The Effect of Distributive Justice on Willingness to Pay for Municipality Child Care: An Extension of the GEF Hypothesis

Public-goods dilemmas are characterized by conflicts between self-interest and the welfare of a group or society at large. Research has identified several factors that enhance cooperation in such dilemmas. However, less is known about how concern for distributive justice affects willingness to contribute in asymmetric public-goods dilemmas. To test the hypothesis that contributions to a common resource is related to perceived fairness, experiments were performed to investigate willingness to pay to the social service of child care in hypothetical societies. Experiment 1 aimed at replicating a previous survey study (Biel et al., 1997). Experiments 2 and 3 were extensions. In all three experiments subjects were asked to indicate how fair they considered different distributions of the quality of child care provided by their municipality. These distributions corresponded to the principles of equality, equity, and need. University students (32, 48, and 32 in the three experiments, respectively) served as subjects. Ratings of perceived fairness were positively related to willingness to pay. Other factors also positively related to willingness to pay included ability to pay, personal need, expected payment from others, and the number of households who had to contribute in order to maintain the quality. Furthermore, decreasing municipality size increased willingness to pay.     

Distributive justice: Theory and research

The concept of distributive justice and the theoretical and empirical work conducted on it during the past two decades are examined. Three questions provide the structure for this examination: (i) What are fundamental conceptual dimensions of distributive justice and the specific substantive issues to which they are related? (ii) What central questions has recent work on distributive justice addressed? and (iii) What are the most important emerging issues on which work in the near-term future should focus? Much of the theory and research examined in the paper is social psychological in nature, but reference is made to related work in related disciplines, particularly sociology and philosophy.     

Distributive and procedural justice: Multifaceted meanings and interrelations

Distributive, procedural, and interactional justice have taken on various interpretations. Even when the meaning assigned to each term has been specified and clarified, however, no single set of unique interpretations for each term allows for an unambiguous set of interrelations among the terms. That is, definitional clarity alone cannot resolve all of the questions that can be raised about how one construct is related to another. My discussion raises some of those questions to illustrate that point. A related point is that although an agreed upon set of conceptual defintions might allow for independence of the constructs and thus their independent manipulation, in practice—and as measured (rather than manipulated) variables—these constructs inevitably reveal considerable overlap. Several different reasons for this overlap are explored and the implications discussed.     

Privacy and procedural justice in organizations

This paper advances the argument that individual privacy is a procedural justice issue in organizations. A review of the organizational privacy literature supports this argument, and new directions for procedural justice research are suggested. In addition, it is argued that a focus on individual privacy highlights the political and paradoxical implications of procedural justice issues in organizations.     

Procedural justice and ethical decision making

Procedural justice, in the form of voice and respectful treatment by supervisor, and ethical decision making are examined in this research. Ethical decision making is hypothesized to be a direct function of moral intent, as indicated by willingness to use moral criteria in decision making. Moral intent is, in turn, expected to be a function of the decision-making context, including perceptions of voice, respect and trust between supervisor and subordinate, and moral climate. Individual moral development is also expected to have a positive effect on moral intent. Results generally support the model, with two exceptions. First, perception of voice has a negative effect on moral intent, while caring climate and respectful supervisory relations have the expected positive effect on moral intent. These results suggest either a compensatory model of ethical decision making or a complacency effect. Second, individual characteristics had very little effect on either the decision made or the level of moral intent developed, save for one decision. These results suggest an important overlooked variable, the salience of issues for procedural justice concerns.     

Perspective and procedural justice: Attorney and litigant evaluations of court procedures

A comparison of the procedural justice judgments of attorneys and those of lay people judging the same procedures offers an opportunity to generate new information on what factors affect judgments of fairness. In a survey of reactions to conventional and innovative procedures in a United States district court, attorneys and lay people involved in tort and contract cases were asked to judge the overall fairness of court procedures and the fairness of specific procedures used in arbitration hearings. The respondents were also asked for their judgments concerning the favorability of the procedure's outcome, the opportunity to have the case heard and decided by an impartial third party, and their side's control over what happened in the case, all of which are factors found in previous studies to affect procedural fairness judgments. The results showed that, while attorneys gave higher overall fairness ratings than did litigants, the difference was not affected by the procedure assigned to the case. In addition, attorneys and litigants appeared to use the same standards to evaluate the fairness of procedures, although they disagreed about where the procedures they experienced fell on these dimensions. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.     

