From Bread and Roses to #MeToo: Multiplicity,Distance,and the Changing Dynamics of Conflict in IR Theory

Abstract

A central assumption in industrial relations theory is that conflict is rooted in an enduring difference between the interests of labor and management. In recent years, the reality of work has changed for many, and scholarship has called attention to overlooked dimensions of conflict that depart from this assumption. The authors account for these developments with the concepts of multiplicity and distance. Multiplicity means that a broad range of actors bring diverse goals, tied to identities and values in addition to interests, to the employment relationship. The competing and fluid motivations that stem from these goals alter how actors individually and collectively name conflict. Distance reflects a growing rift between those who control work and those who labor, rooted in prevailing organizational forms and practices and the transformation of institutions. Distance alters actors’ interdependence and their perceived and actual power in addressing conflict. From these observations, the authors derive propositions suggesting directions for research and theory regarding conflict and the institutions through which actors balance goals.

Keywords

conflict management employment relations employment relations regimes heterogeneous labor industrial relations theory labor market institutions

In 1912, a strike crippled the textile town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, following the passage of a state law that restricted the workweek from 56 to 54 hours for women and children laboring in mills. Massachusetts had passed a similar law two years earlier, leading mill owners to raise wage rates to compensate for reduced hours. This time, however, the owners refused to do so. Roughly 20,000 workers, many of them immigrant women from a diverse set of countries, including Italy, Poland, and Syria, responded in protest, organizing a walk-out followed by demonstrations, relief funds, and soup kitchens to support strike activity. As the conflict stretched into weeks and economic hardships intensified, the workers placed their children under the care of sympathetic supporters throughout New England and generated a wave of publicity when the state met one departure of workers’ children from Lawrence with violence (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 1912). The episode spurred a Congressional investigation and, eventually, mill owners’ decision to settle with employees. These actions later came to be called the “Bread and Roses” strike, reflecting the title of James Oppenheim’s (1915) poem, which contains the lines: “Hearts starve as well as bodies / Give us bread but give us roses.” The women of Lawrence, in other words, demanded not only economic security but also dignity on the job.

Over a century later, women-led protests of a different sort have gripped the public’s attention, this time concerning sexual harassment at work. Rallying under the Twitter hashtag #MeToo, women across a range of occupations—from Hollywood actresses to auto factory assemblers to restaurant servers—are using digital media to broadcast the extent to which harassment pervades their working life and negatively alters the course of their careers (New York Times 2018). Legislative campaigns, legal defense funds, and the raising of public awareness are but a few of the strategies they deploy. No less significant, their movement makes clear the extent to which such conflict is not limited to work. The broader narrative and goals of #MeToo are defined just as much by the experiences of women in workplaces as they are by experiences in personal or public spaces, such as homes and communities.

Though they are many years apart, these two episodes of conflict resonate with core concerns in industrial relations (IR) scholarship in similar ways. Both groups of workers choose to respond collectively to problems in the employment relationship that reflect power inequities. Like the women of Lawrence, women in the #MeToo movement express their demands in terms of dignity as well as economic security. Furthermore, in both settings, identities—as women, wives, mothers, and immigrants—factor into the decision to take action.

Yet these episodes also differ in ways that are hard to make sense of using existing IR frameworks. The Lawrence strike arguably represents a quintessential instance of conflict, oriented as it is around the issues of hours and pay. Strikers, used to working side-by-side at looms, organized a coordinated response to protect their interests. They addressed their employers directly, and their conflict was situated within the mills and therefore defined by the workplace. By contrast, the impetus for #MeToo extends outside the context of work; on-the-job harassment is but one manifestation of the conflict women seek to address. While economic outcomes of harassment and discrimination, such as adverse effects on career advancement or pay, are part of the #MeToo narrative, women define such consequences in terms of a larger societal problem. Finally, workers and supervisors across all types of workplaces are banding together under #MeToo to contend with a broad set of actors who may not directly employ them and who are governed by multiple state and other institutions. In this contemporary instance, conflict is dispersed and widespread.

These differences point to the need to update IR’s accounting of conflict, a construct that has been central to the field since its inception. Traditional IR models build upon the premise that an inherent conflict of economic interests separates two parties—labor and management—in a bilateral employment relationship. Assuming there to be a pervasive incompatibility between the goals of these two groups, IR scholars have modeled how conflict unfolds and have gone on to design policies, processes, and institutions to resolve it (Barbash 1964; Kaufman 2008). Yet today’s employment relationships, influenced by a growing roster of diverse actors situated in increasingly complex organizational and regulatory arrangements, often part from this premise. We capture the essence of this departure with two concepts: multiplicity, or the presence of new and varied actors with diverse goals, and distance, or the growing gap between those who control work and those who labor, induced by a variety of organizational forms, practices, and rules. In light of multiplicity and distance, important questions emerge for IR scholars: How do we theorize conflict in today’s era of employment relations? What do multiplicity and distance imply for the processes through which actors bring goals to the employment relationship, perceive that their goals are incompatible with those of another, and, given their relative position and access to resources, decide to act?

In what follows, we sketch out the implications of these new concepts for IR models of conflict in the context of the US employment relations system. Multiplicity, we contend, requires IR scholars to account for the range of ways in which members of the employment relationship perceive and address conflict when their goals are manifold and defined not only by interests but by identities and values as well. We argue that different types of goals introduce competing commitments and make both symbolic and material resources subject to varied forms of negotiation. Increasing distance, we further argue, transforms the distribution of power in the employment relationship and the perceptions upon which the actors within it define conflict and assess their options for addressing it. Multiplicity and distance thus point to new directions for theory-building and research, and they call for a rethinking of how institutions address conflict, collective action, and distributions of power.

