The Relational Foundations of Inequality at Work I

Theorizing the “Relational”

Prior to proceeding, it is essential to delineate what, precisely, we mean by “relational.” Without doing so, we run the risk of reifying “relational” as but a vague orienting device—a device that, in and of itself, offers little in the way of conceptual, operational, or analytic tools.

Simmel’s classic work, highlighting the fundamentally relational aspects of social life and interaction, as well as Weber’s emphases on social action, status, social closure, and power dynamics laid important foundations. In more recent decades, scholars such as Zelizer (2005, 2012), Emirbayer (1997), Crossley (2010), and Donati (2011) have offered more explicit statements, and issues of particular journals (e.g., Politics & Society) have been devoted to the subject matter. The advancement of network theory and techniques have similarly bolstered a relational orientation, though such developments have been arguably much more effective at delineating structures of relations than relational processes in and of themselves (Pachucki & Breiger, 2010). There is a general concurrence within these discussions that social action and, more broadly, the interplay of structure, culture, and interaction should be more adequately theorized and incorporated into empirical analyses (also see Giddens, 1984). There persists, however, disagreement as to how to do so and a general elusiveness in pinpointing precisely how sociologists might proceed.

Stratification scholars and workplace ethnographers are well aware of the importance of accounting for the relational features and dynamics of inequality production. Several miniconferences, in fact, have transpired over the past 3 years—miniconferences whose aims were to bring together diverse scholars attempting to speak to the topic, forge a more coherent agenda and conception, and define and analyze such dynamics as they specifically pertain to workplace inequality. This has coincided with emerging emphases on “mechanisms” of inequality production (Gross, 2009; Reskin, 2003) and a greater awareness and appreciation for a multiplicity of methods and multimethodological designs (e.g., Morgan, 2007; Pearce, 2012). What has begun to surface is work that highlights relational processes that (a) alleviate, reinforce, and/or exacerbate inequality within workplace organizations; (b) are not simply reducible to individual attributes or psychologies; and (c) are constitutive of, while also fundamentally shaped by, the structures and cultures that enfold them. Especially fundamental, in our view, are the ways in which status, interaction, and culture intersect (the emphasis of this volume) and how more tangible structures, both external and internal to workplaces, condition often more proximate relational processes (the emphasis of the volume that will follow).

Status, Interaction, and Culture

Taking seriously a relational emphasis requires recognition of inequality’s complexity, the role of actors, and multiple social forces at structural, cultural, and interactive levels. An essential piece of the puzzle lies in micro-level interactions and related status dynamics that are ultimately constrained or enabled by culturally defined and proscribed expectations, regularities, and biases. While this may seem commonsensical, especially to social scientists, it is typically not how much social scientific work—work that too often relies on human capital modeling of individual attributes or that relegates individual biases simply to cognition rather than to cultural proscribed status hierarchies that are absorbed, enacted, and often seen and treated as legitimate—proceeds. Organizational theory is partly although not entirely to blame given its largely ahistorical and acultural assumptions about how organizations and organizational actors operate (Dobbin, 1994; Morrill, 2008; Roscigno, 2011).

Actors, including those in workplace environments, interact with one another with differences in leverage or power, depending on both the statuses and valuations of the actors involved (Ridgeway & Smith-Lovin, 1999). Indeed, the presumed worth and leverage of actors (e.g., a manager, an employee, employees, etc.) is relationally determined relative to perceptions of value—perceptions that vary systematically as a function of organizationally (e.g., manager, sales representative, etc.) and broader, culturally proscribed, status hierarchies (race/ethnicity, gender, etc). Impression management, perceptions, and associated cognitive and psychological processes are important here, to be sure. Yet rather than being viewed as individual attributes, they are conceived of as embedded within, shaped by, and constitutive of, a broader status orders.

