Relational Inequalities: An Organizational Approach

Organizations are the dominant social invention for generating resources and distributing them. Relational Inequalities develops a general sociological and organizational analysis of inequality, exploring the processes that generate inequalities in access to respect, resources, and rewards. Framing their analysis through a relational account of social and economic life, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Dustin Avent-Holt explain how resources are generated and distributed both within and between organizations. They show that inequalities are produced through generic processes that occur in all social relationships: categorization and their resulting status hierarchies, organizational resource pooling, exploitation, social closure, and claims-making. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt focus on the workplace as the primary organization for generating inequality and provide a series of global goals to advance both a comparative organizational research model and to challenge troubling inequalities.

Donald Tomaskovic-Devey is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has been a leading proponent of organizational approaches to inequality. His work major works include examinations of the birth of what we now call neoliberalism, the financialization of the US economy, and workplace racial and gender desegregation since the 1964 US Civil Rights Act. Currently he is developing general theory around inequality as well as deepening scholarly and public access to organizational data on inequalities.

Dustin Avent-Holt is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Augusta University. He focuses on the causes and consequences of social inequalities, particularly as they intersect with organizations and markets. His empirical work has primarily examined the various processes through which social relations within workplaces produce income inequalities.