Distributive and procedural justice in interpersonal and intergroup situations: Issues,solutions, and extensions

This paper addresses theoretical issues relating to distributive and procedural justice. Specifically, comparisons are made between interpersonal and intergroup situations. Within the realm of distributive justice, two reinterpretations of the ingroup allocation bias are offered. One reinterpretation states that people show this bias to prevent being exploited by the outgroup. The other reinterpretation states that the bias can be regarded as a measure of the perceived worth of the ingroup in relation to the outgroup. The related issue of the procedure used for allocating resources is addressed by extending Tyler and Lind's (1992) Relational Model of Authority to all ingroup members in both interpersonal and intergroup situations. Reinterpretations and extensions offered in this paper lead to new theoretical insights and to several suggestions and predictions for future empirical research.     

分配正义的两个考察维度

本文基于政治哲学的视野,从持有—转让—矫正、起点—过程—终点两个维度具体讨论社会基本结构的分配正义问题。分配的每一个具体环节都应是平等的基本自由权利的具体呈现,并受到平等的基本自由权利的反思性平衡。社会基本结构对于财富转让具有背景性规定意义,二次分配的矫正正义性可以得到契约论的充分辩护;起点公平是以人自由存在能力为核心的人的存在关系状态,社会财富分配在起点正义基础之上经过合规则的程序过程所达到的终点,既是平等基本自由权利的实现,同时又是新过程的起点。     

Distributive and procedural justice in the workplace

The interrelatedness of procedural and distributive justice has implications for organizational practice, especially in the area of performance appraisal. I explore these implications by first describing how procedures can influence perceptions of distributive justice: Procedural improprieties can bring to mind the possibility that a more just outcome might have been obtained if only more acceptable practices had been followed. Next I discuss a second form of interrelatedness — how distributive consequences can influence perceptions of procedural justice — by suggesting that the fairness of a procedure can be assessed in terms of its expected-value (typical or most probable) outcome. These points are illustrated by a discussion of howvoice, or the opportunity for employees to contribute information during the performance appraisal process, can affect both appraisal accuracy and perception of fairness.     

The Impact of Distributive and Procedural Justice on Social Service Workers

The concepts of fairness and justice are embodied within the organizing principle of social justice. Although social justice is a primary focus of social work, social service workers are not always treated with fairness by their own employers. The results from a survey of 255 social service employees from a variety of agencies in Northwest Ohio indicate that distributive justice and procedural justice, two dimensions of organizational justice, are both significant predictors of job satisfaction and organizational commitment, with procedural justice having two to three times the impact of distributive justice.     

Bargaining for justice: A means to resolve competing justice claims

In many types of social situations, individuals defend their claims to a portion of the rewards by arguing that they are just. Although a great deal of research demonstrates that individuals differ in their distribution preferences and thus their beliefs about what is fair, the literature curiously omits consideration of the consequences of these differences, especially the conflict they may engender. This paper first reviews the few attempts to address such justice conflict. The limitations of these approaches suggest concerns to be addressed in an alternative framework. The paper presents a theoretical discussion of this alternative that integrates assumptions about distribution preferences, justice beliefs, conditions fostering the emergence of justice conflict, and elements of negotiation processes as a basic framework for predictions about the bargaining strategies individuals may employ to resolve competing justice claims.     

Power and fairness in negotiations

This paper reports the results of a laboratory experiment on power (specifically, authority) on negotiation process and outcomes. The experiment found that when given a goal to appear fair, high authority negotiators take less of the resources than when not given a goal to appear fair. Furthermore, this paper predicted and found that the relationship between authority imbalance and concern for fairness on negotiation outcomes is a multiplicative relationship. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed within the context of negotiations in intraorganizational relationships.This paper is based on a dissertation by the author, entitled Authority, Dependency, and Fairness in Negotiations. This work was completed while the author was a student at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University.     

Medicalization and social justice

Most social justice critiques of medical care focus upon the allocation of extant, but scarce, resources. In contrast to that focus, this article explores the preallocative arena of factors which shape the supply and availability of medical care. We identify four such factors: (1)medicalization — the tendency to regard as biologically caused various human problems which were in earlier eras ignored or attributed to other causes; (2)social inclusion — the bringing of economically deprived and socially marginal groups into participation in the medical care system; (3)biomedical transcendence — the elevation of biomedically derived concepts of human function into a social and personal world view; and (4)health absolutism — the ideology which holds individuals accountable for their own health and which, contrary to the thrust of the other factors, deemphasizes access and social equity for professionally provided medical care. While these forces all enhance the place of health as a social value, it is by no means certain that they will lead to a society which is more medically just. The article concludes with an appeal for critical analysis of the processes which shape both the medical care system and the broad social concern with medical care.     