Conflict and Its Transformation

Conflict as Traditionally Understood in IR

Conflict is a core construct throughout IR theory, stretching back to the Webbs (1897) and Commons (1909). Put succinctly, conflict exists when actors within the employment relationship—or the structure that binds those who perform work tasks to those who control the material and subjective conditions under which tasks are performed—perceive at least some of their goals to be incompatible.¹

Three conditions lead to incompatibility. First, the actors who are party to the employment relationship must perceive that attainment of goals by one precludes attainment by the other. Otherwise, conflict remains latent. Second, both parties must depend on a common resource, be it material, such as income, or nonmaterial, such as skills. If interdependence is high, any one actor will view its own goal attainment as highly conditional upon the behavior of the other. Third, an actor must be able to interfere with the other’s pursuance of their goals by controlling access to resources required to complete their pursuit (Schmidt and Kochan 1972; Kochan and Verma 1983).

In this model of conflict, the ability to control resources is each actor’s source of power. The distribution of power is therefore critical to the unfolding of conflict and its negotiation, or the processes through which actors address conflict, for it influences how actors engage with one another to address goal incompatibilities. For instance, one actor may be able to simply ignore the other, imposing its own goals when power is unevenly distributed and interdependence is low (Kochan and Verma 1983). Based on how negotiation unfolds, actors end up forming the rules (e.g., agreements, regulations, norms [Dunlop 1958]) of the employment relationship.

In the pluralist tradition of IR, the root of conflict is taken to be a persistent, bilateral divergence of economic interests between labor and management (Commons 1911; Chamberlain 1963; Barbash 1964; Kochan 1998; Godard 2014). By this conception, the goals giving rise to conflict are equated with interests, or the private, purposeful aims of individuals and parties, which are typically assumed to be economic or material in nature (Provis 1996; Marks and Thompson 2010). Interests derive from actors’ positions within the division of labor or authority structure, as is illustrated by the clash over wages between Lawrence mill workers and owners, leading most IR scholars to theorize conflict as occurring between labor and management. Consequently, they stress the utility of institutions that balance power between these actors in negotiating conflict and assert the value of an activist state and strong labor unions. For this reason, IR scholars’ attention toward negotiation has traditionally centered on collective bargaining (Kelly 1998; Ackers 2002; Piore and Safford 2006).

A Need for Revision

More recent IR scholarship emphasizes the need to update the assumptions that are woven throughout post–New Deal IR literature—widely considered to be the “golden age” of industrial relations (Kaufman 1993: 75)—and that underlie the model we have just sketched.

A first critique is that past scholars (e.g., Kerr, Dunlop, Harbison, and Myers 1960) presumed the separation of social and economic realms of life, viewing households’ economic concerns as tied primarily to the labor market outcomes of white, male breadwinners who labored for large, stable employers over the course of careers. The goal incompatibility giving rise to conflict was seen as stemming from a clash between collective actors, made up of relatively homogenous constituents possessing stable, shared interests. The clear and long-lasting distinction between labor and management implied by this view undergirds IR scholars’ emphasis on bilateralism. Nowadays, however, scholars recognize that this image has not always accurately reflected the US labor market and its institutions (e.g., Cowie 2017). Furthermore, domestic and social spaces are acknowledged as key sites where workplace conflict is born, amplified, and contested (Ackers 2002; Dickens 2004, citing Down and Taylor 2003). In other words, jobs spill into other realms of life, and vice versa.

Second, a growing body of scholars has argued that we are in a new employment relations climate, in both the United States and other countries. Referred to as the employee rights era (Piore and Safford 2006) or the individual rights era (Colvin and Darbishire 2013) or regime (Currie and Teague 2016), this period is characterized less by collective rights defined by common economic concerns and more by rules built upon individual rights that pertain to identities originating outside of the workplace, such as race, gender, or sexual orientation (Piore and Safford 2006). These rules are accompanied by movement away from union membership and collective bargaining and toward the use of policy, judicial opinions, administrative rulings, and arbitration as the means through which conflict is addressed (Colvin 2012).

Finally, IR scholars have also recognized that in the current era of employment relations, conflict is not necessarily rational, unfolding within structures created by institutions and situated in the workplace, as it has been assumed (Lipsky, Avgar, and Lamare 2016). Rather, they argue that conflict can take on many forms, including private and informal instances of goal incompatibility that are embedded in everyday interactions and experiences, a point we return to below (Bartunek, Kolb, and Lewicki 1992; Kolb and Putnam 1992; Budd, Colvin, and Pohler 2020).

These observations suggest that it is an opportune moment to revisit IR’s theory of conflict. Building from the traditional model, we respond to this task by urging IR scholars to incorporate two new concepts into their analysis of conflict: multiplicity, which we argue broadens our notions of the goals that actors bring to the employment relationship; and distance, which we argue transforms the context or structure, and hence the balance of power, in which conflict unfolds.

Multiplicity

Definition

Multiplicity signifies the presence of new and varied actors in the employment relationship, who bring with them diverse goals. Here, we mean “actors” in the broadest sense: individuals or groups who have the capability to influence the employment relationship directly or by influencing others who can (Bellemare 2000). A number of developments call forth this conceptualization.

To begin, the labor force now has a greater mix of people than it did in the post–New Deal era. In the United States, the most obvious instance of change stems from female labor force participation, which rose markedly when women across the income distribution began working outside the home in the latter part of the 20th century (Goldin 2006). The labor force has also diversified along the lines of race and ethnicity, nationality, and other social characteristics (Toossi 2002). These changes undermine the assumption of homogeneity (i.e., that of white, male breadwinners) that is woven throughout prior IR theory.

