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Unequal Dignity: An Examination of Social Class Differences in Preserving and Protecting Dignity
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Meaningful work is both a moral issue and an economic one. Studies show that workers’ experience of meaninglessness in their jobs contributes to job dissatisfaction which has negative effects to business. If having a meaningful work is essential for the well-being of workers, providing them with one is an ethical requirement for business establishments. The essay aims to articulate an account of meaningful work in the Catholic social teachings (CST). CST rejects the subjectivist and relativist notion of work which affirms the absolute freedom of individuals to choose their commitment and goals, even if this includes experiencing satisfaction in dehumanizing work. First, the paper will present a summary account of some of the current views on meaningful work from the objective-normative approach. This will be followed by a systematic treatment of the meaning and value of work in the CST, the similarities and differences it has with alternative views, and its implications for the way we promote meaningful work. The paper will argue that by recognizing the subjective and objective dimensions of work and affirming that although the two are inseparable, the former takes priority over the latter; CST develops a holistic, comprehensive, and coherent account of meaningful work which overcomes some of the difficulties that are usually encountered in dealing with this issue from a purely objective approach.
This Chapter discusses how i-deals have been the product of societal changes. It explains that i-deals have most notably been influenced by the individualization of society through which employees have focused more and more on their individual employment conditions with their organization. However, the prominence of neoliberalism as the current economic-policitical ideology in society also shapes the way organizations and employees negotiate i-deals, as well as the likelihood among employees to be able to negotiate i-deals. The chapter introduces a societal context of the rise and use of i-deals in organizations
Evidence from a range of sources suggests that customer abuse to service workers is a significant phenomenon. This article argues that a large part of customer abuse is endogenously created within the fabric of the service economy. Thirty book-length ethnographies were coded for relevant data and a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis was undertaken. The findings show that frequent customer abuse is associated with a configuration of the promotion of customer sovereignty (at organizational, sectoral and national levels), the weak position of labour, the higher social status position of customers vis-à-vis workers and the structuring of service interactions as encounters.
This study investigates implications of complex control combinations applied in manual, service and professional occupations for expressive, behavioral and emotional aspects of workplace dignity. Qualitative comparative analyses of 154 content-coded workplace ethnographies suggest that professionals encounter persuasive 'bundles' of control that enhance expressive and behavioral manifestations of dignity as well as pride. However, these benefits come at the expense of high levels of stress associated with internal drives and externally driven normative orientations and behaviors. Workers in manual and service occupations confront a broader array of approaches, including coercive control combinations that erode pride and effort by dehumanizing workers and inviting abuse. Furthermore, the benefits of persuasive control combinations in these settings are mitigated by supplementary constraints, which promote maintenance of a protective distance from employers that may also help to limit stress. The paper concludes with organizational strategies for curbing abuse in coercive manual and service environments and a discussion of changes necessary to address the problem of stress in the professions.
Extant research on dignity at work has revealed conditions that contribute to indignity, employees' responses to dignity threats, and ways in which employees' inherent dignity is undermined. But while dignity—and specifically indignity—is theorized as a phenomenon subjectively experienced and judged by individuals, little research has privileged workers' own perspectives. In this study, working adults reveal how they personally experience and understand meanings of dignity at work. I identify three core components of workplace dignity and the communicative exchanges through which dignity desires commonly are affirmed or denied: inherent dignity as recognized by respectful interaction, earned dignity as recognized by messages of competence and contribution, and remediated dignity as recognized by social interactions and organizational practices that conceal the instrumental and unequal nature of work. Based on theoretical insights drawn from examining the relationships between these components, I argue workplace dignity is a phenomenon theoretically distinct from human dignity. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
People are often involuntarily laid off from their jobs through no fault of their own. Employees who are dismissed in this manner cannot always legitimately hold employers accountable for these miserable situations because the decision to implement layoffs is often the best possible outcome given the context—that is, layoffs in and of themselves may be “necessary evils.” Yet, even in circumstances in which layoffs qualify as “necessary evils,” morality demands that employers respect the dignity of those whose employment is involuntarily terminated. In this paper I argue that to preserve the dignity of employees who are involuntarily terminated, in most cases employers have a substantial reason to offer a special kind of unemployment benefit, “severance pay.” To support my claim I draw and expand upon Bernard Williams’s analysis of “agent-regret,” which I believe greatly helps to address and articulate employers’ obligations in the context of involuntary termination.