The relative status of actors cannot be theoretically reduced to a singular status attribute or position, or a simple equation of balance/imbalance during the course of interaction. Instead, it is best understood as derived from an unequal relation, or inequality, based on personal attributes, institutional positioning, and statuses that are defined, codified, and acted on within historical and cultural contexts (Margolis, 1989; Ridgeway, Backor, Tinkler, & Erickson, 2009; Rogers, 1974). Indeed, and in the case of workplaces in particular, meaningful status attributes are both organizationally defined based on institutional positioning and more broadly diffused and enacted via culturally proscribed and pertinent status categories such as gender and race/ethnicity. Given both socialization and ongoing structural disadvantages in networking, mobility, and segregation, there is often considerable overlap between institutionally and culturally proscribed status differentials, and with important implications for interactions, valuations, worker vulnerability, and inequality (Roscigno, Hodson, & Lopez, 2009).

Particularly relevant to the dynamics about which we speak, if not fundamental, are the role of culture in defining the terms of interaction, the salience of status attributes in the first place, and the legitimation of inequality. Classic sociological theory, of course, highlights this point quite directly in noting that, beyond objective structures that reify hierarchy, inequality requires normative frameworks, values, and systems of belief that are consistent with and legitimating of established arrangements (Gramsci, 1971; Habermas, 1973; Weber, 1968). Until recently, however, and with the exception of ethnographic work denoting the realities of internal cultures (e.g., Goffman, 1961), workplace stratification literature (like much organizational research) has remained loyal to acultural, universalistic assumptions while neglecting questions of legitimacy and the broader cultural foundations of organizational life (Dobbin, 1994).

Rather than relegating issues of status, bias, cognition, or inequality to individual attributes or assuming that the bureaucratic scaffolding of workplaces is somehow impervious to culture, relational scholars should view culture as fundamental to workplace processes, interactions, and inequality. Indeed, culture provides the blueprint for relational practices and interactions, defines salient statuses, beliefs and valuations, and shapes the extent to which inequality is likely seen as legitimate (Della Fave, 1980, 1986; also see Stryker, 2000). Reified through organizational structures, policies, and discourses, culture offers a construction of social reality wherein present arrangements are portrayed as natural or evident rather than problematic or unjust (Bourdieu, 1989, 1991; Roscigno, 2011). The contributors to this volume advance our understandings in this regard by conceptually distilling pertinent arguments regarding interaction, status, and culture relative to workplace inequality and by engaging in important and indeed creative analyses of how such relational processes matter in concrete work settings.

Structure and Relational Dynamics

Beyond incorporating the dynamic interplay of status, interaction, and culture into theoretical conceptions and analyses, it is also essential that relational scholars acknowledge the ways in which the dynamics we are describing are enabled or constrained by more tangible structures that are both internal and external to workplaces.

Recent work has begun to speak to this point. For instance, contemporary analyses are now delineating the extent to which more macro processes surrounding labor market and occupational changes (e.g., Weeden, 2008), legal and judicial oversight (Hirsh, 2009; Skaggs, 2009), and historical shifts in opportunity relative to social movement emergence (Stainback & Tomaskovic-Devey, 2012) hold implications for workplace social closure, inequality, and segregation. Using creative analytic and/or comparative designs, other contemporary work is now effectively pointing to internal workplace structures such as on-site diversity and HR offices (Kalev et al., 2006) and structures surrounding the labor process, training, and work teams themselves (Kalev, 2009; Vallas, 2006). Such internal structures play an important part in conditioning the pertinence of status, interactions, and potential cultural biases and inequalities.

Such findings, which often pay attention to historical changes or provide comparative leverage across organizations, need not and should not be seen as somehow at odds with theoretical interests or methodological orientations more amenable to questions of status, interaction, culture. Rather, historical shifts and tangible external and internal structures condition the very terms of culturally proscribed statuses, status salience, and workplace interaction. As such, such structures should be conceived of as part and parcel of the relational orientation. The next issue of American Behavioral Scientist tackles this head on with its attention to structure–action interplay. Even the contributions to the current volume highlight, within their attention to status and interaction, important elements of structure including, for instance, workplace organization, structure and change (Vallas & Cummins), legal structures and discourses (Hirsh), segregation (Wingfield & Skeete), status mismatches and managerial behavior (Maume, Rubin, & Brody), formalization, assessment criteria and networks (Shwed & Kalev), third-party actors, information flow and structural vulnerability (López-Sanders), and diversity structures, discourses, and practices (Berrey). Particular research designs and methodologies will, of course, be more or less amenable to capturing the relational triad of structure, culture, and interaction about which we speak. The contributions to this issue and the following issue of American Behavioral Scientist nevertheless provide important, creative, and bridging efforts.