Next, recognition is growing that certain actors are more important to the employment relationship than previously assumed. These include customers (Bellemare 2000), labor market intermediaries (Bidwell, Briscoe, Fernandez-Mateo, and Sterling 2013), arbitrators (Seeber and Lipsky 2006), owner-investors (Appelbaum and Batt 2014), global suppliers (Lakhani, Kuruvilla, and Avgar 2013), and contractors (Bernhardt, Batt, Houseman, and Appelbaum 2016). This variety is reflected as well in new forms of labor representation, such as employee associations, worker centers, and civic associations (Osterman, Kochan, Locke and Piore 2001; Heery, Abbott, and Williams 2012) in lieu of strong unions and the state. While such actors may not be ever-present in the employment relationship, they still play a role in shaping its rules and outcomes, challenging traditional assumptions of workplace-centric bilateralism.

This heterogeneity means that IR scholars must reckon with the multitude of goals animating actors in the employment relationship. To adequately account for these various goals, we argue that scholars need to recognize that goals do not necessarily stem from interests alone. A key insight embedded in our notion of multiplicity is that in addition to interests, identities and values may define goals that actors hold in relation to work, a point summarized in Table 1. Each of these are distinct motivations underlying conflict, yet they are also reciprocal and discordant.

Table 1.

Multiplicity and Goal Heterogeneity

Goal	Definition	Key considerations
Interests	Private, purposeful goals of actors, associated with rationality, choice, and tangible outcomes	Each are: • Distinct motivations for conflict and subsequent action • Reciprocal, multidirectional, and influence each other • Multiple: any given actor can hold numerous identities, values, and interests • Situational and context-dependent Goals vary by: • Interactional, symbolic, outward orientation of social identities and values versus private, purposeful nature of interests • Varied and symbolic outcomes and mechanisms of negotiation associated with social identities and values versus tangible outcomes and mechanisms associated with interests
(Social) identities	Sense of belonging to a group defined by agreed-upon, shared characteristics including attributes, roles, culture, or practices that motivate action out of concern for collective welfare or to promote what is valued relative to other groups
Values	Principles actors think ought to be true that can be represented as claims to others; are perceived to be agreed upon by others

Interests, as noted earlier, are actors’ private, purposeful aims. They reflect the “needs, desires, concerns or fears . . . [that] underlie people’s positions, or the tangible items they say they want” (Ury, Brett, and Goldberg 1998: 5). They arise from actors’ positions or roles within a social structure (Somers 1994; Whitford 2002), and they lead to actions that are transactional in nature and carried out in defense or pursuit of material resources (Marks and Thompson 2010: 323). As such, interests are implicitly associated with rationality, calculation, and choice (Polletta and Jasper 2001).²

Identities, broadly construed, consist of a person’s images of self and are typically associated with attributes that contribute to the person’s distinctive, recognizable uniqueness (Budd 2011: 145; Stets and Burke 2000). Identities are born out of individuals’ own self-conception and its interaction with the self-conception of others (Brewer and Gardner 1996). Important for our purposes, identities can also be collective in nature, in that they distinguish one group from another according to agreed-upon, shared characteristics (Hogg and Terry 2000; Alvesson, Ashcraft, and Thomas 2008). Such social identities are born out of interactions and relationships that give rise to collective identification (Rowley and Moldoveanu 2003). Social identities can be tied to attributes such as race or gender but can also be related to roles or categories (e.g., “worker” or “manager”), culture, or practices (Polletta and Jasper 2001). Constructing and maintaining social identities represent goals in their own right. Fundamentally, action motivated by identity relies not on material but symbolic resources (e.g., attitudes, beliefs, legitimacy) (Piore 1995) that are frequently oriented around concern for collective welfare. Thus, symbolic resources are often at stake in instances of collective action motivated by social identities (Ackroyd and Thompson 1999). Additionally, because they can belong to multiple groups, any individual holds more than one identity, any of which can underlie conflict.

Values, finally, are principles that individuals and groups think ought to be true and that can be presented to others as worth pursuing (Provis 1996; Budd and Bhave 2008). Powerful motivators of action, values are defined in terms of rights and obligations—conflict over values often concerns legitimacy or status (Gusfield 1963; Ury et al. 1998). Like identities, values provide people with ideas about how and why they should act (Brown 2015). Values are also an integral part of social identity formation, in that group membership rests upon a positive evaluation of or acceptance of shared values relative to comparison groups (Hogg and Terry 2000). By delimiting people as members of groups, identities and values thus stand as a source of solidarity (Cregan, Bartram, and Stanton 2009). And as opposed to the pursuance of interest-based goals, which are viewed in terms of their salience to specific actors, value-based goals carry an expectation that others would agree with their premise and therefore act accordingly. Values thus have both a moral underpinning and a public, outward-facing orientation (Provis 1996: 479).

Departures from Prior Theory

IR scholars have, to be sure, long recognized features of multiplicity. For one thing, identities and values are relevant to episodes of conflict that pervade labor history, and this has not been lost on those who study them. Lichtenstein (2002) pointed out, for example, that when Hospital Workers Local 1199B sought to initially unionize in Charleston, South Carolina, in the late 1960s, they couched their claims almost entirely in the language of the civil rights movement. IR scholars have likewise emphasized identity and value’s importance in worker centers (Fine 2007), community-based organizations (Osterman 2006; Heery et al. 2012), and labor movements generally (Ferguson, Dudley, and Soule 2018). They have emphasized work as a source of identity itself (Budd 2011), and identities and values now figure as important variables of analysis in their own right (Healy, Bradley, and Mukherjee 2004; Yu 2016). These developments reflect an acknowledgment in IR that the growing diversity of identities and values in the employment relationship makes them more salient (Hunt and Rayside 2000).

Yet prior models of conflict, when they do recognize identities and values, tend to situate them in the context of existing institutional and organizational rules, raising two consequences. First, they overlook informal forms of conflict. These might include, for example, an offensive joke made in regard to gender or race at work (e.g., Hepler 2018). Such experiences inform individual and shared frames—or the cognitive lenses through which interpretations, decision-making, and action occur, thereby influencing how individuals and groups perceive the world around them (Budd et al. 2020: 260)—even if they do not rise to the level of formal redress within an organization. Second, prior models assume that identities and values align with economic interests (Piore and Safford 2006). As we elaborate below, this is not always the case.