The identity literature suggests that the stigma of "dirty work" threatens the ability of occupational members to construct an esteem-enhancing social identity. However, research indicates much the opposite, creating a puzzle we attempt to answer. We argue that the stigma of dirty work fosters development of a strong occupational or workgroup culture, which fosters (1) ideological reframing, recalibrating, and refocusing and (2) selective social comparisons and differential weighting of outsiders' views. These defense mechanisms transform the meaning of "dirt" and moderate the impact of social perceptions of dirtiness.
This article investigates how complex combinations of control contribute to class variations in the experience of work through their impacts on relational aspects of workplace dignity. Analysis of content-coded data on 154 work groups suggests that control structures vary by class and have significant implications for levels of abuse and shame, but exert little direct impact on hostility toward management or coworker conflict. Abusive treatment rooted in coercion, however, generates hostility toward management and intensifies feelings of shame associated with coercive control. Contrary to expectations, a pattern of abuse does not tend to generate coworker conflict. Reimmersion in the case studies suggests that when it does, the cause is often favoritism-a correlate of abuse.
Calls for change within the hospitality sector have argued for the industry to seriously consider the implementation of professionalism. Concerns have been raised about the workplace conditions of many employees, the readiness of graduates to meet or challenge these practices, and commitment
to sustainability in promoting and respecting the rights of people in the workplace. In this conceptual article traditional perspectives of professionalism are critically examined. A key argument is that recent changes to professionalism have transformed the term into another discursive tool
for discipline, performance and control. Rather than focusing on professionalism this article asserts that the sector should seriously consider implementing meaningful work and dignity. The article concludes that integrating these concepts through practices such as caring relationships, trust
and education of managers starts to open up avenues for change in this hostile industry. Overall, the article argues that by adopting a broader understanding of professionalism, one that incorporates communication and collaboration, and challenges the lack of dignity in the workplace, we can
start to open up possibilities for interdisciplinary work and more importantly, change.
The daunting challenges of making ends meet can have serious implications for members of the working class, particularly in terms of dignity. The ability to provide is tied inextricably to personal dignity; threats to the ability to make ends meet are threats to dignity. For example, Riggs explains that, by and large, society imposes a mandate upon men that they fulfill the role of "breadwinner" by providing for their families financially. Due to societal pressures, the inability to fulfill breadwinner duties can have serious impacts on masculine identity for men (Buzzanell and Turner). Ongoing threats can damage self-esteem. In an examination of what constitutes a living wage, Glickman quotes a McDonald's worker who wanted a raise in the federal minimum wage to ten dollars per hour. He explained, "A man can't have any self-respect for less than that" (xii). It is important to note that men are not alone. Women, too, take the role of providing seriously, particularly when they have sole responsibility for those duties. In the United States, 12.9 million households are run by single mothers (Simmons and O'Neill). Within African American communities, women often assume a central role of providing and protecting. Fine and Wies explain that a "roof over our heads and food in our stomachs" (162) is frequently a mantra of African American women, regardless of their marital status.
The material conditions of the working class that lead to difficulty in making ends meet (low wages, limited benefits, job instability) certainly are cause for concern. However, disregarding, discounting, or denying the struggle itself—whether in scholarship, policy debates, or daily discourse—is just as damaging. Zweig explains: "When society fails to acknowledge the existence and experience of working people it robs them of an articulate sense of themselves and their place in society. We know from the vibrancy of other identity movements that to silence and leave nameless a central aspect of a person's identity is to strip them of a measure of power over their lives. A full, realistic self-identity is a basic requirement for human dignity" (61).
In this chapter, I give voice to and name a central aspect of membership in the working class in an effort to bolster a sense of dignity among its members. I argue that providing and protecting, particularly problematized providing and protecting, is a fundamental principle of working-class identity and organizing. As such, it surfaces in everyday rhetoric.
