Date: March 10, 2023
Time: 15.30 – 17.00
Location: Snijders room M.061, University of Groningen
Workplace dignity violations, feelings of misrecognition and consequences for political behavior by Katerina Manevska (RU) & Agnes Akkerman (UvA)
Abstract: This article studies how dignity violations at work incite feelings of misrecognition and establishes the theoretical and empirical connection between feelings of misrecognition and political behavior. Feelings of misrecognition reflect a person’s sense of worth, cultural membership, and place in society, and are considered a key concept in understanding current political developments. However, relatively little is known about how such feelings of misrecognition take shape in people’s everyday lives. We argue that the workplace is an important context for understanding feelings of misrecognition, both as a specification of educational differences in misrecognition, and directly, as a consequence of workplace dignity violations. We connect feelings of misrecognition to political trust, non-voting and populist voting using unique Dutch data (N=1835) that include experiences with workplace dignity violations such as supervisor suppression of voice and lack of co-worker solidarity. Our results underline the importance of the workplace as a source of feelings of misrecognition. Furthermore, we show that feelings of misrecognition are related to less political trust and more populist voting. As such, our findings point to the workplace as an important additional source of divide between those who do and do not feel to be full members of society.
Biography of prof. Agnes Akkerman
Since September 2021 Agnes Akkerman works as professor at the AIAS/HSI at the UvA, as professor of Regulation of Labour and head of the department. The research institute is multidisciplinary and affiliated with the Department of Labor Law (FdR).Until september, Agnes Akkerman works as Professor of Labor Market Institutions and Labor Relations in the Department of Economics at the Radboud University Nijmegen. She is one of The Netherlands’ leading sociologists in the eld of policy networks, corporatism, and industrial relations, and was a visiting fellow at Cornell University in 2011.
In her NWO VICI project (2016), she investigates how and why employers suppress the expression of dissatisfaction by employees, and what kind of spillover effects this has for their cooperative behavior within and outside of the organization. Her multiple award-winning research has appeared in top journals in the eld of Sociology, Political Science and Public Administration.
From 2015 to 2020 Agnes Akkerman was the James Coleman Professor of Sustainable Cooperation in Collective Labor Relations in the Department of Sociology at the University of Groningen.
Expertise
Sociology
Excellence
VICI, NWO conflict grants
Projects
9.6 Gigs of their own: Are worker-owned and worker-governed platforms viable?
