Tomaskovic - Devey: Organizational Inequalities: Relational Process in Institutional Context

Relational Inequality Theory (RIT) is a relatively new theory tool, developed to explain and explore organizational inequality processes, and as an explicit alternative to traditional stratification and human capital approaches. RIT stresses the central role of relationships, within and between organizations, for both the production of resources and their distribution, as well as the causal power of generic inequality generating processes in organizational and institutional context. In this talk I provide a brief outline of RIT and demonstrate its utility for explaining variations in inequalities both within and between organizations. Empirical examples include class, gender and citizenship inequalities in multiple institutional contexts, using both quantitative and qualitative examples. There are two central empirical lessons from these examples. First, particular status based inequalities, such as class or gender, vary greatly across organizations in most national contexts. Second, the levels and even directions of inequalities are profoundly conditioned by the organizational intersection of status characteristics in their institutional context.

Donald Tomaskovic-Devey is a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He studies the processes that generate workplace inequality. He has projects on the impact of financialization upon U.S. income distribution, workplace desegregation and equal opportunity, network models of labor market structure, and relational inequality as a theoretical and empirical project. He is a founding member of the University of Massachusetts Computational Social Science Institute. He is also a founding member of the EEODataNet, a network of researchers using data from and for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.