The Contributions That Follow

Capturing the relational dynamics of workplace inequality entails theoretical syntheses, creative and varying methodologies, and oftentimes both. Such is the case with the contributions here. All push the theoretical envelope, to be sure. Most explicit in this regard are the articles by Steven Vallas and Emily Cummins, Elizabeth Hirsh, and Adia Wingfield and Renee Skeete. The remaining articles, by Uri Shwed and Alexandra Kalev, David Maume, Beth Rubin, and Charles Brody, Laura López-Sanders, and Ellen Berrey, likewise push the theoretical envelope but also engage in creative and systematic quantitative and qualitative analyses of core relational processes of inequality at work.

Vallas and Cummins tackle pertinent literatures surrounding inequality, the labor process, and intersectionality and culture and highlight conceptual and methodological gulfs that exist between distinct strands of relationally relevant approaches. In doing so, they point out and offer us direction in how relational work, especially in the face of key and contemporary workplace changes, might move forward. Hirsh’s in-depth theoretical discussion of discrimination (and how it is largely thought of in both law and research literature) reveals important limitations we must be cognizant of—limitations that center precisely on lack of attention to the relational and cultural realities of discrimination and discrimination experiences. With the use of narrative data, she illustrates the interplay of structure, culture, and interaction, and makes clear the current disconnect between how discrimination operates and how the current legal structure treats it. Wingfield and Skeete’s contribution and theoretical development lies in highlighting the interactional and structural dimensions of racialized labor in workplace environments, which they refer to conceptually as “racial tasks.” Their conceptual development is important, delineating how cultural presumptions in conjunction with job placement and hierarchy result in racialized and indeed reifying race-specific interactions and inequalities on the job.

To the extent relational processes are dynamic, as we proposed above, then capturing them analytically requires innovative designs and sensitivities—designs and sensitivities that offer precious insight into workplace processes imbued with cultural meaning and status distinctions, interactions, and structural constraints and opportunities. The four more explicitly empirical contributions do just this. Shwed and Kalev brilliantly tackle the fundamental issue of merit, how it is constructed and formalized through evaluations, and the role that referrals through networks play. Drawing on truly unique and detailed over-time data from an international firm, their analyses show an important disconnect among job performance, evaluation, and rewards—a disconnect and indeed a bias that privileges network embeddedness. Even more broadly, their insights prod us to take social relations and issues of formalization and discretion in evaluation more seriously. Maume, Rubin, and Brody likewise undertake systematic quantitative analyses that speak to the heart of inequality and relational research by examining perceptions of managerial competence and its implications for worker commitment and satisfaction within the context of same and cross-race dyads. Their analyses, which draw on the National Survey of the Changing Workforce, reveal important relational biases that can occur within superordinate–subordinate workplace interactions. Such biases, however, can be overcome to the extent that managers (of either race) act in reasonable, responsive, and just ways to their employees.

Ethnographic observation, while arguably limited in offering comparative leverage, is a quite effective methodology for revealing the vibrancy of social interactions in relation to inequality production. It can also be valuable in showing how structural processes enable or constrain interactions and the production of various forms of inequality. It is in these particular veins that the contributions of López-Sanders and Berrey are important. López-Sanders, drawing on grounded observations from seven workplaces, provides a rich account of the ways in which networks and third-party actors (i.e., external and embedded brokers) moderate employment relations, inequalities, and interactions between employers and immigrant workers. Some of the patterns she observes are functional, enhancing information flows, and mutually beneficial to employer-employee negotiations. Such relations, however, can also become problematic, power-laden, and exploitive given the precarious position of immigrants, and López-Sanders shows how. Berrey’s yearlong ethnographic insights into a multinational company similarly reveal potentials and pitfalls. She examines specifically diversity management within a particular workplace context, how it is codified in both discourse and structure, and the ways in which current practices preclude attention to, let alone voice among, lower-status workers in the organization. Berrey, López-Sanders, and all of the contributors to this volume are examples of scholars who are thinking deeply and theoretically about relational processes surrounding workplace inequality while also remaining mindful, if not creative, in how to empirically capture those very processes.