The role of "social insertion" and victimization in generating social representations of justice and injustice in work settings

How do people talk about justice and injustice? Are concepts of justice and injustice factors in driving social change or, on the contrary, do they help legitimize the system and perpetuate the conditions generating injustice? This study, following the theoretical perspective of social representations, attempts to answer to these questions by examining shared concepts of justice and injustice, their components, and the ways in which they are organized. It analyzes reports of episodes of justice and injustice as described by three groups of participants, including men and women, characterized by varying degrees of work experience and victimization in the work place. A qualitative, inductive approach to data gathering was employed using a traditional content analysis and a statistical analysis through the Alceste software. The results show different ways in which distributive and procedural rules contribute to the representations of justice and injustice, and how such representations change according to the “social insertion” and work experience of participants, in particular the experiences of victimization. The workers who described themselves as victims of mobbing, resorted to procedural justice with reference to those procedures that involved a lack of their rights and of acknowledgment of their status inside the organization. The workers who did not experience mobbing essentially made reference to distributive criteria, as merit. In this group of workers the organizational culture appeared so strong that in their episodes of injustice they never questioned the organizational system of values and norms: they held individuals (e.g., colleagues, subordinates, managers) responsible for injustice, rarely the whole organization. The results show also some differences between men and women. In womens’ reports, injustice appeared to confirm that even today, women are experiencing discrimination in the workplace: they are paid less than men for similar roles and responsibilities, and have difficulty in advancing to higher career levels. This group, cross-sectional to the various subgroups of the sample in this research, shows a great attention to the social dimension of justice, by expressing a greater interest, compared to men, towards those behaviours (OCB) faces to the cooperation and the search of harmony inside the organizations.