Rules, Relations, and Work

Roscigno VJ, Sauer C, Valet P. Rules, Relations, and Work. American Journal of Sociology. 2018;123(6):1784-1825.Classic theory is ambiguous regarding what is most meaningful for workers and workplaces. Are bureaucratic rules most consequential by providing predictability, as suggested by Weber, or problematic, owing to assaults on autonomy? And what of proximate social relations, seen as fundamental in ethnographic, resistance, and justice accounts? This article's analyses, which draw on a unique sample of approximately 2,500 German workers across heterogeneous contexts, reveal pronounced effects of horizontal and vertical social relations on worker (i.e., satisfaction and fairness) and workplace (i.e., commitment and effort) outcomes. These effects, which hold for high- and low-status workers, exist beyond independent, mediating, or conditional associations with rules and have differing implications for women versus men. The authors discuss the importance of their findings for work, organizational, and inequality literatures and call for greater attention to relational dimensions of work-life, their frequent disconnect from bureaucratic structures, and the consequences for organizations and the individuals within