Full Description
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.
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
