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A Rising Tide Lifts Some Boats, but Leaves Many Others Behind: The Harms of Inequality-Induced Status Seeking and the Remedial Effects of Employee Ownership

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The Social Psychology of Inequality

Abstract

Economic growth has been regarded as a key societal development goal since World War II with the argument that it benefits everyone in society. Yet, it has become clear today that in most Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, it benefits a few but leaves many others behind. The result is economic inequality—the extent to which income or wealth are unevenly distributed within or across societies. This issue has been studied extensively by economists, but it has only recently attracted attention from social scientists including psychologists. In this chapter, we focus on the psycho-social processes and consequences of economic inequality. We posit that an unequal socio-economic context heightens competition and social comparisons, which in turn lead to two interrelated psycho-social processes aimed at securing a respectable place in an unequal society: status-seeking and self-esteem pursuit. This is especially relevant in an organizational context because organizations mirror the structural inequalities of the wider societal culture and let individuals believe that they could improve their position if they only showed the required effort. We finish by highlighting the remedial effects that employee ownership and democratic work organization can have to counteract the harmful psychological consequences triggered by perceptions of inequality.

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Correspondence to Boyka Bratanova .

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Bratanova, B., Summers, J., Liu, S., Vauclair, CM. (2019). A Rising Tide Lifts Some Boats, but Leaves Many Others Behind: The Harms of Inequality-Induced Status Seeking and the Remedial Effects of Employee Ownership. In: Jetten, J., Peters, K. (eds) The Social Psychology of Inequality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28856-3_5

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