Illusions of opportunity

Sonia Ospina

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...

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