Justice (Sociology)

Introduction

Since at least the time of Plato’s Republic, justice has been a close companion to all critical analysis of social life, not least because speculation about the just society has often been synonymous with the study of society in a more descriptive sense. Indeed, the concept of “society” has itself had a normative meaning much longer than it has had a descriptive one. Sociology, of course, changes that relationship as a scientific discipline dedicated to describing the reality of social life independent of how we want it to be. However, the apparent fragmentation of the sociology of justice is living testament to the difficulty still presented by studying justice empirically instead of normatively. Emile Durkheim tried to resolve the normative and descriptive difference (see Classical Sociology of Justice) by arguing that what justice means is nothing less than what social groups, as quasi-natural entities, require in order to maintain solidarity. The normative becomes empirical in Durkheim’s analysis, though not all would agree that his equating of justice with solidarity makes the sociology of justice any easier to do. Social psychologists have arguably done the most to advance the contemporary sociological study of justice, aided by testable propositions, the power of experimental methods, and the fact that the meaning of justice as an affect carries far less ambiguity than its philosophical, cultural, or institutional meanings. The role that justice plays in social movements and public opinion owes much to the social psychology of justice. Yet for all of its strengths, social psychology is often criticized for lacking historical and cultural depth and for limiting justice to a micro phenomenon. Drawing from concepts such as institutions, orders of worth, practices, and discourse, other sociologists have attempted to fill the gap, revealing the dynamic role that justice plays in a variety of contextual settings. In many respects, the study of justice, both inside and outside of social psychology, is more vital and significant than it has ever been. And yet, a normative ghost still haunts the sociology of justice in two senses. First, the meaning of justice is still in many respects imported from philosophy and its effort to completely define ideas (e.g., “what is justice?”). Philosophers still hold court over the study of justice in the public eye. However, with more reflexive analysis of philosophical principles and the effort to give ideas a history and a context rather than a definition, the relationship could be changing. Second, achieving justice in society through the empirical analysis of society remains, for many, the very lifeblood of sociology. This presents a different set of challenges for efforts to treat moral ideals such as justice empirically and therefore muddied by psychology, history, culture, and context. Attunement to multiple perspectives and exhortations over time on justice seems requisite for developing the sociology of justice as a field dedicated to revealing the many ways in which the justice world works.

General Overviews

Overviews of justice that engage with sociology, or any other social science, are considerably lacking in comparison with the number of overviews that take a philosophical point of view. This is a testament to the continued dominance of philosophers over the study of justice. Philosophical overviews often emphasize the distinction between utilitarianism and deontology, or the difference between a morality of outcomes versus a morality of duties and principles (Sandel 2009, Sandel 2007). Other treatments engage with themes that overlap with sociological topics, particularly distributive justice (Roemer 1996), reciprocity (Johnston 2011), and critical theory (Pereira 2013). Importantly, however, a general overview of the sociology of justice is yet to be written.

Bierhoff, Hans, Ronald Cohen, and Jerald Greenberg, eds. 1986. Justice in social relations. New York: Plenum.
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This edited volume is rich in discussion of experimental methods for studying justice, particularly from a social-psychological, formal and game-theoretic standpoint.
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Cohen, Ronald, ed. 1986. Justice: Views from the social sciences. New York: Plenum.
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Features chapters written about justice from the standpoint of each social science. Rytina’s chapter “Sociology and Justice” is an important and useful overview, with a discussion ranging from classical theory to social movements.
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Johnston, David. 2011. A brief history of justice. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
DOI: 10.1002/9781444397550Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Johnston’s book is probably most significant for its narrative focus, capturing how alternative theories of justice in the Western philosophical tradition grow out of one another. His claim that justice is essentially a matter of reciprocity should be of interest to sociologists.
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Kolm, Serge-Christophe. 1996. Modern theories of justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
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A philosophically oriented and slightly technical discussion of themes in distributive justice, Kolm’s book relates these to many issues of interest to sociologists. He concludes that justice consists of justifications about social entities that have been made amenable to considerations of justice.
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Pereira, Gustavo. 2013. Elements of a critical theory of justice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137263384Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Directly informed by social theories of justice, Pereira’s book provides an excellent dissection of the “recognition versus redistribution” dispute. The critical theory of justice is unique in its emphasis on rooting critical standpoints in everyday moral experiences.
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Roemer, John. 1996. Theories of distributive justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Roemer’s overview covers the full range of different theories of distributive justice. While technical in focus, it relates philosophical themes to core sociological issues such as inequality and poverty.
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Sandel, Michael, ed. 2007. Justice: A reader. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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A user-friendly edited volume of primary works drawn from major theorists of justice, this book includes contributions from philosophers, economists, social activists, and journalists. Sandel weaves together problem-centered discussions with philosophical analyses.
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Sandel, Michael. 2009. Justice: What’s the right thing to do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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A provocative and readable introduction to major themes in the philosophy of justice, Sandel’s book displays his mastery at relating abstract philosophical principles to particular moral puzzles.
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Philosophical Theories of Justice

Given how influential philosophy remains for the study of justice, it is useful to review the main philosophical theories of justice that shape contemporary debates. The distinguishing factor of the philosophical approach to justice is the Platonic “will to truth” that attempts to define a form that is unchanging and without history. Undoubtedly, the starting point must be Rawls 1971, A Theory of Justice, and the debate it sparked over the question of whether justice principles should, as Rawls argued, be treated as “ideal” or normative and therefore removed from all “heteronomous” determination, or whether, on the contrary, those principles must remain deeply interwoven with communities. This is referred to as the “liberal versus communitarian” debate, and it is significant that communitarian claims about the rootedness of justice principles lend themselves to a sociological analysis of justice.

Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Rawls’s masterwork argues that inequalities are not justified from deservingness. Talents and abilities gained from nature or family are not deserved and neither is being born into a society that values what you do. Only the “difference principle”—that inequalities are just only if they help the least advantaged—suffices. Rawls presents the “veil of ignorance” concept as a way of determining the fair distribution of social goods that appeals to universalist reason alone.
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Liberal Theories of Justice

The core focus on liberal theories involves a search for universal or impartial principles that allow justice claims to transcend social or cultural differences. Reason is the tool that enables the creation/discovery of these principles when (following Kant) its exercise is free of all particular empirical determinants. For Barry 1995 this means capitalizing on the impartiality intrinsic to justifications. For Dworkin 1985 it means insisting on a transcendent and principled basis when making moral judgments about justice in particular situations.