Choice is foundational to contemporary careers. Yet, it often is constrained and contested in imperceptible ways. We reposition Ciulla's (2000) four reasons for work--meaningful work, leisure, money, and security--as discursive frames whereby people make career choices, craft their choice-legitimizing stories, and overemphasize the rhetoric of individual choice. These frames attend to, as well as underplay, profound discursive and material differences and socio-political and economic forces that enable and constrain career choice across lifespans. We describe and critique communication and related literature that extends and challenges each frame. We conclude by advancing a research agenda on communication, choice, and dignity.
The working poor are situated in a very powerful context—the nexus of poverty and low-wage work. Our central premise is that this context represents a "strong situation" that powerfully affects work-related outcomes, but it has been largely overlooked by organization science, even as the working poor comprise a sizable segment of the workforce. In this paper we briefly review categorical, compositional, and relational theories of poverty from other disciplines, and we describe three key mediators from organizational research that may explain how the working poor are adversely affected in terms of job attachment, career attainment, and job performance. Our goals are to encourage further thinking about the working poor among organizational scholars, encourage future research in this domain, and call attention to the need for research-based interventions.
Employee emotional abuse (EEA) is repetitive, targeted, and destructive communication by more powerful members toward less powerful members in the workplace. It is costly, widespread, and may be the precursor to workplace aggression and violence. This article synthesizes extant research findings with the author’s own managerial experience into a comprehensive gestalt of EEA as a communicative process that evolves, escalates, and moves to new targets when earlier targets exit the organization. The model proposed depicts a six-stage cycle that provides a means for (a) understanding the dynamics of abuse, (b) recognizing the indicators of abuse, (c) controlling or stopping the abuse, and (d) predicting the development of unchecked abuse. Practical implications of the model and areas for future research are identified.
People generally possess a strong desire to construct positive, dignified work identities. However, this goal may be more challenging for some people, such as blue-collar workers, whose occupations may not offer qualities typically associated with workplace dignity. Interviews with 37 people from a blue-collar mining community reveal three central identity discourses about workplace dignity: All jobs are important and valuable; dignity is located in the quality of the job performed; and dignity emerges from the way people treat and are treated by others. Participants communicated these themes by backgrounding their own occupations and drawing comparisons between two outgroups, low-status, low-paid dirty workers and high-prestige, white-collar professionals. Implications for understanding how identity work is negotiated and for managing a blue-collar workforce are explained.
In 2010, a cluster of suicides at the electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn Technology Group sparked worldwide outcry about working conditions at its factories in China. Within a few short months, 14 young migrant workers jumped to their deaths from buildings on the Foxconn campus, an all-encompassing compound where they had worked, eaten, and slept. Even though the language of workplace dignity was invoked in official responses from Foxconn and its business partner Apple, neither of these parties directly examined workers’ dignity in their ensuing audits. Based on our analysis of media accounts of life at Foxconn, we argue that its total institution structure imposed unique indignities on its workers that both raised questions of their self-respect and self-worth, as well as gave rise to multiple episodes of disrespectful communication. We interpret our findings in light of the larger cultural context and meanings of work in China to understand more fully the experience of dignity of Foxconn’s migrant workforce.
Link to Published Article: https://rdcu.be/dFkMT
I used qualitative methods to explore why some employees working in a newly created, non-territorial office environment perceived that their workplace identities were threatened and used particular tactics to affirm those threatened identities. Findings suggest that the non-territorial work environment threatened some employees' workplace identities because it severely limited their abilities to affirm categorizations of distinctiveness (versus status) through the display of personal possessions. Categorizations of distinctiveness appeared to be most threatened by the loss of office personalization because of three characteristics: (1) their absolute, rather than graded membership structure, (2) their high subjective importance and personal relevance, and (3) their high reliance on physical markers for affirmation. In affirming threatened identity categorizations, employees chose different tactics, in terms of the amount of effort required and their conformance with company rules, based on the acceptability and importance of affirming the threatened categorization.