In sum, multiplicity requires that IR scholars be more attuned to the multiple kinds of goals producing conflict. With firmer conceptual boundaries around the sources of each of these goals, we can better explain how different motivations (i.e., the private, purposeful nature of interests versus the interactional, symbolic, public-facing and moral concerns of identities and values) manifest in conflict in both formal and informal ways. Moreover, the approach we advocate calls forth explicit consideration of the ways that accumulated advantage and power associated with identities external to the workplace are parallel to, and reinforced by, work—an often overlooked dimension in IR scholarship (Forrest 1993; Hunt and Rayside 2000; Wajcman 2000; Hansen 2002; Rubery and Hebson 2018).

Distance

Definition

If multiplicity is about recognizing new and more numerous goals, distance is about recognizing that the contexts and structures in which actors formulate and pursue those goals are more complicated than previously theorized. Distance manifests in the growing divide between those who control the material and subjective conditions of work and those who labor. Its sources lie in today’s prevailing organizational practices, forms, and means of governing the employment relationship, summarized in Table 2. Together these affect the distribution and balance of power in the employment relationship and thus how conflict is both perceived and acted upon.

Table 2.

Distance and Transformation of Power

Source	Description	Key considerations
Organizational practices	Orientation of firm business models and decision-making in accordance with financial capitalism	Changed organizational and institutional context in which goals are formulated and acted upon Redistribution of power (access to and control over resources) and reduced visibility of those who have power Changed perception of actors’ capacity to interfere with and gain control over resources needed for goal attainment
Organizational forms	Widespread use of fragmented or fissured arrangements; growth of networked forms of organization
Institutional governance	Decline of collective rights and regulatory escape through organizational forms Increase in individual rights and shift of regulation into the private realm (e.g., dispute resolution and mandatory arbitration)

Of distance’s drivers, the first is the diffusion of new business practices. Most notably, the rise of financial capitalism in the 1980s led to the spread of business models and decision-making strategies that split apart firms’ management and ownership, promulgating the notion of firms as shareholder-maximizing institutions (Davis 2009) and marking a clear shift from the post–New Deal ideal of the “firm as a family” (Osterman 1999). This can be seen, for example, when private equity ownership orients a firm’s human resource management decisions toward the benefit of owners as opposed to other stakeholders, including workers (Appelbaum and Batt 2014).

Second are organizational forms themselves. Fragmented or fissured arrangements, such as subcontracting and temporary employment, are used in more sectors than in the past and include more diverse forms, such as franchising and on-demand gig work (Rubery, Cooke, Earnshaw, and Marchington 2003; Weil 2014). Take as an example the janitorial sector, in which, historically, building owners directly employed workers (Figure 1). Today owners may contract out maintenance work to large, geographically dispersed property management firms that solicit bids from smaller contractors who provide cleaning services and labor (Howley 1990; Erickson et al. 2002). More recently, franchising models—in which the relationship between building owners and the franchisees that place workers on its properties are mediated through additional layers of franchising agreements—are increasingly commonplace (Weil 2014). The resulting networked forms of organization, similarly observed in global and domestic supply chains (Lakhani et al. 2013), mean that the work arrangements in which conflict manifests may span multiple settings and thus multiple cultures and legal frameworks.

Figure 1.

Illustrations of Distance in Janitorial Work

Such arrangements undergird the third driver of distance: the transformation of institutional rules by which the employment relationship is governed. Fissured arrangements such as those in janitorial work obscure the “employer”—for instance, whether it is the franchisees or contractors who directly hire workers, or the building owners on whose properties labor is performed. The chain of responsibility for handling conflict in these settings is limited by terms set forth in actors’ contractual relations and the lack of clarity regarding the legal definition of the employer role, which renders unavailable the traditional means of negotiating conflict found in labor and employment law (Zatz 2008; Weil 2014).

Departures from Prior Theory

These changes have a number of implications for conflict as understood in IR.

First, the formation and pursuit of goals are no longer confined to the large, stable organizations and activist institutions of the past. Consider how the fragmented work arrangements of janitorial workers weaken their identification with a particular employer or organization. In such settings, external identities such as gender or immigration status may become more salient in defining conflict. Such was the case of Latino immigrant workers in the Justice for Janitors campaign, who in Los Angeles and other cities organized janitorial workers in the early 1990s (Howley 1990; Erickson et al. 2002).

Second, distance shifts the distribution of power in the employment relationship by altering the extent to which actors in more dispersed arrangements control or have access to resources they need to attain goals. This shift is evident in the negative effect of distance on outcomes such as wages (e.g., Dube and Kaplan 2010; Goldschmidt and Schmieder 2017; Wilmers 2018). This situation weakens the efficacy of existing institutions intended to balance power.

Third, the changes wrought by distance are apparent in workers’ own accounts of conflict. Data from the MIT Survey on Worker Voice (2018) showed that 42% of all respondents report that they encountered a workplace problem but decided not to take action to resolve it. Most of those deciding not to take action claimed that it would make no difference if they did; temporary and contract workers in fissured settings were most likely to make this claim. The structure of work arrangements evidently shapes expectations regarding whether and how conflict can be addressed. In the current era, distance thus raises a set of structural, institutional, and power considerations that are distinct from those in the traditional IR model.

Multiplicity, Distance, and the Formation of Conflict

Given multiplicity and distance, how do we theorize conflict in today’s era of employment relations? What do multiplicity and distance imply for the processes through which actors bring goals to the employment relationship, perceive that their goals are incompatible with those of another, and, given their relative position and access to resources, decide to act?