Barry, Brian. 1995. Justice as impartiality. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Barry claims that the motive of impartiality is characteristic of all justice claims: this is because we are required to support justice claims with justifications. Justice thus involves the creation of principles that can form the basis for “free agreements” on reasonable terms. While this is an empirical process, it makes justice principles impartial (i.e., free of circumstantial determination).
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Dworkin, Ronald. 1985. A matter of principle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Dworkin distinguishes between problems and theories, urgencies, and principles. Justice must have greater fidelity to principles than it does to solving particular problems. It must not be rooted in interpretations suited to specific communities, and therefore “checkerboard” in its application, but instead have the “integrity of a single coherent scheme.”
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Communitarian Theories of Justice

Communitarians critique the key presumptions of liberal theories of justice, namely that there is some “neutral standing ground” that allows for the exercise of reason removed from context—or that there is a “universal” moral subject who is removed from history and culture. By contrast, what liberal arguments perceive as limits to justice—culture, society, community, history—communitarians claim form the very substance of justice. Macintyre 1988 emphasizes the constraining/enabling effect of traditions, while Sandel 1982 points to constitutive attachments such as family and community that contradict autonomous liberal subjectivity. Taylor 1985 asks whether justice is meaningful independent of questions about the “good life.” Finally, Walzer 1983 identifies independent “spheres of justice” each with their own individual moral criteria and goods to distribute.

Macintyre, Alasdair. 1988. Whose justice? Which rationality? Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press.
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Macintyre argues that the meaning of justice varies according to historical, adaptive, but ultimately incommensurable moral traditions, as does the meaning of rationality and action. He discusses four such traditions in Western culture: Homeric, Augustinian, Humean, and Liberal. Macintyre claims that the latter, which is synonymous with the advent of European modernity, is paradoxical: it is a tradition that is resistant to traditions.
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Sandel, Michael. 1982. Liberalism and the limits of justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Sandel’s important book argues that the effort to reach impartial moral principles (most notably by Rawls) is impossible and misguided. Moral experience is defined relative to constitutive attachments such as friendship, community, and family. The unencumbered subject behind the veil of ignorance only appeals to relationships between perfect strangers without history or culture.
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Taylor, Charles. 1985. The nature and scope of distributive justice. In Philosophical papers. Vol. 2. By Charles Taylor, 289–317. London: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Taylor poses the question: what kind of good does distributive justice represent? He claims that conceptions of particular “excellences of the good life” underlie beliefs about distributive justice. Differences between conservatives and liberals thus consist of an orientation toward different social goods: liberating a self-reliant individual, on the one hand, versus greater solidarity and collective self-management, on the other.
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Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of justice: A defense of pluralism and equality. New York: Basic Books.
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Walzer’s groundbreaking book argues for a theory of “complex equality” based on a plurality of goods in different social spheres, each featuring their own distributive principles and meanings of justice. A regime of complex equality is the opposite of tyranny, which finds control over one good in one sphere trumping control over all goods in all spheres. Complex equality maintains the integrity of each sphere according to its own unique goods and distributive principles.
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Other Critiques

Liberal arguments are subject to a variety of other critiques, and the latter often extend their critical glare to the communitarians as well. Notable among these critics is the inclusion of social theory, social movements, and sociology into their theories of justice. For instance, Cohen 1995 draws on socialist theory to critique the premises of liberal justice. Miller 1999 emphasizes connections with sociology, while Mills 2005 takes liberal theory to task for avoiding “nonideal” realities. Warnke 1993 draws hermeneutics together with theories of justice, a direction that leads Ricoeur 2000 to emphasize the connection between justice and causal attributions of responsibility. Young 1990 draws from New Left social movements to critically reorient justice around participation. Nussbaum 1992 also seeks a critical revision of liberal justice by drawing from Aristotelianism. Finally, in response to long-standing efforts to reach the “ideal” theory of justice, Sen 2009 radically reframes the pursuit around the empirical investigation of injustice.

Cohen, Gerald. 1995. Self-ownership, freedom and equality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511521270Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Cohen’s counterargument to liberal and libertarian theories of justice finds parallels between the concept of self-ownership and a socialist form of equality. Cohen ultimately claims that self-ownership is fundamentally misrepresented in liberal thought, and that injustice (e.g., slavery) does not automatically result from limitations to it. He claims that social justice rooted in equality must be drawn from a socialism that expels the notion of self-ownership.
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Miller, David. 1999. Principles of social justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Miller emphasizes the relevance of sociology to social justice. He argues that normative theorists of justice (from philosophers) need evidence (from sociologists/social psychologists) about what people regard as fair and unfair in different social settings. Empirical researchers of justice, meanwhile, would benefit from recognizing that normative theories help them identify actions and beliefs that serve as expressions of justice.
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Mills, Charles. 2005. ‘Ideal theory’ as ideology. Hypatia 20:165–184.
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Mills influential article argues that “ideal theories” of justice, such as those put forth by Rawls, are inherently ideological. They are spontaneous concepts that occur as a result of social structures and hegemony. By contrast, Mills draws on feminist critiques to claim that theories of justice must be “nonideal” (i.e., rooted in material facts and experiences).
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Nussbaum, Martha. 1992. Human functioning and social justice: In defense of Aristotelian essentialism. Political Theory 20:202–246.
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In this important work, Nussbaum argues that human capabilities present themselves as a moral claim: they must be developed. When unequal social and political circumstances result in the unequal development of human capabilities, those circumstances are morally indictable. Nussbaum links this to a qualified defense of a human “essentialism” that transcends historical and cultural differences in the meaning of social justice.
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Ricoeur, Paul. 2000. The just. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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This volume of collected essays features important criticisms of the pluralist view of justice supported by Walzer and Boltanski and Thevenot. Ricoeur argues that politics has its own sphere but is transcendent in its effect on other spheres. In another essay, Ricoeur claims that our assignment of causal responsibility for an action is a moral act of imputation with direct implications for justice.
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Rorty, Richard. 1983. Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism. Journal of Philosophy 80:583–589.
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Rorty’s entry into the liberal/communitarian debate makes the provocative claim that the self is indistinguishable from a network of beliefs, emotions, and desires. This renders the liberal moral subject meaningless, and it suggests that communities are less stable than communitarians let on.
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Sen, Amartya. 2009. The idea of justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
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Sen’s most recent contribution to theories of justice argues that the field has traditionally been plagued by what he labels “transcendental institutionalism,” in which justice is defined normatively in relation to a characterization of perfectly just institutions. By contrast, Sen argues for the merit of a “realization-focused comparison” perspective more attuned to the empirical and comparative meanings of injustice, with the aim to developing a true “practical reason of justice.”
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Warnke, Georgia. 1993. Justice and interpretation. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
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In this useful work, Warnke outlines various arguments for what she calls the “hermeneutic turn” in political philosophy. Instead of appealing to formal reason or neutral procedures of rational choice, justice principles express the meanings of a society’s goods, practices, and traditions. Warnke argues that we should recast debates over the meaning of justice as interpretive debates over the meaning of certain social goods.
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Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Young challenges the idea that social justice must focus on the distribution of goods and burdens. Channeling the spirit of New Left social movements, she argues that commitments of liberal theories of justice to impartiality and a homogenous public are mistaken. Social justice must instead be rooted in a critique of institutions that affords participation in determining the sociopolitical and economic conditions that affect one’s life.
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Classical Sociology of Justice

Despite the relative paucity of research on justice in contemporary sociology, the topic has extensive classical roots. While Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theories were essentially normative, they are a good example of the lack of distinction between a theory of society and a theory of a just society (Spencer 1978). In many respects, Durkheim exemplifies the distinctiveness of the sociology of justice in his effort to make justice (and morality as a whole) a “social fact” determined by social relations (Durkheim 1984, Durkheim 1997). Weber and Simmel both examined justice from a neo-Kantian perspective (Weber 1946, Weber 1968, Simmel 1971). Marx and Engels attempted to distance their analyses of modes of production from normative principles such as justice, even while their diagnosis of capitalism implied its profound injustice (Marx 1976, Engels 1951). Finally, Mead’s early development of symbolic interactionism provided an important route to a different form of moral universalism (Mead 1967).