The study of worker resistance has tended to focus either on organizational attributes that may alter actors' capacity to respond or on influential shop-floor social relations. This divide, partially driven by analytical and methodological preference, is also a function of different theoretical traditions. In this article, we suggest that organizational attributes and interpersonal relations in the workplace, in concert with union presence and collective action history, may be simultaneously but also conditionally meaningful for workers and their potential resistance strategies. Findings, derived from analyses of unique data on 82 workplace ethnographies and that merge Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) techniques and more conventional quantitative methods, largely support these expectations. Most notably, the impact of workplace organization and even union presence on worker resistance varies depending on social relations on the shop floor. Where there is union presence and significant interpersonal conflict with supervisors, the likelihood of collective resistance in the form of strike action is heightened. This pattern also holds for certain more individualized forms of worker resistance (i.e., social sabotage, work avoidance, and absenteeism). More central to individual resistance, however, are workplace contexts characterized by poor organization and a lack of collective action legacy. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for future analyses of workplace social relations, workplace structure, and collective and individual resistance-oriented actions.
Researchers asked 17 participants in a job-training program to describe their personal struggles following an economic restructuring. Examined through a critical theoretical lens, findings indicate that the learners enrolled in the program to reclaim security, dignity, meaningful work, and caring relationships. Program planners at community colleges are therefore urged to employ democratic program planning models, ask learners about their educational needs as they see them, and listen compassionately to their responses.
Sentiments favoring a sweeping overhaul of the United States’ social welfare system culminated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996 - a law that mandates states to move almost all recipients from cash assistance on welfare to paid work. This ethnographic study examined work refusal among women who left menial jobs to return to welfare, or to subsistence by other means. Seventy interviews and 18 months of participant observation revealed a pattern of confrontations with authority figures at various job sites as well as resentment of the subservience often demanded of workers in the lowest tiers of the primary economy. Confrontations in training programs and at work afforded impoverished women the chance to express their resentments about being relegated to unrewarding, low income work and to maintain vestiges of even a defiant dignity in the face of a hostile social order.
Based on three years of ethnographic research in a large, mixed-practice veterinary hospital and semistructured interviews with twenty-two veterinary technicians, this discussion focuses on the work of veterinary technicians, which is, as described by Everett Hughes (1984, 343), “physically disgusting,” “a symbol of degradation,” and “wound(ing to) one’s dignity.” The article briefly describes the vet tech’s career and work activities. The discussion then focuses on how technicians regard and deal with the least appealing of their physical and emotional tasks. Here I emphasize the compensatory role played by the relationships and encounters with nonhuman animals that are central to their work life. The article concludes with an examination of the concept of dirty work and the relationship between dirty work and identity.
Good Jobs, Bad Jobs provides an insightful analysis of how and why precarious employment is gaining ground in the labor market and the role these developments have played in the decline of the middle class. Kalleberg shows that by the 1970s, government deregulation, global competition, and the rise of the service sector gained traction, while institutional protections for workers-such as unions and minimum-wage legislation-weakened. Together, these forces marked the end of postwar security for American workers. The composition of the labor force also changed significantly; the number of dual-earner families increased, as did the share of the workforce comprised of women, non-white, and immigrant workers. Of these groups, blacks, Latinos, and immigrants remain concentrated in the most precarious and low-quality jobs, with educational attainment being the leading indicator of who will earn the highest wages and experience the most job security and highest levels of autonomy and control over their jobs and schedules. Kalleberg demonstrates, however, that building a better safety net-increasing government responsibility for worker health care and retirement, as well as strengthening unions-can go a long way toward redressing the effects of today's volatile labor market. There is every reason to expect that the growth of precarious jobs-which already make up a significant share of the American job market-will continue. Good Jobs, Bad Jobs deftly shows that the decline in U.S. job quality is not the result of fluctuations in the business cycle, but rather the result of economic restructuring and the disappearance of institutional protections for workers. Only government, employers and labor working together on long-term strategies-including an expanded safety net, strengthened legal protections, and better training opportunities-can help reverse this trend. © 2011 by the American Sociological Association. All rights reserved.