To arrive at answers, we adopt a processual view of conflict, conceptualizing it as a sequence moving from perception to attribution to action (Pondy 1967). More specifically, we examine how actors come to define conflict, identify its sources, and seek means of resolution—a process that has been dubbed “naming, blaming, and claiming” in the literature on disputes (Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat 1980). It follows that when we account for multiplicity, we must examine how, out of many possible goals, a particular one becomes salient and how actors come to recognize that this goal is incompatible with that of another actor. When we account for distance, we must understand how goal salience and conflict unfold within dispersed contexts in which groups span a range of settings and attribution of blame is often unclear.

We explore these questions by sketching out implications of multiplicity and distance for the processes through which conflict unfolds. In doing so, we arrive at a set of propositions that provide a framework for future investigation, summarized in Table 3.

Table 3.

Propositions Regarding Multiplicity, Distance, and the Formation of Conflict

Perceiving conflict

Proposition 1: By inducing competing commitments and transforming the nature of interactions and relationships, multiplicity and distance reduce the likelihood that individuals will arrive at shared goals.

Proposition 2: Group cohesion derived from identities and values increases the likelihood that individuals will arrive at shared goals; this likelihood is at a maximum when identities, values, and interests align.

Attributing blame

Proposition 3: Conflict can emerge between actors who lack interdependence when the conflict is motivated by identities and values.

Proposition 4: Distance obscures interdependence, reducing the likelihood that some actors will be able to identify those actors who control resources integral to their goals.

Making claims

Proposition 5: Actions stemming from symbolic goals associated with identities and values will be associated with remedies that are less well-defined and outcomes that are less easily assessed than the more clearly defined remedies and tangible outcomes associated with interests.

Proposition 6: For actors who are displaced from control over resources, distance reduces perceived power by obscuring actors’ interdependence and removing opportunities for interaction with actors who control resources, thus making the process of claiming more difficult.

Perceiving Conflict

IR’s model of conflict takes as a starting point that before conflict can manifest, actors must perceive their goals to be incompatible. They must recognize and define, or name, their conflict (Felstiner et al. 1980). Without this recognition from both parties, conflict remains latent. Given the various goals and changing contexts presented by multiplicity and distance, it is not straightforward which goals actors will consider to be in conflict. Moreover, the process through which individual actors arrive at collective perceptions of goal incompatibility, known as alignment, is an integral part of IR scholars’ study of conflict. Yet alignment is typically conceptualized in terms of interests and in relation to less fluid organizational contexts (e.g., intra-organizational bargaining [Walton and McKersie 1965]). Multiplicity and distance, we argue, create clear impediments to alignment but also raise the possibility of new overlaps.

Multiplicity affects the goals an actor is paying attention to at any one time. On one hand, identities, interests, and values are reciprocal in that they shape one another (Marks and Thompson 2010) and thus are often all “in play.” In other words, identities and values may shape interest-based goals (Rowley and Moldoveanu 2003), as is observed when immigrant workers in the Justice for Janitors campaign, and the women of Lawrence and #MeToo, make compensation demands for members of their respective groups. Similarly, interests can give rise to new shared identities, as is illustrated by Occupy Wall Street protesters’ use of the 99% catchphrase to forge a collective identity defined by income inequality (Milkman, Luce, and Lewis 2013).

On the other hand, interests, identities, and values are distinct motivations that vary in their salience to a given actor over time. Consider the act of sharing gender-based discrimination or harassment experiences via social media, which is increasingly common in #MeToo. Some feminist scholars propose that although sharing is individualized and dispersed, it is a way in which individuals develop a feminist consciousness and reframe problems from individual to collective ones (Zarkov and Davis 2018; Mendes, Ringrose, and Keller 2018). Thus, actions such as these may heighten identification with a particular social group and its values, making them more salient (Roccas and Brewer 2006). Put another way, such motivations are fluid, subjective, and reactionary, influenced by circumstance and social context.

The fluidity of goals can complicate the degree to which a given motivation shapes expectations associated with another. With more than one goal activated at any one time, challenges to alignment arise in the form of competing commitments: Actors may feel compelled to pursue interests even when they clash with their numerous identities or values (Marks and Thompson 2010; Crane and Ruebottom 2011). They may also wish for greater distinction among identities or may face difficulty justifying action based on one identity over the other (Rowley and Moldoveanu 2003). Tension in the #MeToo movement rooted in intersectionality—or the idea that multiple marginalized identities amplify the oppression experienced by an individual (Tapia, Lee, and Filipovitch 2017: 489)—illustrates this idea. Public discourse and media coverage, for example, have largely centered on the experiences of white women and have failed to account for the ways in which race and class define experiences of sexual harassment and assault at work (Tambe 2018). Competing commitments may thus lead to tension in the naming of conflict (Alvesson et al. 2008).

Distance adds another layer of complexity to the naming of conflict. Organizational and institutional contexts, which are transformed by distance, activate actors’ goals and expectations (Brickson 2000; Korschun 2015). Consider, for example, how fissuring affects individuals’ perception of their work roles and associated goals. Managers may grapple with unclear role expectations when overseeing external workers, such as temporary employees (Connelly and Gallagher 2004; Davis-Blake and Broschak 2009). Both external and lead firm workers may define their respective roles and associated goals through social and status comparisons with counterparts on the other side of such arrangements (e.g., Brooks 2011). Even the nature of interactions and relationships may change: Some evidence suggests that fissuring is associated with weakened peer- and work-group identification (Chattopadhyay and George 2001).

This complexity feeds into collective processes of naming. Under distance, organizational and institutional contexts are neither stable nor consistent for those performing similar jobs, and therefore goal homogeneity can no longer be assumed. In the example of fissured work arrangements, a potentially significant outcome is that those who share grievances may not recognize their common plight because their employment statuses differentiate their experiences of work.

Proposition 1: By inducing competing commitments and transforming the nature of interactions and relationships, multiplicity and distance reduce the likelihood that individuals will arrive at shared goals.

