Illusions of opportunity : employee expectations and workplace inequality / Sonia Ospina
- Bib ID:
- 2613375
- Format:
- Book
- Author:
- Ospina, Sonia Margarita, 1955-
- Description:
-
- Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 1996
- 270 p.
- p. cm.
- ISBN:
-
- 0875463568 (alkaline paper)
- 0875463576 (alkaline paper)
- Summary:
-
Employees expect organizations to offer an equitable distribution of rewards in promotion, compensation, and job challenge to those who work hard. According to Sonia Ospina, the realities of the workplace confound that expectation, since organizational practices of labelling and ranking individuals create inequality. For this reason, Ospina suggests that an appreciation of how employees experience and resolve the contradiction between expectation and reality in prerequisite to understanding work attitudes in contemporary organizations.
Illusions of Opportunity documents the pervasiveness of this contradiction by focusing on three groups of workers within a large public organization in a major city. Exploring individual and collective attempts to make sense of reward distribution, Ospina found that each group endorsed a different definition of merit. The definitions represented an attempt on the part of each group to justify the claims of its own members to being organizational citizens who deserved recognition. Drawing on the research traditions of organizational stratification, the social psychology of justice, and organizational behavior, Ospina operates within a conceptual framework that links objective opportunity structures to employees' subjective perceptions of justice. Through this merger of the structural and the subjective, she provides new insights into the social basis of work attitudes.
- Full contents:
-
- Pt. I. The Problem: A Pervasive Gap
- Pt. II. Realities: Documenting Patterns of Opportunity
- Pt. III. Perceptions: Experiencing Workplace Inequality
- Pt. IV. Reactions: The Social Context of Work Attitudes.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Subject:
- Discrimination in employment -- United States
- Copyright:
-
In Copyright
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Copyright status was determined using the following information:
- Material type:
- Literary Dramatic Musical
- Published status:
- Published
- Publication date:
- 1996
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