Durkheim, Emile. 1984. The division of labor in society. Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: Free Press.
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Durkheim argues that justice is necessary for every form of social solidarity. While it varies, like all morality does, with the solidarity requirements for a given social grouping, no society lacks an impulsion to justice. For modern societies and other social groups with an extensive division of labor, the individual becomes sacred. Social justice is therefore defined as “each individual [having] the place he merits and . . . rewarded according to his deserts.” Originally published in 1893.
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Durkheim, Emile. 1997. Suicide: A study in sociology. Translated by John Spaulding. New York: Free Press.
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Durkheim’s important work does not appear to concern the study of justice, but justice is foregrounded once again in the one of the most important and misunderstood concepts drawn from the book: anomic suicide. As Durkheim defines it, anomie is defined by the lack of many things in the individual’s experience of the world: foremost among them is the absence of a sense of justice. Originally published in 1897.
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Engels, Friedrich. 1951. The housing question. In Marx-Engels selected works. Vol. 1. 345–387. Moscow: Progress.
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Engels argues that there is no “eternal justice” that can serve as a benchmark for criticism of present social conditions. Meanings of “right, wrong and justice” are readily understood in everyday life, though they are hopelessly confused when discussed as abstractions. Thus, any study of justice must be rooted in a study of human practice. Originally published in 1858.
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Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A critique of political economy. 3 vols. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage.
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Marx’s epoch-making survey of the capitalist mode of production contains few references to justice, though his claims are important. Marx dismisses the notion of an “eternal justice” and argues that any notion of justice is only adequate to its mode of production. Justice is therefore a moral standard only in the context of the social relations that define a mode of production. Originally published 1867–1883.
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Mead, George Herbert. 1967. Mind, self and society. Edited by Charles Morris. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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While Mead wrote specifically about punitive justice, his insights about social justice and ethical universalism in this text cannot be overlooked. Taking the role of the other extends to the “ideal of human society” in which individuals who perform a specific role or function in society can take the “attitude of those whom they affect.” The social (phylogenetic) development here is equivalent to the individual’s (ontogenetic) development toward play. Originally published 1934.
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Simmel, Georg. 1971. Georg Simmel on individuality and social forms. Edited by Donald Levine. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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This edited volume features several of Simmel’s most important insights into the meaning of justice. The poor occupy our widest social circle—one we owe common moral duties to. Exchange was once defined culturally by a just price but subsequently develops into an objective structure removed from considerations of justice. The development of individuality involves a dialectical relationship between equality and inequality, and this provides the forum for justice evaluations.
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Spencer, Herbert. 1978. The principles of ethics: In two volumes. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics.
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Spencer’s ideas of justice are tied to his claims about social evolution and ontological individualism. A just condition is when someone receives what he or she deserves without depriving others of what they deserve. In this sense, a just society is not a condition for social justice. Instead, the latter refers to the cumulative presence of an “egoistic feeling” of deservingness in individuals. Originally published in 1878 and 1893 in two separate volumes.
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Weber, Max. 1946. The social psychology of the world religions. In From Max Weber. Edited by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 267–301. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Weber’s seminal essay features his materialist claim that “the fortunate” seek a right to their good fortune, in the sense that they deserve it, through religious forms of theodicy. He contrasts this with Nietzsche’s claim that an interest-based theory of ethics is rooted in the ressentiment of the powerless. For Weber, justice claims reflect the interest in merit of the powerful. For Nietzsche, justice claims reflect the interest in equality of the powerless. Originally published 1915.
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Weber, Max. 1968. Max Weber on charisma and institution building. Edited by S. N. Eisenstadt. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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This edited volume features several of Weber’s most important insights about justice and rationalization. As Weber argues, the conflict between substantive and formal justice arises from the growing distinction between the formal administration of laws and ethical considerations created by substantive justice meanings. Weber puts “popular justice, social justice, and khadi-justice” into this latter category.
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Social Theories of Justice

Social theories of justice share relatively little in common other than their commitment to make justice a function of an empirical process of some kind. This does not automatically make all social theorists of justice communitarians, although in philosophical terms the sociology of justice often lends itself to that side of the debate. Importantly, social theorists move beyond the restrictive terms of the liberal/communitarian divide in many important respects, showing the promise of at least partially replacing philosophical with sociological theories of justice.

Functionalism

A key premise of functionalism is that modern society is organized as a differentiated system held together by common values and the interdependence of a division of labor between role distinctions. Justice plays a pivotal role in modern value commitments, providing the centerpiece of the universalistic-achievement orientation to values in which rules and standards apply equally to individuals whose status in society is achieved not ascribed (Parsons 1951). Starting with Davis and Moore 1945 and its functionalist analysis of social inequality and the critical rebuttal in Tumin 1953, the question has been whether functionalism explains social inequality or justifies it. For Meyer 2001 this reveals that social inequality is fundamentally a functionalist category tied to modern institutional rules and scripts that are anchored in meanings of justice.