Multiplicity and distance tend to work against the notion that conflict naming is a straightforward process of interest definition. However, they also open up new opportunities for naming that bring together individuals or groups whose interests are not so clearly defined or aligned, thereby suggesting how such challenges to naming may be overcome.

Under multiplicity, alignment can result from the differing and independent effects of identity- and value-based motivations, rather than interests alone. For instance, goals shaped by identity rely on individuals’ identification with members of a group or movement. Members are driven, in essence, by a belief that “if I know who I am, then I also know what to do, no matter what the consequences are” (Simon et al. 1998: 656). At a collective level, this belief is more difficult to displace than interests, given that social identities are rooted in friendship, kinship, and concern for the welfare of others (Jenkins and Delbridge 2007). As such, shared identities can overcome competing commitments, even more so when they align with other bases for conflict, such as interests (Wolfe and Putler 2002; Crane and Ruebottom 2011).

Under distance, this kind of alignment may derive from new cognitive frames that stretch across disparate work settings. Consider the Fight for $15, an organizing campaign of fast food workers employed in a heavily fissured sector characterized by low wages and high turnover. Despite working at various independent franchisors under a number of brands, workers’ shared vision for wage increases and union representation stem from common perceptions of conflict related to their social identities, specifically, discrimination based on gender, race, ethnicity, and immigration status (Tapia et al. 2017). These bases are thus one way in which actors’ perception of conflict, and the collectivities that result, can cut across economic interests assumed to derive from organizational contexts; as we elaborate below, the same is true in regards to the division of labor or authority structure.

Proposition 2: Group cohesion derived from identities and values increases the likelihood that individuals will arrive at shared goals; this likelihood is at a maximum when identities, values, and interests align.

Attributing Blame

Traditional IR models of conflict specify that actors must not only perceive goal incompatibility but also recognize that they depend on those who share divergent goals. This step in the conflict process, akin to blaming (Felstiner et al. 1980), entails the identification of an opposing actor or actors whose behavior and resources are necessary to attain goals. Multiplicity and distance each make this process less clear, albeit in different ways.

Crucially, multiplicity raises a direct challenge to the assumption of interdependence: social identities and values as motivators of conflict mean that blaming can occur even when no interaction or interdependence is present. Reconsider the example of posting about #MeToo on social media or the tensions rooted in intersectionality that exist within the movement. These may not necessarily represent conflicts of interests, for they may neither make any specific actor or entity the target of blame (as in the case of posting on social media) nor require direct interaction in order to manifest (as in certain social groups’ lack of representation in public discourse or media coverage). In similar fashion, forms of bias, like stereotyping, that give rise to conflict do not necessarily require interaction and interdependence (Budd et al. 2020). Motivations can be attributed to one group by another even though members have never met or cannot point to a particular situation as evidence for their perspective. Such symbolic bases of conflict are necessary for IR theory to capture because they may be part of larger or subsequent iterations of formal conflict that typically have been the focus of IR.

Proposition 3: Conflict can emerge between actors who lack interdependence when the conflict is motivated by identities and values.

Even when interdependence is present and jointly acknowledged, the process of blaming and the nature of interdependence remains subject to dynamics other than what scholars previously assumed. Consider, for example, the conflict at Market Basket, a New England family-owned grocery chain known for prioritizing good wages and working conditions for its employees. Employees were fiercely loyal to the company, seeing themselves as part of the Market Basket “family”—many had personal relationships with the firm’s CEO, who frequently visited stores (Lingo and Elmes 2019). When the company’s board abruptly posed a leadership change in 2014, workers and managers alike perceived a threat not only to tangible resources but also to their collective identity and the shared values they held important. Rallying under the “We are Market Basket!” cry, executives, middle managers, frontline workers, and others banded together to take direct action in opposition to the board, causing one labor leader to observe that in this case of conflict, “managers are workers” (MIT Sloan Forum: Lessons from Market Basket 2014; Ton, Kochan, and Reavis 2015). The Market Basket example reveals the importance of relaxing the assumption of bilateralism in IR’s model of conflict; here, attribution of blame in conflict over both material and symbolic resources stretched beyond this dichotomy, even within a single organization.

Now, consider distance, which poses a more direct challenge to attribution of blame because it hides from view some of the actors who control resources necessary for goal attainment. Actors may no longer perceive their interdependence even when it exists, nor may they be able to grasp how much power both they and other actors possess. The role of private equity firms in the United States provides an apt illustration of this change. Private equity separates firm ownership and management. Decision-making is concentrated with owners, specifically with private equity general partners, who make choices with little input even from those who supply investment funds. Human resource management, operations, and collective bargaining are but a few of the activities in which authority resides with the general partners as opposed to management. Yet, unlike the board of Market Basket, general partners frequently escape scrutiny, remaining “behind the scenes with little visibility” (Appelbaum and Batt 2014: 4) should a company go bankrupt and workers lose their jobs. As a result, it becomes more difficult to attribute responsibility for goal incompatibility.

Proposition 4: Distance obscures interdependence, reducing the likelihood that some actors will be able to identify those actors who control resources integral to their goals.

Making Claims

In IR’s current model of conflict, negotiation follows actors’ mutual perception of goal incompatibility and interdependence. Negotiation entails seeking ways to remedy conflict with the actor or actors to whom blame is attributed, which can be thought of as a process of claiming (Felstiner et al. 1980). In the presence of multiplicity, claiming takes on more varied forms and outcomes than usually is assumed by IR theory. Distance has the effect of impeding claiming by altering the distribution and perception of power in the employment relationship.

