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.     

Justice for All? Factors Affecting Perceptions of Environmental and Ecological Injustice

Moving beyond the typical focus on individual injustices, we examine individual-level and contextual factors affecting perceptions of justice with regard to the environment. Specifically, we examine decision-making procedures pertaining to environmental resource use and harms across groups of people; the distribution of environmental harms; and the direct treatment of the natural environment (i.e., procedural environmental justice, distributive environmental injustice, and ecological injustice, respectively). To test our hypotheses, we use data from a survey administered to a cohort of first-year college students at a southeastern university. Results demonstrate that environmental identity and perceptions of the extent to which the university context encourages sustainability consistently enhance perceptions of all three types of justice. Other factors differentially affect each type of justice. We discuss the importance of the patterns that emerge for environmental and sustainability education and speculate on the implications of moving from thinking about (in)justice related to the environment as an individual issue to one of the collectivity.     

The Social Context of Responses to Injustice: Considering the Indirect and Direct Effects of Group-Level Factors

Whether individuals evaluate a distribution of outcomes to be unfair and how they respond to it depends upon the social context and their perceptions of why the objective injustice occurred. Here we examine a general feature of the situation that highlights what is often overlooked in distributive justice research: the impact of the group. We conceptualize such impact in terms of the group value model of procedural justice (Lind and Tyler, 1988) and in terms of collective sources of legitimacy (Walker and Zelditch, 1993). The former highlights how the extent to which one feels valued by the group may enhance perceptions of distributive justice (net of actual outcomes) and thus ameliorate the impetus to respond to objective injustice. The latter considers how the dynamics of group influence may reduce the propensity to respond behaviorally to perceived injustice. Our analysis shows how procedural justice and legitimacy (in the forms of authorization and endorsement) may affect attributions in a work setting, and, in turn, influence individuals' justice perceptions and reactions. By combining these elements, we chart for the first time the relative impact of two factors representing elements of the group on an individual's evaluation of and response to distributive injustice.     

Review Essay: Legitimizing Legitimacy: Shaping a New Frontier of Research

Social Justice Research -     

Attributions for fair exchange outcomes: The effects of power and status

This study focuses on how two fundamental social factors, structural power position and social status, affect attributions for relatively common, non-problematic exchange outcomes. We argue that the relative power and statuses of dyad members activate expectations of competence which in turn shape attributions in the situation. Subjects assumed the role of a typist described in a vignette of a transaction between a typist and a student needing a paper typed. We manipulated power positions in the vignette by varying the value and availability of the resource each actor desired; subject's sex and that of the fictive student represented social statuses. Despite the typicality of the exchange situation, results indicated that status and, to some extent power, created variation in the strength of attributions for the exchange outcome. Females, presumably expected to be more competent typists, made stronger self-attributions for the typing payment than males. Similarly, those in high power positions tended to attribute the payment more to themselves than occupants of low power positions.