Davis, Kingsley, and Wilbert Moore. 1945. Some principles of stratification. American Sociological Review 10:242–249.
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Likely the most famous (or infamous) application of functionalist principles to social inequality, Davis and Moore argue that, as functional necessities, societies include a kind of sorting mechanism that distributes individuals according to their talents and motivations into roles that are unequally rewarded according to their functional importance to society.
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Meyer, John. 2001. The evolution of modern stratification systems. In Social stratification. Edited by David Grusky, 881–890. Boulder, CO: Westview.
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Meyer claims that the functionalist theory of inequality is not factually true of modern societies but is instead a cultural construction based on an interpretation of modern institutionalized rules. Functionalist stratification is thus a core cultural element of modern societies that is rooted in a shared understanding of social justice.
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Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The social system. New York: Free Press.
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Parsons describes the basic structure of social systems and pays particular attention to the processes of differentiation that characterize modern societies. For Parsons, social justice has a unifying effect on modern value commitments as one the few principles shared between what are otherwise increasingly differentiated value systems.
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Tumin, Melvin. 1953. Some principles of stratification: A critical analysis. American Sociological Review 18:387–394.
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Tumin’s critical response to Davis and Moore claims that the determination of functional importance is not objective and that highly stratified societies do a poor job discovering and rewarding the talents of individuals. In this sense, social inequalities decided by functional importance cannot be a proxy of social justice.
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Institutions

Institutions are the durable parts of society that structure our practices and beliefs. For the social theorists who link justice to institutions, the main claim is that our beliefs about justice enjoy a kind of non-negotiability and obviousness that removes them from individual decision making (Douglas 1986). Importantly, however, what strikes some as obvious is not so obvious to others but is instead patterned by different institutions (Friedland and Alford 1991). Mutual participation in different institutions with different meanings of justice creates dissonance in social actors (Rubinstein 1988). The implication here is that justice cannot be understood independently of institutions. The reverse is also true: institutions depend on meanings of justice (Meyer, et al. 1994).

Douglas, Mary. 1986. How institutions think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press.
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Douglas concludes that the meaning of justice varies according to institutions that correspond to different forms of social order. She claims that we must “offload” important moral decisions to institutions in order to decide what is just or unjust. Her case study of the “the Speluncean Explorers” is a masterful demonstration of the thesis.
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Douglas, Mary. 1993. Emotion and culture in theories of justice. Economy and Society 22:505–515.
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In this crisply written article, Douglas argues that institutional meanings of justice vary according to different conceptions of action and categories of the person. The latter in particular shapes attributive processes of responsibility that dictate blameworthiness.
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Friedland, Roger, and Robert Alford. 1991. Bringing society back in. In The new institutionalism in organizational analysis. Edited by Walter Powell and Paul Dimaggio, 232–267. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Friedland and Alford claim in their chapter that just as the central institutions in contemporary capitalist society shape individual and organizational interests and beliefs, they also shape meanings of justice. The meaning of justice varies between the multiple, incommensurable logics of the capitalist market, bureaucratic state, democracy, nuclear family and Christianity, and is similarly co-constructed by symbols and practices.
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Meyer, John, John Boli, and George Thomas. 1994. Ontology and rationalization in the Western cultural account. In Institutional environments and organizations. Edited by W. Richard Scott and John Meyer, 9–27. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE.
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This chapter argues that the high structuration of modern societies by institutionalized rules has profound implications for justice. All aspects of individual identity, choice and action are animated by an institutional system that relates them to collective purposes of justice. Meanings of justice are part of the “Western cultural account” that assigns legitimate moral resources such as rights, dignity, and values as properties of individuals.
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Rubinstein, David. 1988. The concept of justice in sociology. Theory and Society 17:527–550.
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Rubinstein critiques the dominance of equity in theories of distributive justice. Different societies—and different sectors of the same society—use different distributive schemes. The university institutionalizes meritocracy while the market does not, as it emphasizes entitlement instead. In this sense, distributive justice varies according to institutional structures not individual preferences.
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Culture

Culture is among the most useful and debated concepts in the social sciences. Applied to justice, it challenges inherited assumptions by revealing the multiplicity of justice meanings (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006) and the practices that help generate and create justice (Kurasawa 2007). If there is a commonality to cultural theories of justice it is that justice is irreducible to social relations or individual psychology and is instead created by meanings and practices that remain distinct from both (Alexander 2006). Justice as a distinct set of meanings and practices has unique effects on social action and social relations, distinguishable in this case from violence or pity (Boltanski 1999, Boltanski 2009).

Alexander, Jeffrey. 2006. The civil sphere. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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In this magisterial work, Alexander argues that the meaning of justice remains autonomous from what he calls the realism of Thrasymachus. Justice does not merely express the interests of the strongest. Instead, Alexander argues that justice is made possible by the “discourse of civil society” and the animating force it gives to moral concerns independent of social power.
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Boltanski, Luc. 1999. Distant suffering: Morality, media and politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Boltanski distinguishes justice from pity as a distinct response to suffering. The former is defined by a type of dualism that compares an ideal set of relationships with an actual set of relationships. To reorder society according to standards of justice requires that social relationships be mediatized by second order meanings, establishing principles of equivalence. Justice differs from pity as the latter involves sympathy with suffering instead of questions of desert.
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Boltanski, Luc. 2009. Love and justice as competences. London: Polity.
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Boltanski presents the clearest formulation of his approach to justice, arguing that it is a “competence,” distinct from love or violence, with which to order social relations. Where love values individuality regardless of merit, violence orders social reality by force. Justice, meanwhile, constructs social order on the basis of agreement, bringing proofs to bear on judgments and proposing tests that fairly distinguish better from worst.
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Boltanski, Luc. 2011. On critique: A sociology of emancipation. London: Polity.
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Boltanski develops the orders of worth framework further, focusing in particular on the concept of test. Tests are fundamental to the creation of social inequalities through orders of worth. Fair tests are those that structure inequalities according to legitimate criteria (knowledge, physical strength, aesthetic beauty). Unfair tests are those corrupted by the influence of criteria not legitimate within a specific order (financial worth). According to Boltanski, unfair tests precipitate judgments of social injustice.
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Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thevenot. 2006. On Justification: Economies of Worth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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In this groundbreaking work, Boltanski and Thevenot argue that the meaning of justice varies according to “orders of worth” that define a just social ordering between objects and persons. The authors use an innovative comparison of contemporary business management texts with classic philosophical texts to identify six orders of worth in contemporary society, each featuring its own justice model and presence in everyday life through actors’ “critical capacities”: civic, market, inspired, fame, industrial, and domestic.
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Kurasawa, Fuyuki. 2007. The work of global justice: Human rights as practices. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511619465Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Kurasawa’s highly original book argues that justice and human rights have been plagued by a far too idealist or formalist definition. He argues instead that they are best conceived as an ensemble of emancipatory practices. He describes five such practices: bearing witness, forgiveness, preventative foresight, aid, and solidarity.
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Sources of Justice

Lacking the overall coherence of culture or institutionalist claims, these arguments emphasize instead a variety of sources of justice. The attention here is less on the specific meaning of justice beliefs than where justice as a moral construct comes from. The arguments range from transcendent experiences (Joas 2001) to biology (Moore 1978), discursive action (Maynard and Manzo 1993), personhood (Sayer 2005), and class relations (Wright 1997).