Important in shaping the claiming process, the remedies sought and the actions taken under multiplicity vary from the material to the symbolic. Whereas the means for securing interest-based goals revolve around tangible outcomes that are well-defined (e.g., wages), identities and values motivate conflict in which desired outcomes cannot always be “priced” and so obtained in a similar manner (Piore 1995). Goals associated with identities and values are often symbolic and rely on expressive, rather than instrumental or pragmatic, action (Gusfield 1963; Rowley and Moldoveanu 2003). Further, the ensuing forms of conflict tend to be associated with outcomes, such as recognition or legitimacy, that are subject to interpretation. Less concrete or measurable than an outcome such as wages, these outcomes—and whether or not they have been met—may become the subject of disagreement themselves (Provis 1996; Ury et al. 1998; Polletta and Jasper 2001).

Proposition 5: Actions stemming from symbolic goals associated with identities and values will be associated with remedies that are less well-defined and outcomes that are less easily assessed than the more clearly defined remedies and tangible outcomes associated with interests.

Claiming under multiplicity thus necessarily involves a broader set of actions than the formal processes of negotiation and collective bargaining that have long been the focus of IR. The assertion of the right to workplaces free of sexual harassment through #MeToo and the myriad of strategies it pursues to this end—legal defense, legislative goals, social media campaigns, and public opinion—are telling examples of this shift. They highlight the ways in which a plethora of actors can move to address conflict by offering social support or raising consciousness inside and outside employer organizations (Bidwell et al. 2013).

Because of distance, claiming unfolds in transformed interdependence and power contexts. The change is significant because whether actors deem action to be feasible hinges both on whether they recognize they hold sufficient power, relative to others, to obtain their goals or interfere with the goal attainment of others and on whether they actually possess that power. While it has been pointed out that distance undermines actual power, it is important to note that actors may never move to address conflict in the first place if they do not perceive that they have sufficient power to do so.

The fewer opportunities for interaction between those who labor and those who control work because of distance weighs against the former’s ability to apprehend the power they hold. Prior models of IR assert that when questioning whether to address conflict, actors assess previous interactions with other parties. Whether the other parties previously engaged in negotiation and compromise, or made unilateral decisions regarding the issue at stake, past outcomes shape perceptions of interdependence and plausible strategies for future action (Walton, Cutcher-Gershenfeld, and McKersie 1994). Arguably, the strong, coordinated response of Lawrence mill workers was shaped by their experience two years prior, in which mill owners compensated them for a similar reduction in hours. Contrast this with contemporary janitorial work. How would workers laboring at a given property perceive their power relative to contractors, franchisees, and building owners when often it is not clear which of these actors controls access to resources and workers have not interacted with whomever these others are?

Proposition 6: For actors who are displaced from control over resources, distance reduces perceived power by obscuring actors’ interdependence and removing opportunities for interaction with actors who control resources, thus making the process of claiming more difficult.

It is worth noting that in the current era of employment relations, conflict is characteristically experienced and dealt with individually. Employer requirements that claims be made individually—a requirement supported in the United States by decisions of the courts—prevent some workers from taking class action. Because conflict resolution procedures vary from organization to organization, workers are also separated from each other in the sense that they face unequal access to workplace justice (Colvin 2016). Paired with employers’ ability to unilaterally set the terms of conflict resolution, this situation can reinforce perceptions that workers possess diminished power in relation to their employers.

Future Directions for Theory

So far we have argued that current developments in employment relations call for a broadened understanding of conflict, and we have developed a set of research propositions to guide the creation of a framework for doing so. To summarize: Multiplicity brings to the employment relationship goals defined not only by interests but also by identities and values. Consideration of these motivations as distinct analytical concepts reveals that goal heterogeneity creates competing and fluid commitments upon which actors perceive and define conflict. Such goals are associated with outcomes that span the symbolic to the material, giving rise to varied forms of negotiation that emphasize individual rights as much as collective ones. Given the broader bases through which conflict is perceived and defined, collective decisions to address conflict may bring together actors traditionally treated as separate from, or opposed to, one another. These dynamics are situated in a context of distance, induced by organizational practices, forms, and governance structures. Distance transforms the distribution of power among actors, weakening the power of those who labor relative to those who control resources and decreasing their interdependence. The formation of goals, attribution of blame, and visibility of those who hold power—and the way in which conflict is perceived and whether or not it is acted upon—are further affected by distance.

Implications for Theories of Collective Action and Institutions

This all suggests a number of implications for collective action and institution-building, two core IR concerns regarding the rules through which conflict is governed and goals are balanced.

To start, heterogeneity in goals implies that new forms of collective action that may at first appear outside the purview of traditional IR warrant exploration. IR scholars have already moved in this direction, arguing for a new conceptualization of labor solidarity that reflects the nature of conflict and the employment relationship described here. This includes “collaborative solidarity,” in which disparate actors connected through broad social relationships organized through vehicles such as social media come together around a shared goal, potentially disbanding once the shared goal is achieved (Heckscher and McCarthy 2014: 640). This form of solidarity is loose and fluid, much like the motivations that underpin conflict in the context of multiplicity and distance.

With respect to institution-building, scholars can account for changes induced by multiplicity and distance in at least two ways. First, they can conceive of ways to adapt existing institutions to accommodate the changes we have reviewed. Indeed, signs indicate that long-standing institutions are responding to the challenges posed by multiplicity and distance, though there is debate over the potency and viability of these developments. Unions, for instance, have pursued social movement orientations and strategies (Nissen 2003) and have forged new strategic partnerships to undertake nontraditional organizing in sectors such as fast food, mobilizing around non-economic identities (Milkman 2013; Ibsen and Tapia 2017).

The second approach is to envision new institutions to address conflict given that members of the employment relationship are distant and motivated by multiple goals. Already new types of labor organizations are bridging the conceptual spaces we have identified. Via social media, United for Respect, for example, organized among 30,000 workers laid off from Toys “R” Us after the company went bankrupt because of excessive debt from a private equity buyout. By making visible the private equity firms that controlled resources and power, workers eventually secured a partial severance payout from two of the firm’s private equity owners (Dayen 2018; Lieber 2018). In other settings characterized by distance, such as platform-based online freelancing or gig work, workers have likewise drawn upon social media to establish ties and build communities around salient identities, such as occupations (Wood, Lehdonvirta, and Graham 2018), in efforts to realize change. These efforts imply that emerging institutions are closing gaps imposed by distance and are facilitating the naming of and acting upon conflict through shared frames defined by social identities and values.