The Interplay Between Greed,Efficiency, and Fairness in Public-Goods Dilemmas

The Greed–Efficiency–Fairness hypothesis (H. A. M. Wilke, In European Review of Social Psychology, Wiley, New York, Vol. 2, pp. 165–187, 1991) states that people in resource dilemmas are greedy and wish to defect, but that greed is constrained by preferences for efficient resource use and fair distributions. This paper reviews research where the GEF hypothesis was generalized to public-goods dilemmas. Results from both surveys and experiments on people's willingness to contribute to resources for social services were interpreted in light of the GEF hypothesis. Whereas earlier research on social dilemmas and fairness considerations have focused on the correlation between estimated fair and actual cooperation rates, the present results provide an extension where cooperation rates are influenced by perceived fairness of how a resource is distributed. Two experiments contribute further insights into the interplay, in terms of effects on cooperation, between greed, efficiency, and fairness. The collective consequences of individual choices were either highlighted or not (Experiment 1) and the outcome structure in prior social dilemma tasks was either collectively or individually framed (Experiment 2). These manipulations influenced (a) cooperation rates and (b) the extent to which decisions were based on greed, efficiency, or fairness.     

Justice and organizational punishment: Attitudinal outcomes of disciplinary events

This study utilized a justice framework to investigate punished subordinates' attitudinal reactions to specific disciplinary events. Results suggested that personality variables (negative affectivity and belief in a just world) influenced subordinate perceptions of the disciplinary event. In addition, belief in a just world had a direct effect on satisfaction with the supervisor, intention to leave, and organizational commitment. Contrary to expectations, harshness (a distributive aspect of the event) influenced perceptions of procedural justice and attitudes toward the institution (organizational commitment) and the leader (trust in supervisor), in addition to its influence on perceptions of distributive justice. The influence of procedural aspects of the event on attitudinal outcomes varied by dependent variable. The implications for future research and for management are discussed.     

Integrating societal and psychological rules of entitlement: The basic task of each social actor and fundamental problem for the social sciences

A preliminary statement of a theoretical framework integrating psychological and societal determinants of justice in human affairs is presented. It is proposed that the social structure provides the rules of entitlement and decision making that regulate the course of routine social interaction. These societally based norms are representable in people's conscious thought processes. By contrast, the psychologically generated rules of entitlement, typically contradict conventionally accepted rules of thought and discourse and thus remain unconscious. The major part of the discussion considers the motivationally important circumstances that engage the unconscious psychologically compelling determinants and how their appearance in behavior is both shaped and legitimized by the situationally prevailing normative context. The final section considers some of the more important methodological, theoretical, and social policy implications of this social psychological theory of entitlements.     

Individual and collective justice and injustice: Implications for intergroup conflict

This paper focuses on the combined impact of individual and collective justice and injustice on intergroup conflict. The basic premise is that an adequate understanding of the course of intergroup relations requires knowledge not only about relevant conditions on the intergroup level, but also about the intragroup conditions that might predispose each group to assume a particular type of social orientation. It is assumed that an individual is more dissatisfied when both s/he and her/his group are unjustly treated than when only either one is. The consequences of different combinations of justice and injustice for the individual and his/her group are specified for the intensity of conflict between two groups. Sixteen intergroup scenarios are first derived and rank-ordered, via three assumptions, in terms of how aversive they are likely to be from the perspective of one of two interacting groups. The viewpoints of both groups are then taken into account in an attempt to make predictions about the potential for and intensity of intergroup conflict.     

法官独立--司法公正之根本前提和司法独立应有之义

法官独立乃司法独立应有之意,对于保障司法公正意义重大.针对目前法官权利、义务不一致,法官权利被侵犯的事情时有发生,重新审视现有法律、法规对于司法独立的规定极为必要.为此,恢复司法独立的本来涵义,从制度上真正实现法官的身份独立、实质独立、外部独立、内部独立,对于加强和改善党的领导,构筑和谐、公正的社会主义社会意义重大.因为只有公正的社会才可能是和谐的社会.     

Parents' Reactions to Child Day Care Organizations: The Influence of Perceptions of Procedures and the Role of Organizations' Trustworthiness

On the basis of the uncertainty management model, we argue here that when people are uncertain about an organization's trustworthiness, they may resolve the question how they should react toward the organization by relying on their perceptions of the organization's procedures. As a consequence, we predicted that the reactions of parents whose child was in a day care center would be strongly influenced by their perceptions of the procedures used by the organization that was responsible for their children's day care when the parents would be uncertain about the organization's trustworthiness. However, when parents would be certain that the organization could be trusted they would be less in need of procedural information, yielding less strong effects of perceived procedure on parents' reactions. The findings of a survey study corroborate this line of reasoning. In the discussion it is argued that these findings suggest that people especially rely on their perceptions of procedures when they are uncertain about important aspects of their lives, such as the trustworthiness of organizations that are responsible for their children's day care.