Joas, Hans. 2001. The genesis of values. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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In this important book, Joas takes on several theories of the origin of morality and posits his own. The “subjective impression that something is of value” is rooted in experiences of self-transcendence and self-formation. In this sense, justice is a value judgment that ultimately has experiential origins.
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Maynard, Douglas, and John Manzo. 1993. On the sociology of justice: Theoretical notes from an actual jury deliberation. Sociological Theory 11:171–193.
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Analyzing justice from an ethnomethodological point of view, Maynard and Manzo argue that it involves the construction of perceivable order. In their case study of a jury deliberation, justice emerges in the talk of jurors trying to determine the fate of a criminal defendant. An injustice is first defined, with justice subsequently entering the discussion as its corrective, restoring order. The authors argue against treating justice as something exogenous to concerted activities such as jury deliberations or social movements.
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Moore, Barrington. 1978. Injustice: The social bases of obedience and revolt. New York: M. E. Sharpe.
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Moore roots expressions of injustice in human nature. Arguing for the universal presence of moral preferences, he claims that across different societies and cultures unjust situations provoke a similar response of moral outrage. Moore finds that punishment for transgression, the division of labor between desirable and undesirable forms of work, and the distribution of a society’s resources are almost always occasions for the expression of injustice regardless of social or cultural differences.
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Sayer, Andrew. 2005. The moral significance of class. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511488863Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Sayer defends what he calls a “qualified ethical naturalist” approach to morality. While certain human characteristics such as normative concerns are universal, they vary in their cultural expression. Among these is the sense of justice, which is invariably mixed in with our evaluations and motives for action. This is particularly true in relationship to social class and the phenomenon of “moral luck.”
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Wright, Erik Olin. 1997. Class counts. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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The opening chapter is perhaps Wright’s clearest exposition of his influential approach to class analysis. Most notable is his treatment of exploitation. Exploitation is defined as the dependence of the welfare of one social class on the “effort” expended by another social class. As Wright explains, this does not prejudge the justice or injustice of exploitation, although it helps explain why exploitation often seems unjust.
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Critical Theories

While sharing much in common with theorists in the other camps, critical theories of justice attempt to articulate a notion of justice that is adapted (or adaptable) to the critique of present social conditions. Important considerations here are the difference between principles (Fraser 1995), procedures and practices of justice (Habermas 1984, Fraser and Honneth 2004), and the new challenges presented by a form of justice that is global in scale and inclusive of difference (Fraser 2010, Kurasawa 2009). Alternative practices retrievable from archives different from those supplied by liberalism or Europe provide new critical resources for thinking about justice (Gandhi 2006).

Fraser, Nancy. 1995. From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a ‘post-socialist’ age. New Left Review 212:68–93.
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Fraser argues that contemporary social movements for justice focus more on recognitions of collective identities based on race and gender, whereas prior movements focused on redistribution of resources based on social class. Fraser argues that treating these as separate tendencies presents a false antithesis. For collective identities such as race and gender, the combination of deconstruction in culture and socialism in economics makes it possible to restore both redistribution and recognition as part of the same pursuit of social justice.
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Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the “post-socialist” condition. New York: Routledge.
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This volume of essays provides an introduction to Fraser’s efforts to reposition the meaning of justice in the wake of what she calls “post-socialism,” a condition lacking a credible progressive alternative to the present capitalist order and that features a shift in the basic grammar of political claims making: from redistribution to recognition.
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Fraser, Nancy. 2010. Scales of justice: Reimagining political space in a globalizing world. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
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Fraser reframes justice for a “post-Westphalian world” of globalization and transnational social movements. Retaining the redistribution and recognition duality of social justice, she adds “representation” as a third dimension in a globalized context. This focuses on questions of who counts as legitimate subjects of justice. Fraser emphasizes that a critical theory of justice must target particular framings of justice that privilege only a limited range of subjectivities.
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Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. 2004. Redistribution or recognition? A political-philosophical exchange. London: Verso.
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This influential volume revolves around Fraser’s effort to reconcile recognition and redistribution. Honneth argues that while Fraser is correct to emphasize recognition as a critical ingredient for social justice, she relies too heavily on social movements of identity politics to define the concept. By contrast, he claims that recognition is more adequately theorized in relation to social suffering, which better captures its stakes for social injustice and its motivational resources for political resistance.
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Gandhi, Leela. 2006. Affective communities: Anticolonial thought, fin-de-siecle radicalism and the politics of friendship. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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Gandhi’s influential work synthesizes insights from deconstructionism and postcolonial theory to argue that friendship provides a better ethics for generating solidarity in a globalized world than justice. Liberal conceptions of justice are predicated upon a moral agency that is autonomous and self-sufficient. By contrast, Gandhi uses an analysis of late Victorian anti-imperialism to recover a radically different form of moral agency for creating a global ethics: “hybridity.”
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Habermas, Jurgen. 1984. The theory of communicative action: Reason and the rationalization of society. Vol. 1. Boston: Beacon.
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Habermas’s masterwork argues that modern notions of justice develop through learning processes involving the adaptation of normative structures to emergent problems created by social systems. The injustice of individual suffering develops from the clash between normative structures developed in tribal societies and new social realities created in class societies. The rationalization potential of ethical discourses such as justice is shaped by social conditions that allow for (or prevent) the effectiveness of communicative action.
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Habermas, Jurgen. 1998. A genealogical analysis of the cognitive content of morality. In Inclusion of the other: Studies in political theory. By Jurgen Habermas, 3–49. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
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Arguably the definitive discussion of Habermas’s influential approach to discourse ethics, here he claims that justice, not sympathy or trust, is all that can hold complex societies together. Furthermore, in the absence of religion or metaphysics, communicative agreement is the only remaining resource on which the moral obligations of justice can draw.
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Kurasawa, Fuyuki. 2009. Global justice as ethico-political labor and the enactment of critical cosmopolitanism. Rethinking Marxism 21:85–102.
DOI: 10.1080/08935690802542457Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A closely argued summary of Kurasawa’s book, here he links his focus on justice as practice to efforts at creating an alternative globalization.
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Social Psychology of Justice

The social psychology of justice is the only branch of the sociology of justice that can be said to resemble “normal science.” Rooted in experimental methods and a core set of concepts (Adams 1965, Hegtvedt and Clay-Warner 2008), the field has identified four distinct types of justice: distributive (Homans 1961, Jasso 1980), procedural (Lind and Tyler 1988, Thibaut and Walker 1975), interactional (Bies and Moag 1986) and reciprocal (Molm, et al. 1993). While each of these types of justice has its own specific meanings and conditions, they all consist of cognitions, perceptions, and affects instead of abstract principles (Hegtvedt 2006). The social psychology of justice makes a strong claim to reveal underlying unities in the sense of justice found universally across different topical domains (Jasso 1980, Adams 1965, Homans 1961).