This chapter examines the link between the design of employee jobs and five positive employee experiences and actions suggested by the positive organizational scholarship literature: satisfaction with the job, satisfaction with opportunities to grow and develop at work, internal work motivation, creativity, and altruism. The chapter first defines job design and then describes an approach to the design of jobs that has received the most empirical attention: job characteristics theory (JCT). I then review the literature that has focused on the effects of the core job characteristics included in JCT on the aforementioned positive outcomes. The implications of these findings for the design of individuals' jobs are then presented. I conclude with a discussion of several topics for future research, including the possible effects of the design of jobs on several positive employee outcomes (e.g., new learning and resilience) that have received little research attention.
Andrew Sayer undertakes a fundamental critique of social science's difficulties in acknowledging that people's relation to the world is one of concern. As sentient beings, capable of flourishing and suffering, and particularly vulnerable to how others treat us, our view of the world is substantially evaluative. Yet modernist ways of thinking encourage the common but extraordinary belief that values are beyond reason, and merely subjective or matters of convention, with little or nothing to do with the kind of beings people are, the quality of their social relations, their material circumstances or well-being. The author shows how social theory and philosophy need to change to reflect the complexity of everyday ethical concerns and the importance people attach to dignity. He argues for a robustly critical social science that explains and evaluates social life from the standpoint of human flourishing.
Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of "concerted cultivation" designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on "the accomplishment of natural growth," in which a child's development unfolds spontaneously—as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America's children. The first edition of Unequal Childhoods was an instant classic, portraying in riveting detail the unexpected ways in which social class influences parenting in white and African American families. A decade later, Annette Lareau has revisited the same families and interviewed the original subjects to examine the impact of social class in the transition to adulthood.
In 2001, Tyson Foods, one of the world's leading chicken processors, was indicted on charges that it recruited undocumented migrants to work in its plants across the rural United States. In the following years, Tyson engaged in an operation to purge the largest chicken plant in the country of hundreds of unionized immigrant workers, relying heavily on the Social Security Administration's controversial "No-Match" program to shape its termination practices. In response, a local campaign called for "Justice and Dignity" in the form of an improved corporate policy that would simultaneously serve the interests of the company, its workers, and their communities. This article chronicles that localized struggle and its national aftermath, illuminating the far-reaching effects federal "employer sanctions" have had on transnational corporations and their policymakers, on workers of different backgrounds, and on strategies used to advocate for worker rights. Politically engaged ethnography reveals how differentially positioned actors navigate and experience the neoliberal immigration and employment laws of the United States while deepening our understanding of the workings of the poultry industry, the recruitment of immigrant workers, and the anthropology of organized labor.
This is the 4th edition of a 1999 book dealing with income and wealth inequality. The new edition contains several new chapters including the "new economy" and the "decline of the middle class," and new information on income and wealth inequality.
Research on workplace inequality focuses largely on gender and racial disparities at work and contributing factors, while those who study diversity interventions tend to ask how these might be remedied. This article takes a different tack, asking the following: What ideals and cultural assumptions about social progress undergird workplace diversity programs, and with what consequences? Drawing from neoinstitutionalism and workplace ethnography, I examine diversity management in a multinational company based on a year of field research. At this company, diversity programs are for high-status women and people of color. Findings advance the study of workplace inequality and, more generally, the relational study of meaning making in real-life institutional contexts. They show that diversity management programs attempt to minimize gender and racial boundaries by codifying egalitarian ideals in organizational structures, and those definitions can reify class-based hierarchies. The findings also push social scientists to conceptualize inequality and equality as cultural constructs and to consider the biases of scientific measurements of inequality.
For too long the built working environment has been excluded from the analysis of work organisations. Buildings, like other cultural artefacts, encapsulate social and economic priorities and values, and represent prevailing power structures. Work buildings, such as offices and factories, both make possible the organisation of the labour process and also serve as structures of non[hyphen]verbal communication, providing cues on hierarchy, status and appropriate behaviour. Control over the working environment can be seen as a constituent part of the control of the labour process, displaying similar cyclical movements. Human resource management and information technology are currently combining to encourage a reappraisal of the working environment, but one that is not without its own contradictions.
