boundaries to Monopolize Surplus


• Chapter 9. Expanding the Moral Circle


• Implications for Social Science


• RIT and the Politics of Egalitarianism


• From Tribalism to Universalism


• From Hierarchy to Organizational Citizenship


• From Markets to Dignity


• Institutional and Organizational Politics


• Destabilize Status Hierarchies


• Increase the Bargaining Power of the Least Powerful


• Reduce Organizational Resource Inequalities

About the author

Donald Tomaskovic-Devey is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has been a leading proponent of organizational approaches to inequality. His work major works include examinations of the birth of what we now call neoliberalism, the financialization of the US economy, and workplace racial and gender desegregation since the 1964 US Civil Rights Act. Currently he is developing general theory around inequality as well as deepening scholarly and public access to organizational data on inequalities.

Dustin Avent-Holt is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Augusta University. He focuses on the causes and consequences of social inequalities, particularly as they intersect with organizations and markets. His empirical work has primarily examined the various processes through which social relations within workplaces produce income inequalities.

Summary

Organizations are the dominant social invention for generating resources and distributing them. Relational Inequalities develops a general sociological and organizational analysis of inequality, exploring the processes that generate inequalities in access to respect, resources, and rewards. Framing their analysis through a relational account of social and economic life, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Dustin Avent-Holt explain how resources are generated and distributed both within and between organizations. They show that inequalities are produced through generic processes that occur in all social relationships: categorization and their resulting status hierarchies, organizational resource pooling, exploitation, social closure, and claims-making. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt focus on the workplace as the primary organization for generating inequality and provide a series of global goals to advance both a comparative organizational research model and to challenge troubling inequalities.

Additional text

Brilliant book.

Product details

• Authors: Dustin Avent-Holt, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Donald (Professor Tomaskovic-Devey, Tomaskovic-Devey Donald
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 28.02.2019
• EAN: 9780190624439
• ISBN: 978-0-19-062443-9
• No. of pages: 296
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Psychology > Applied psychology; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; Social Theory, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Social Theory, Organizational theory & behaviour, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Organizational theory and behaviour