Adams, J. Stacy. 1965. Inequity in social exchange. In Advances in experimental social psychology. Edited by Leonard Berkowitz, 267–297. New York: Academic.
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In this frequently cited paper, Adams claims that justice, or equity (used interchangeably), consists in matching outcomes to inputs. In dyadic relationships, participants experience a feeling of injustice and deprivation when the ratio of their outcomes to inputs and the ratio of the other person’s outcomes to inputs are unequal.
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Bies, R. J., and J. S. Moag. 1986. Interactional justice: Communication criteria of fairness. In Research on negotiation in organizations. Edited by R. J. Lewicki, B. H. Sheppard, and M. Bazerman, 43–55. Greenwich, CT: JAI.
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Bies and Moag develop a type of justice evaluation distinct from procedural or distributive justice known as “interactional justice.” This concerns a perception of fairness generated by communication and interaction protocols, not simply during arbitration, conflict resolution, or resource distribution but in everyday interactions. People have minimal expectations for considerate treatment regarding the conveyance of respect and accounts given for decisions that affect them that generates a distinct sense of justice.
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Hegtvedt, Karen. 2006. Justice frameworks. In Contemporary social psychological theories. Edited by Peter Burke, 45–70. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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This useful overview of theories of justice in social psychology summarizes research on cognitive, emotional, and situational factors shaping justice evaluations between both perceivers and reactants to justice evaluations.
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Hegtvedt, Karen, and Jody Clay-Warner, eds. 2008. Advances in group processes. Vol. 25, Justice. Bingley, UK: Emerald.
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Offers a comprehensive overview of the range of social-psychological theories of justice. Of particular interest is the final chapter by Markovsky, et al. that debates the relative merits of modularity versus integration in developing theories of justice.
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Homans, George. 1961. Social behavior: Its elementary forms. New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich.
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Homans’s foundational text starts with a simple thesis: just distribution equals the rewards of each person proportional to his or her costs. While there can be differences in what counts as a contribution, distributive justice always entails a comparison of contributions that each party makes with the rewards that he or she receives. Homans further disassembles the distress experienced by injustice into specific emotions corresponding to under reward, over reward, and equitable reward.
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Jasso, Gullermina. 1980. A new theory of distributive justice. American Sociological Review 45:3–32.
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This seminal article offers a mathematical formulation for distilling a basic framework for justice evaluations. Jasso calls this the “Comparison Ratio.” A justice evaluation (JE) is equal to ln (actual share of good/just share of good). Jasso distinguishes between the unequal possession of quality goods (e.g., fame) versus quantity goods (e.g., money) as having unique sets of consequences for justice evaluations and the effect of social discontent.
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Lind, E. Allan, and Tom Tyler. 1988. The social psychology of procedural justice. New York: Plenum.
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Lind and Tyler’s book offers a comprehensive overview of procedural justice as a theory and group process. Of particular interest are the chapters on organizational procedural justice and the successful application of procedural justice principles to work organizations. The authors conclude by distinguishing two basic models of procedural justice: a self-interest model and a group-value model.
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Molm, Linda, Theron Quist, and Philip Wiseley. 1993. Reciprocal justice and strategies of exchange. Social Forces 72:19–44.
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Molm and her co-authors investigate reciprocation instead of allocation in the distribution of power strategies within exchange networks. Reciprocal justice is distinct from distributive, procedural, or interactional justice, involving an actor’s contributions to an exchange and whether the object of exchange is “returned in kind and degree by the exchange partner.” When situated in power-balanced exchange networks, actors find nonreciprocal and punishment-based power strategies less just than reciprocal and reward-based power strategies.
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Thibaut, John, and Laurens Walker. 1975. Procedural justice: A psychological analysis. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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This foundational text argues that individuals are less concerned with fairness of the outcome of a dispute than they are with the procedures used to reach that outcome. Thibaut and Walker distinguish procedural from distributive justice. An important aspect of procedural justice is the relative power possessed by third parties to disputing parties. This plays a different role during a “process” phase of procedural negotiation then it does during a “decision” phase.
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Contexts of Justice

Empirical analysis of the contexts of justice shares many features with the social psychology of justice, though importantly the research here attempts to capture varying degrees of specificity in the types of justice claims that actors make. Culture, institutions, discourse (Lamont and Thevenot 2000), traditions (Bellah, et al. 1985), and social context more broadly provide a toolkit of concepts with which to approach the contextual examination of the meaning of justice (Elster 1995). If there is a common theme running throughout this research, it is that justice has many specific definitions, all of them shaped by processes operating at meso or micro levels that shape the perceptions and beliefs of individuals. Some of these are “local” institutions (Elster 1992); others are fields (Strand 2015) or contexts of deliberation (Lamont 2009, Nonet and Selznick 1978). Sociospatial relations (Harvey 1973) and micro-processes of interaction (Della Fave 1986) have also been discussed as contexts of justice.

Bellah, Robert, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton. 1985. Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American life. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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In this important and ambitious work, Bellah and his co-authors trace the foundations of moral culture in American life. They argue that while there is broad consensus among Americans on procedural questions of justice, the meaning of distributive and substantive justice reveals deeply rooted differences ultimately patterned by the predominant traditions that shape the central strands of all American moral culture: biblical, republican, and individualist.
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Della Fave, Richard. 1986. Toward an explication of legitimation processes. Social Forces 65:476–500.
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Della Fave’s work focuses on how social interaction imposes standards of evaluation. An individual’s position in society is determined by his or her interactions with its principal institutions, more specifically his or her interactions with the individuals who are the “face” of those institutions. During these interactions, norms and reward structures are imposed with which the individual must cope. Justice can serve as the basis for the interactional formation of counternorms that challenge the imposed standards.
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Elster, Jon. 1992. Local justice: How institutions allocate scarce goods and burdens. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
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Elster focuses on the process of allocation and claims that a variety of autonomous, local, decentralized institutions allocate scarce goods, resources, and burdens. He focuses on three case studies in his analysis: college admission, organ transplants, and selection of workers for layoffs. In each of these situations, allocative systems characterized by a “local” meaning of justice shapes decision making about the distribution of scarce goods and undesirable burdens.
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Elster, Jon, ed. 1995. Local justice in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
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This edited volume features several case studies of local justice processes at work in a variety of allocation decisions: college admission, organ transplant allocation, layoffs, and immigration. In his concluding chapter, Elster claims that equality plays less of a role in local justice institutions than does efficiency, though the former remains the centerpiece of liberal theories of justice.
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Harvey, David. 1973. Social justice and the city. Athens, GA: Univ. of Georgia Press.
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In this frequently cited text, Harvey argues that social justice beliefs are not drawn from abstractions but are contingent instead on social processes operating in society as a whole. He reveals how liberal justice notions such as need, merit, and contribution to the common good are borne out in spatial terms by a variety of neighborhood practices.
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Lamont, Michele. 2009. How professors think: Inside the curious world of academic judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.4159/9780674054158Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this innovative study, Lamont reveals that while academics largely eschew notions of absolute truth, they remain committed to standards of excellence. More surprising is the agreement among academics that often accompanies such judgments. Justice concerns are ubiquitous in academic judgments, though without a universal standard. For example, panelists deciding about research funding creatively forge a sense of justice through deliberation. They make compromises between need and merit in specific cases.
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Lamont, Michele, and Laurent Thevenot, eds. 2000. Rethinking comparative sociology: Repertoires of evaluation in France and the United States. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This edited volume features a variety of applications of the orders of worth paradigm. It also establishes the comparative appeal of this framework by focusing on case studies of evaluative processes between France and the United States. Chapters on racism and sexual harassment will likely appeal most to justice scholars.
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Nonet, Phillippe, and Philip Selznick. 1978. Law and society in transition: Toward responsive law. New York: Transaction.
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The United States has traditionally been defined by an expansive legal system and discourse. Nonet and Selznick see this increasing in the wake of civil rights legislation. Distinguishing between three types of law—repressive, autonomous, and responsive—they argue for the merits of the latter, claiming that responsive law is rooted in procedural justice: this ensures that the decision-making processes that affect inequality outcomes are just.
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Strand, Michael. 2015. The genesis and structure of moral universalism: Social justice in Victorian Britain, 1834–1901. Theory and Society 44:537–573.
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Strand traces the origins of contemporary social justice beliefs to Victorian Britain. From narrowly moralized views of poverty at the beginning of the century, the object of moral beliefs shifted toward social inequality by the end, leading to the formulation of universalist principles such as “equality of opportunity.” Strand claims that it is misleading to think that social justice consists of these principles. It consists, rather, of the mode of experience that contingently lends these principles universal significance.
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Meritocracy and its Discontents

