Illusions of opportunity
Subtitle: employee expectations and workplace inequality
By: Sonia Ospina.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Ithaca, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 270
Subjects: Discrimination in employment -- United States.
Description: Employees expect organizations to offer an equitable distribution of rewards in promotion, compensation, and job challenge to those who work hard. According to Sonia Ospina, the realities of the workplace confound that expectation, since organizational practices of labelling and ranking individuals create inequality.

For this reason, Ospina suggests that an appreciation of how employees experience and resolve the contradiction between expectation and reality in prerequisite to understanding work attitudes in contemporary organizations.

Illusions of Opportunity documents the pervasiveness of this contradiction by focusing on three groups of workers within a large public organization in a major city. Exploring individual and collective attempts to make sense of reward distribution, Ospina found that each group endorsed a different definition of merit. The definitions represented an attempt on the part of each group to justify the claims of its own members to being organizational citizens who deserved recognition.

Drawing on the research traditions of organizational stratification, the social psychology of justice, and organizational behavior, Ospina operates within a conceptual framework that links objective opportunity structures to employees' subjective perceptions of justice. Through this merger of the structural and the subjective, she provides new insights into the social basis of work attitudes.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 243-264) and index.