If an employee is committed to his firm—if he is “attached” or “bound” to it—then his firm may be able to obtain a discount on his labor. This paper asks: Is it wrong for firms to do so? If we understand just or fair pay solely in terms of voluntary agreements between employers and employees, the answer seems to be ‘no.’ Against this, I argue that, in some cases, it is ‘yes.’ In particular, it is wrong for firms to try to obtain discounts on their committed employees’ labor when their employees reasonably expect that they will not try to obtain them. In the process, I probe the limits of exploitation and question the relevance of contribution to fairness in compensation.
U.S. Organizational Sentencing Guidelines provide firms with incentives to develop formal ethics programs to promote ethical organizational cultures and thereby decrease corporate offenses. Yet critics argue such programs are cosmetic. Here we studied bank employees before and after the introduction of formal ethics training—an important component of formal ethics programs—to examine the effects of training on ethical organizational culture. Two years after a single training session, we find sustained, positive effects on indicators of an ethical organizational culture (observed unethical behavior, intentions to behave ethically, perceptions of organizational efficacy in managing ethics, and the firm’s normative structure). While espoused organizational values also rose in importance post-training, the boost dissipated after the second year which suggests perceptions of values are not driving sustained behavioral improvements. This finding conflicts with past theory which asserts that enduring behavioral improvements arise from the inculcation of organizational values. Implications for future research are discussed.
During the past few decades, scholars have undertaken numerous studies to map various determinants of flexibility at various levels: organizational, group, and individual. However, limited attention has been paid to the role of context and spatiality in realizing individual flexibility. This article aims to fill this gap and seeks to inquire into links between flexibility and spatiality. More specifically, this article will explore how organizational spatial layouts affect individual flexibility as everyday work activities are undertaken in the production of services in two settings, namely, health care and financial services. The findings show that spatial layout is important to better understand and conceptualize individual and organizational flexibility. The findings also show how spatial layout affords various and unexpected outcomes and that layouts that unilaterally foster flexibility are difficult to achieve due to the polymorphous nature of flexibility.
This article highlights women room attendants’ experiences of the consequences of distinction work in five five-star hotels located in the Gold Coast region of South East Queensland, Australia. Those consequences are demonstrations of deference, reification of lower social class standing and social ostracism. ‘Distinction work’ requires attendants to recognize the guest’s superior class position as a key part of service interactions. An ontologically intertwined research stance was used with socialist feminism and critical theory epistemologies and a qualitative constructionist grounded theory methodology. Interviews were conducted with 46 room attendants working at five five-star hotels. This research contributes to hospitality literature by focusing on the influence of broader socio-economic hierarchies functioning within hotels, an arena not usually encompassed within hospitality studies. We argue that ‘distinction work’ involves a process wherein the causal aspects of demonstration of deference to guests during interactions, and the conditional aspects of the lower social standing of room attendants within the broader socio-economic arena, result in embedded ostracism. This article presents a new perspective on the low social value currently placed on room attendant employment.
Using a microsociological lens, we develop a theoretical framework that explains how social class distinctions are sustained within organizations. In particular, we introduce the concept of "class work" and explicate the cognitions and practices that members of different classes engage in when they come in contact with each other in cross-class encounters. We also elucidate how class work perpetuates inequality, as well as the consequences of class work on organizations and those at the lower end of the organizational hierarchy. By examining microlevel interactions and how they become institutionalized within organizations as prevailing rules and practices, we contribute to both institutional theory and the sociology of social class differences. We encourage future research on social class and discuss some of the challenges inherent in conducting it.
At the same time that low‐wage workers in the changing US health care systems are facing under‐ and unemployment, organizational scholars are engaged in a healthy discussion of the impact of layoffs on various organizational stakeholders. Through a feminist ethics lens and an ethnographic in‐depth interviewing methodology, this case study expands that work by exploring how 55 low‐wage workers in a state mental health hospital facing closure make sense of their experiences of impending job loss. The collected narratives illuminate how the workers interpret the (un)ethical behaviors of the organizational decision makers and how the workers author a (re)framing of their experiences through an attention to care. Explicated from the workers’ descriptions is a perspective about standpoint and open communication that offers organizational scholars and practitioners a foundation from which to expand approaches to communicating with workers in an environment of organizational closure.