If there has been one wildly influential idea produced by the sociology of justice, it is undoubtedly meritocracy. Coined in 1958 by Young 1958 in the author’s backward-looking “possible history,” the term has been used both positively and pejoratively by sociologists and others to describe postwar society in Europe, North America, and elsewhere (Bell 1972, Lasch 1995). The discussion here ranges from the welfare state (Guetzkow 2010), to civil rights (Dobbin 2009), affirmative action (Berrey 2015), and education admissions (Karabel 2006). While the discussion is largely critical, it is difficult to say whether the goal is ultimately to replace meritocracy or “equality of opportunity” with an alternative guiding ideal (Swift 2004, Lasch 1995)

Bell, Daniel. 1972. On meritocracy and equality. Public Interest 29:29–68.
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Bell’s survey canvasses a wide variety of philosophical views of equality and meritocracy. He pays particular attention to the evolution of liberal thinking that culminated in Rawls’s Theory of Justice (see Rawls 1971, cited under Philosophical Theories of Justice). Bell claims that, ideally, a just meritocracy would recognize different kinds of inequality that correspond to social and moral differences between various social spheres. In this sense, it is possible to prioritize the disadvantaged in policy without discouraging the best from rising to the top.
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Berrey, Ellen. 2015. The enigma of diversity: The language of race and the limits of racial justice. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226246376.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Berrey draws from fieldwork and historical research to argue that policies focused on increasing racial diversity have had the effect of greater inclusiveness, but they do little to tackle the underlying causes of racial inequality. Their benefits tend to be confined to a small proportion of elites. In this sense, diversity policy might only preclude the more “radical race-class transformation” that social justice in this arena ultimately requires.
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Dobbin, Frank. 2009. Inventing equal opportunity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Equal opportunity is arguably the fundamental theme in contemporary definitions of social justice. In this book, Dobbin shows that while civil rights legislation was rooted in the idea, equal opportunity became the tool of personnel managers in large corporate firms following the Civil Rights Act in 1964. It was they who defined a legal order and grievance procedures internal to corporations that ultimately determined what equal opportunity means in practice.
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Guetzkow, Joshua. 2010. Beyond deservingness: Congressional discourse on poverty, 1964–1996. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 629:173–197.
DOI: 10.1177/0002716209357404Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Guetzkow reveals how “deservingness” explains little about differences in social welfare policy. More important are how the causes of poverty and the nature of the poor are framed by elites. In the 1960s the poor were helpless victims of discrimination and economic changes. In the 1990s they were rational actors lacking the values to make responsible choices. This framing difference made possible the welfare reform passed by the US Congress in 1996 that significantly reduced welfare availability.
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Karabel, Jerome. 2006. The chosen: The hidden history of admissions and exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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In Karabel’s landmark history, Ivy League admissions become a protracted arena of conflict over the definition of “merit.” In 1900, merit meant knowledge of a traditional curriculum. In 1950, it meant intellectual gifts and talents. After the 1960s revolts, it changed again to include diversity. This is not random, however. For Karabel, changes in the meaning of merit in admission decisions correspond to changing power relations among social groups in society at large.
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Lasch, Christopher. 1995. The revolt of the elites and the betrayal of democracy. New York: Norton.
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In Lasch’s final work, he claims that meritocracy has contributed to the abandonment of the 19th-century vision of a classless society, as social mobility into a higher class has come to define the meaning of social justice. The “aristocracy of talent” created by meritocracy has produced individualist and competitive elites who lack the noblesse oblige and sense of public responsibility that were the virtues of a traditional aristocracy.
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Swift, Adam. 2004. Would perfect mobility be perfect? European Sociological Review 20:1–11.
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Swift’s provocative article argues that the ideal of equality of opportunity, when combined with sociological research on inequality, points to an implausible solution to growing inequality: abolishing the family. Clearly this is not a solution, but Swift uses it to reveal implicit normative standards in social mobility and inequality research, ultimately concluding that social justice does not require complete equality of opportunity.
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Young, Michael. 1958. Rise of the meritocracy. London: Thames and Hudson.
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Young’s satirical masterpiece argues that the meritocracy has its roots in the late 19th century and took definitive shape after the Second World War with the advent of comprehensive schools in the UK. Tracing this development until the year 2033, he argues that the meritocracy eventually precipitates a revolution, fueled by those who perceive injustice because they lack merit in the merit-based system.
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Public Beliefs about Justice

One of the more interesting and neglected branches of the sociology of justice is the study of public beliefs about justice, particularly in relation to social inequality. While Runciman 1966 pioneered the first of these studies in England in the early 1960s, efforts to uncover what the general public believes about social justice have been relatively infrequent (but see Hochschild 1981), at least until recently (Marshall, et al. 1999; Prasad, et al. 2009; McCall 2012). Given the heightened appeal of social inequality, the subfield seems one of the more promising growth areas in the sociology of justice. In addition, it is one of the few areas that draws concepts from all of the different branches of the sociology of justice: social psychology, philosophy, and the more contextual understanding of justice claims. While survey methods remain the dominant approach (Kluegel, et al. 1995; Osberg and Smeeding 2006), interviews have also proven resourceful in this area (Lamont 2000)

