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Raising the Question on ‘Who Should Get What?’ Again: On the Importance of Ideal and Existential Standards

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Abstract

This contribution compares the importance of ideal standards and existential standards on people’s ideas on fair earnings. Ideal standards refer to persons’ preferences for a distribution rule according to which earnings ought to be allocated among members of a social aggregate. Existential standards refer to conditions of the social context, like the average earning or pay inequality, that serves as points of reference when people shape their ideas on just earnings. In line with the theoretical literature, we find that both standards are relevant for shaping people’s ideas on just earnings. However, there seems to be greater consensus among our respondents on the importance attached to the existential standards than over that attached to the ideal standards. We also found a “reversed just gender wage gap”: by assigning higher earnings to fictitious female than fictitious male employees, our female and male respondents seem to compensate former gender-related income discrimination against female employees in the German labor market. Our analysis is based on the answers of 676 respondents living in Germany who participated in an internet-based factorial survey.

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Notes

  1. The justice evaluation function proposed by Jasso (1978) can be found in the appendix.

  2. For the sake of clarity: Jasso and Webster (1997, 1999) and Jasso and Meyersson Milgrom (2008) ask the respondents of a factorial survey to evaluate the earnings of fictitious persons. However, they do so in order to obtain the respondent-specific just rewards via the so-called indirect method, as proposed by Jasso and Rossi (1977) and described in detail i.e., in Jasso (2007). That is, their main analyses are based on the just rewards obtained via the indirect method.

  3. Table 7 in Appendix provides more detail on differences between the studies reported here.

  4. This relationship holds if these justice evaluations arise from the justice evaluation function proposed by Jasso (1978). The justice evaluation function is shortly described in Appendix of this paper. For further details on the properties of the justice evaluation function we recommend Jasso (2007).

  5. Equity theories explain the emergence of (in-)justice sentiments in a exchange situation between two persons and in which they exchange reward-relevant factors (the input of an exchange situation) with rewards (the output of an exchange situation). Reward-relevant input factors encompass factors from the past, like an educational attainment previously obtained, and factors from the present, like the effort an employee shows in the workplace. The equity theory states that individuals relate the ratio of their output to their input and compare it with the other person’s input output relation. Situations in which the ratios of both individuals are unequal will evoke a feeling of injustice.

  6. In accordance with Nisbet (1970), the term social aggregate is defined by Jasso (1980: 5) as “any physical or conceptual aggregate of humans who are mutually aware of each other and of the aggregate they form.”

  7. Douglas (1982) differentiates between fatalism, ascriptivism, individualism, and egalitarianism, of which the two latter justice ideologies are also known as ‘equity’ and ‘equality,’ respectively (Wegener, 1992, p. 275).

  8. The split-conscious hypothesis explicitly states that a person can hold several justice ideologies, even if they contradict each other.

  9. We aimed at choosing a realistic value for our fictitious employees. In Germany, the average salary of 30- to 40-year-old full-time employees with completed vocational training amounted, in 2010, i.e., 2 years before the study was carried out, to 2,943 euros a month (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2013, own calculations). Unfortunately, a more recent publication of data that allow for the computation of the average salary in 2012 was not available at the time of the article’s publication.

  10. Other studies (e.g., Jasso and Rossi, 1977; Jasso and Webster, 1997, 1999; Jasso and Meyersson Milgrom 2008) apply indirect methods of obtaining the just rewards rather than the direct method we apply. Details of the indirect methods are described more precisely in Jasso (2007). However, the range of indirect measures of just rewards may exceed, by far, the range of direct measures of just rewards and yield just rewards “literally beyond belief” (Markovsky and Eriksson, 2012, p. 8).

  11. Given the same salary range, the average salary (low, high) indicates the skewness of the salary distribution. That is, whether most individuals earn at the bottom part or at the upper part of the salary distribution.

  12. The minimum requirement for the test of a hypothesis is to have a qualitative variable. Increasing the number of a dimension’s attributes may allow testing for the functional form of the relationship between a dimension and a dependent variable on the one hand. On the other hand, the vignette universe (Cartesian product of all possible vignettes attributes of different factors) increases dramatically. As a consequence, a respondent will have to rate much more vignettes given the same sample size which increases the risk of learning and fatigue-effects (e.g., Sauer et al., 2011).

  13. We asked our respondents for their educational attainment and provided them with a list of educational attainments in the German school system. Persons with an educational degree obtained outside of Germany could enter the degree in an open text field. Respondents who made use of the text field were assigned, after data collection, into the equivalent answer category form the German school system. For the five cases deleted from the dataset, the appropriate category could not be definitively identified.

  14. We carried out our analyses once with the 28 persons that made constant justice judgments and once without them. The results of our analyses remain substantially the same.

  15. We also estimated a model that accounted for a potential interaction effect between the two vignette dimensions ‘pay inequality’ and ‘average salary,’ as “Factorial Survey” section states. However, the interaction term turned out to be insignificant and was, for reasons of parsimony, excluded from the analysis.

  16. Since we are dealing with a random sample from a volunteer opt-in panel, the results are not representative of German inhabitants. Hence, we have to abstain from inference–statistical interpretations. Instead, statistical tests on significance are used exclusively as a pragmatic criterion to distinguish important from unimportant effects.

  17. Figures 3 and 4, in Appendix, depict the distribution of the vignette variables’ coefficients obtained by running a regression of the just rewards on the vignette variables separately for every respondent.

  18. The Justice Index JI1 is defined (Jasso, 1999, p. 144) “as the arithmetic mean of the justice evaluations” in a social aggregate arising from the justice evaluation function proposed by Jasso (1978).

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our anonymous reviewers and the editor for their numerous valuable comments.

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  1. Institute for Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus Platz, 50923, Cologne, Germany

    Hawal Shamon & Hermann Dülmer

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Appendix: A Short Note on the Justice Evaluation Function

Appendix: A Short Note on the Justice Evaluation Function

Justice evaluations (J) arising from the justice evaluation function Jasso (1978) equals the logarithm of the ratio of the actual reward (A) to the just reward (C). A J score of zero means that a person’s reward is considered to be fair in the eye of the beholder. A value less than (greater than) zero indicates that the evaluator thinks that the evaluated person’s reward is unjust in the sense of underrewardment (overrewardment). The logarithmic transformation of the comparison ratio takes into account that deficiencies of the absolute value Z (= A − C < 0) evoke a stronger injustice sentiment among the evaluating person than any surplus of the same absolute value Z (= A − C > 0):

$$J = \ln \left( \frac{A}{C} \right).$$

See Table 7 and Figs. 3 and 4.

Table 7 Overview of Selected Factorial Studies of the Non-Reflexive Justice of Earnings
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Fig. 3
figure 3

Distribution of coefficients of ideal standards

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Fig. 4
figure 4

Distribution of coefficients of existential standards

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Shamon, H., Dülmer, H. Raising the Question on ‘Who Should Get What?’ Again: On the Importance of Ideal and Existential Standards. Soc Just Res 27, 340–368 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-014-0217-3

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