Catholic social teaching makes the moral argument for the importance of dignity at work, and organization studies scholars have documented workers’ plight. Yet, neither perspective sufficiently provides a sense of the feelings that managers and employees have toward one another. Adopting an aesthetics approach, and drawing from comic art and the cartoon strip Dilbert, this research provides an alternative view to understand challenges to employee dignity. Like aesthetics and art, comic art reflects feelings and attitudes and aims to provide insight into contemporary life. The results from surveying Dilbert found that managers often viewed their subordinates as exploitable commodities and threatened them with abuse. They point to a possible structural explanation for why employers view their workers so disparagingly and why employees feel their dignity challenged. This research makes evident the potential value of an aesthetics/comic arts perspective to understand and address issues concerning human behavior in the workplace.
Heightened competition has resulted in an intensified search for practices that enhance organizational success—success often defined in terms of heightened worker effort. This article suggests that the interplay between organizational and job-level practices determines the extent to which organizations can be successful and workers' well-being can also be protected. These relations are analyzed with a unique data set on organizational practices, managerial behavior, and work-life experiences from 204 English- language organizational ethnographies. The analyses reveal config- urations of practices associated with both positive and negative out- comes for organizations and workers. Configurations associated with organizational success include both positive organizational-level and positive job-level practices, such as employee involvement, com- petent management, and on-the-job training. The findings suggest that although the goals of organizational success and worker dignity are sometimes at odds, they can also be complementary.
This essay considers how the narrated experiences of immigrant workers in the United States could help promote organized labor’s participation in a transnational movement to democratize globalization processes. I draw on interviews with immigrant meatpackers working for the Tyson Corporation, who since the late 1990s have mounted an impressive and unusual effort to democratize their workplace and union as well as to improve worker safety and dignity. Although the union has elaborated an effective discourse concerning injustice in the workplace and the need for action to remedy these problems, it has not developed any comparable interpretation of workers’ migration experiences. Workers’ migration narratives often reinforce the liberal assumptions guiding the union’s campaigns as well as the U.S. labor movement in general. They occasionally intimate, however, how migration processes can aid in the formation of counter-hegemonic subjectivities, developing these workers’ practical orientations toward resisting mistreatment both individually and in solidarity with others. Thus, creating more institutionalized spaces for workers to communicate about their migration experiences not only could help unions achieve their organizational goals—it also could help shift the political orientation of the labor movement toward a more transnational, social-democratic approach to regulating immigration and capitalist production alike.
This article focuses on the effect of labor market restrictions on worker dignity during the recruitment and hiring processes by examining a labor-market case study in which worker power is severely constrained through industry practices. Specifically, the authors study workers who attempted to gain employment in the National Football League to explore how artificially restricted labor markets limit workers' market power. Findings from extensive field notes, observations of player assessments, and semistructured interviews suggest that although workers possess elite skills necessary for employment, industry restrictions on employees' market power enable employers to demand painful and dehumanizing concessions that seriously challenge workers' dignity. The findings presented here extend previous studies of threats to worker dignity from shop floors and workplaces to labor markets and to elite, highly skilled workers.
The idea that power relations have systemic consequences for behavior in organizations is too abstract to be meaningful to many students. This article focuses on a simulation of a hierarchical manufacturing firm designed to promote an experiential understanding of how behavior is shaped by the distribution of power in organizations. The exercise may also generate learning on topics such as attributions, motivation, communication, and conflict. The author discusses how and why she developed the simulation, its strengths and drawbacks, and student reactions. The appendix provides detailed instructions for conducting the exercise.
The uniform is viewed as a device to resolve certain dilemmas of complex organizations-namely, to define their boundaries, to assure that members will conform to their goals, and to eliminate conflicts in the status sets of their members. The uniform serves several functions: it acts as a totem, reveals and conceals statuses, certifies legitimacy, and suppresses individuality. The interaction of these components and the acceptance or rejection of the uniform and its associated status by the wearer are described.