Implications for Theories of Conflict

We have highlighted #MeToo as a contemporary manifestation of conflict in the individual rights era; we return to it here as it raises a number of additional questions for theorizing conflict. We have shown that #MeToo stretches across workplaces and contexts, utilizes symbolic action, and raises discourse on the myriad ways in which various identities (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, class), interests (e.g., compensation and promotions), and values (e.g., respect) intersect with the experience of sexual harassment. The movement has spurred action through varied channels that reflect the individual rights era, such as legal avenues, stretching across disparate and diffused settings. In so doing, the movement calls attention to power, privilege, and the accumulation of advantage, at the same time demonstrating how these features underpin conflict within and outside of work contexts in both formal and informal ways.

Yet, #MeToo—and, more broadly, the concepts of multiplicity and distance—also raises questions that will be crucial for IR scholars to address in both theoretical and practical terms. We highlight three of these questions here.

First, what does #MeToo imply for collective goal formation and the action that ensues once goals are perceived to be incompatible? Notably, the features of collective action that make it durable—recurring interactions based in established relationships (Simon et al. 1998), which strengthen the ties that bind groups together (Fantasia 1988)—appear at odds with some of the insights raised here. Given goal fluidity and competing commitments, identity-based groups are liable to splinter, making it hard to establish shared norms that can resist fragility. These challenges point to the need to investigate the importance of “ongoing orchestrators” that can cut across networks, serving as more stable nodes in efforts to address conflict (Heckscher and Carré 2006: 623).

At the same time, the implications for collective goal formation and action can also be unpacked by returning to classic IR models of negotiation (e.g., Walton and McKersie 1965) with notions of multiplicity and distance in hand. These models conceptualize the subprocesses of negotiations and interactions that occur within, between, and among individuals and groups on opposing sides of conflict, typically after the point at which conflict has been named and interest-based claims have been made. The ways in which the patterns of interaction, influence, and alignment developed in these models are transformed by the heterogeneity of multiplicity is a topic to be investigated. Distance, moreover, challenges an implicit assumption of many of these models: that recognized interdependence between and among actors gives them reason to negotiate in the first place. This belief is challenged not only by multilateralism but also by the growing divide between those who control resources and those who do not, yielding imbalances in both perceived and actual power that allow powerful actors to evade claims made by others. Investigating these models of negotiation in such situations is another area for theoretical and empirical work.

Second, how should IR scholars identify and measure the more varied outcomes of action taken to address conflict? Do these newer forms of action and outcomes—some of which are difficult to quantify—change the distribution of power among actors, or, if not, do they simply reproduce existing social hierarchies that are reinforced by work? Whether #MeToo spurs concrete institutional and organizational change at work, in other words, is arguably an outstanding empirical question but one that must be analyzed, as multiplicity implies, through outcomes that range from the symbolic to the material.

Finally, how do new forms of action and institutions affect perceptions of power and thus actors’ means to address conflict? Here we contend that even the more informal or dispersed actions taken to address conflict—like the sharing of #MeToo experiences via social media—may illuminate how actors understand and become familiar with structures of power, eventually arriving at a shared sense of injustice and envisioning more desirable alternatives (Ewick and Silbey 2003). Future research may flesh out the conditions under which such informal or dispersed experiences coalesce into shared goals, lead to more formal expressions of collective conflict, and inform new directions of institution-building.

Conclusion

In this article, we have argued that today’s era of employment relations calls for a model of conflict that takes into account heterogeneity in actors and goals as well as the varied organizational forms, practices, and governance surrounding the employment relationship. This insight holds implications for how the process of conflict unfolds. Interrogating IR’s prior model of conflict, we build a framework around two concepts that capture the current era: multiplicity, which implies a change in how IR conceptualizes the goals and actions underlying conflict, and distance, which implies a change in the context in which conflict is situated. By affirming conceptual distinction between the interrelated goals that define conflict—interests, identities, and values—and emphasizing informal as well as formal expressions of conflict in the employment relationship, we argue that both scholarship and practice will benefit from elaborating the range of ways in which conflict is experienced and negotiated. Both endeavors can also arrive at a more comprehensive view of how goals derived from social and economic realms of life manifest in more traditional employment relationships, such as those of Lawrence’s mills, or the more dispersed types we observe today in the context of #MeToo. In the process, they can uncover insights that reassert the role of institutions in balancing power between those who labor and those who control the conditions under which labor is performed.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the helpful reactions and input from Tom Kochan, Susan Silbey, Michael Piore, Paul Osterman, John Budd, Deborah Kolb, Markus Helfen, Aruna Ranganathan, Ryan Lamare, and Andrew Weaver. We thank Ariel Avgar, Dionne Pohler, and Adrienne Edisis for conference feedback. We extend our thanks also to the discussants of an earlier version of this paper presented at LERA 2017 and participants in the IR track of EGOS 2017.

For information regarding the data and/or computer programs used for this study, please address correspondence to criord5@illinois.edu.

ORCID iD

Christine A. Riordan

Alexander M. Kowalski

1

John R. Commons and others who embrace a pluralist frame of reference recognize that actors also share objectives. Pluralist theorists diverge from those in critical or unitarist camps, who assume that conflict is either all-encompassing or dysfunctional. In this article, we focus on goal incompatibility within the pluralist frame.

2

Although interests are typically equated with economic concerns in much IR scholarship, they may encompass any tangible concern. That interest-based action is instrumental and calculative in nature lends itself to economic considerations.

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