The Legitimacy of Inequality: Integrating the Perspectives of System Justification and Social Judgment

Published date01 May 2018
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12323
Date01 May 2018
The Legitimacy of Inequality: Integrating the
Perspectives of System Justification and Social
Judgment
Patrick Haack and Jost Sieweke
University of Lausanne; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
ABSTRACT To explain the legitimation of inequality among the members of a social system,
we blend system justification theory and the theory of social judgment. We identify adaptation
and replacement as two major mechanisms of inequality legitimation and examine their
influence in the unique setting of a natural experiment, the reunification of socialist East
Germany and capitalist West Germany. We show that the new members of a society in which
inequality is broadly endorsed and perceived as enduring will adapt to this perception and
come to view inequality as acceptable. This process of adaptation reflects the subtle but
powerful influence of collective legitimacy on an individual’s tacit approval of inequality.
Inequality also becomes legitimate as older cohorts are replaced by younger cohorts; however,
this effect is weaker than the effect of adaptation. We contribute to the literature by
demonstrating that developing and testing a theory of how inequality becomes legitimized can
provide new insights into the ideational antecedents of inequality.
Keywords: inequality, legitimacy, natural experiment, social judgment, system justification
INTRODUCTION
During the 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos, Oxfam executive Mark Goldring
complained that it ‘is simply unacceptable that the poorest half of the world population
owns no more than a small group of the global super-rich – so few, you could fit them
all on a single coach’ (The Guardian, 2016). Goldring was referring to an Oxfam report
revealing that the world’s 62 richest people owned as much wealth as the poorest half of
the world’s population (The Guardian, 2016). This comment and the report that
inspired it highlight the huge gap between the few ‘haves’ and the many ‘have-nots’.
Address for reprints: Patrick Haack, Department of Strategy, Globalization and Society, HEC Lausanne,
Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Lausanne 603 Internef, Dorigny 1015, Lausanne,
Switzerland (patrick.haack@unil.ch).
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C2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies
Journal of Management Studies 55:3 May 2018
doi: 10.1111/joms.12323
Despite the detrimental impacts of social and economic inequality – including poor
health (Pickett and Wilkinson, 2015), lower levels of happiness (Alesina et al., 2004), and
slower economic growth (Halter et al., 2014) – there has been hardly any noteworthy
action to remedy the causes of this trend. Although such action would arguably be in
the interest of the large majority of disadvantaged people (Jost et al., 2004), the public
discourse typically sidesteps the topic of inequality, and there is evidence that the general
public shows little concern for inequality (Luttig, 2013). Thus, in blatant opposition to
Goldring’s statement, inequality seems to be perceived as acceptable, even to those who
are disadvantaged by the status quo. The absence of popular resistance to social and
economic inequality poses a puzzle, because it violates the idea that people demand
the redistribution of wealth to maximize their self-interest (Trump, 2017) and is at
odds with findings that individuals care deeply about norms of justice and fairness
(Greenberg, 2010; Greenberg and Colquitt, 2005).
What might explain the tacit approval of the current system, which promotes the
preservation of inequality and other forms of social dominance? According to system
justification theory (Jost and Banaji, 1994; Jost et al., 2015), many members of a
social system tend to preserve the belief that existing socia l arrangements are fair,
legitimate, justifiable, and necessary. This belief allows them to satisfy basi c psycho-
logical needs, such as the need to maintain a positive self-image and to believe the
world is just. Believing in the legitimacy of a social system, in tu rn, disposes people
to support that system (Stryker, 1994; Zelditch, 2001a). Thus, the psychological
need to justify a system that is perceived as legitimate typically leads members of
that system to defend and perpetuate the social and economic forms of inequality
that characterize it.
In this paper, we take a fresh look at the legitimation of inequality by integrating the
perspective of system justification with the perspective of social judgment, which origi-
nates in organization and management studies (Bitektine, 2011; Bitektine and Haack,
2015; Haack et al., 2014; Huy et al., 2014; Tost, 2011). Specifically, we develop and test
a novel theory on how inequality becomes accepted among the members of a social sys-
tem and turns into a taken-for-granted and self-perpetuating feature of everyday life
(Amis et al., 2017). We define ‘inequality’ as the uneven distribution of economic resour-
ces, such as income and wealth, as well as of other social resources, such as information
and social integration, which contribute to income or wealth as intervening variables.
System justification theory proposes that legitimacy, and by extension the legitimation
of social inequality (Costa-Lopes et al., 2013), can be viewed as a psychological construct
( Jost and Major, 2001; Tyler, 2006). This stream of research focuses on legitimacy
beliefs and on the personal and situational contingencies that influence such beliefs and
lead the members of a system to justify them. However, to date few studies adopting the
system justification perspective have examined how approval and conformity at the indi-
vidual level emerge from personal beliefs that derive from the legitimacy beliefs that
other members of a group hold. In contrast, the perspective of social judgment argues
that legitimacy can be viewed as an ongoing process of judgment formation. The propo-
nents of this perspective assume that this process is multi-level, in the sense that legiti-
macy judgments occur simultaneously at the collective level (where perceptions of
appropriateness are created, shared, and validated) and at the level of the individual,
487The Legitimacy of Inequality
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C2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

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