Hochschild, Jennifer. 1981. What’s fair? American beliefs about distributive justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Hochschild’s influential book claims that American beliefs about distributive justice are characterized by ambivalence. This is rooted in the fact that Americans apply different principles of distributive justice to different domains in society. In the political and private domains, equality reigns; in the economic domain, just deserts and unequal differentiation are predominant.
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Kluegel, James, David Mason, and Bernd Wegener, eds. 1995. Social justice and political change: Public opinion in capitalist and post-capitalist states. New York: Transaction.
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This edited volume draws from an ambitious data-gathering project: surveying 1200 respondents in both capitalist and “post-capitalist” societies to determine what they believe about social justice. While people in all societies hold contradictory beliefs about social justice, those in the capitalist West endorse the equity principle that legitimate inequalities grow out of market exchange. For those in the post-capitalist East, an emphasis on need replaces this view of market equity.
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Lamont, Michele. 2000. The dignity of working men: Morality and the boundaries of race, class and immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Lamont’s influential book uses interview data to find that morality in “working class worlds” corresponds with the effort to find identity and self-worth through hard work. White workers tend to stress self-discipline, while black workers emphasize a caring identity. Importantly, Lamont finds that distributive justice evaluations by workers emphasize morals as a more important marker of worth than money, even for the rich.
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Marshall, Gordon, Adam Swift, David Routh, and Carole Burgoyne. 1999. What is and what ought to be: Popular beliefs about distributive justice in thirteen countries. European Sociological Review 15:349–367.
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordjournals.esr.a018270Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Marshall and his co-authors find that public support for principles of desert in distributive justice evaluations do not vary between market and non-market societies. Sampling a population of thirteen countries before 1989, the authors find that people in eastern European countries were nearly as likely to support desert and meritocratic principles as those in western Europe and the United States. The main difference is that non-market societies had higher expectations for the state to deliver distributive justice.
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McCall, Leslie. 2012. The undeserving rich: American beliefs about inequality, opportunity and redistribution. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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In this timely work, McCall uses survey data to reveal that American beliefs about inequality are contingent upon the perception of equal and open opportunity. Income inequality is relatively unjust to Americans if they believe that economic opportunities are open to all. This means that the rich are deserving. By contrast, income inequality is most objectionable when it is believed to decrease opportunity for economic advancement. This means that the rich are undeserving.
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Osberg, Lars, and Timothy Smeeding. 2006. “Fair” inequality? Attitudes to pay differentials: The United States in comparative perspective. American Sociological Review 71:450–473.
DOI: 10.1177/000312240607100305Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Osberg and Smeeding find that America’s inequality “exceptionalism”—the claim that Americans are more accepting of inequality than people in other countries—is only partially true. Americans are not exceptional with regard to “do earn/should earn” comparisons. However, there is strong polarization in attitudes about the justness of income leveling. Americans also tend to underestimate top-end incomes and show less concern with a “social minimum” than people in other countries.
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Prasad, Monica, Andrew Perrin, Kieran Bezila, et al. 2009. The undeserving rich: “Moral values” and the white working class. Sociological Forum 24:225–253.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1573-7861.2009.01098.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Prasad and her co-authors find that moral evaluations of wealthy political candidates by Americans are not structured by distributive justice, but by non-economic moral frameworks that resonate with particular voting demographics. The authors find that even when given information about the unequal benefits of certain economic policies, voters’ preferences do not change. Moral values still resonate more than potential economic gains when evaluating political candidates.
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Runciman, W. G. 1966. Relative deprivation and social justice: A study of attitudes to social inequality in twentieth century England. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Runciman’s classic work was among the first to systematically sample moral beliefs about social inequality and social justice. Runciman finds that people’s assessment of social inequality is largely contingent on a small set of social comparisons which produce a sense of relative deprivation. He further tests how closely this perception matches the reality of what is actually unjust by developing a theory of social justice based on absolute deprivations.
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Justice and Social Movements

The study of justice in social movements has a long and somewhat controversial history. It has played a role in most of the major conceptual developments that have taken place in the field. Notably, it has been closely linked with the concept of framing (Benford and Snow 2000), and the debate here has concerned whether all social movement frames are, in fact, “injustice frames” of some kind (Gamson, et al. 1982; Gamson 1992). Justice plays an important role in cognition, senses of empowerment, and the repertoires deployed by social movement actors (McAdam 1982; Tilly 1977; Jasper 1997). Justice has also been deeply intertwined with the renewed focus on emotion in the field (Goodwin and Jasper 2006; Goodwin, et al. 2009). The sense of injustice is among the most powerful emotional resources from which social movements draw sustenance. This is true for conservative and progressive movements alike (McVeigh, et al. 2014).

Benford, Robert, and David Snow. 2000. Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment. Annual Review of Sociology 26:611–639.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.611Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Benford and Snow’s frequently cited article challenges Gamson’s sweeping claim that all collective action frames are injustice frames. Categorizing injustice frames as “diagnostic” frames and thus distinct from prognostic and motivational frames, Benford and Snow question whether an injustice frame needs to be elaborated for certain movements, though they concede that injustice frames are ubiquitous in movements seeking political and economic change.
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Gamson, William. 1992. Talking politics. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Gamson’s classic work argues that a strong injustice component in political consciousness is one of the most vital supports for collective action mobilization. Revealing the presence of injustice frames in everyday conversation, the media, political discourse, and in the discourse of social movement actors, Gamson argues that injustice is the critical catalyst in bringing other elements to bear on collective action. This leads him to conclude that, in some sense, all collective action frames are injustice frames.
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Gamson, William, Bruce Fireman, and Steve Rytina. 1982. Encounters with unjust authority. Dorsey, IL: Dorsey.
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This influential work introduces “injustice frames” as part of social movement mobilization. Using an innovative experimental design, Gamson and his co-authors argue that injustice frames apply an interpretation to authority systems that defines them as untrustworthy, unreasonable, or unjust in some way. This, in turn, provides sufficient reason for subordinates to engage in actions of resistance and noncompliance.
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Goodwin, Jeff, and James Jasper. 2006. Emotions and social movements. In Handbook of the sociology of emotions. Edited by Jonathan Turner and Jan Stets, 611–635. New York: Springer.
DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-30715-2_27Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Goodwin and Jasper’s chapter argues that the emotional component of social movements has been neglected in favor of its more cognitive dimensions. As they argue, injustice frames are not simply cognitive constructs but pivotal resources for generating the strong “moral emotions” that motivate and maintain involvement in social movement organizations.
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Goodwin, Jeff, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta eds. 2009. Passionate politics: Emotions and social movements. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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This edited volume provides a variety of perspectives on the role of emotions in social movements. Of particular interest is the treatment of injustice as a cultural construct with powerful emotional resonance. Different contributors dispute whether social psychology or psychoanalysis provides the more adequate psych model for explaining why.
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Jasper, James. 1997. The art of moral protest: Culture, biography and creativity in social movements. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226394961.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Jasper argues that most of the elements involved in the successful emergence of collective action are saturated with emotion. Injustice frames depend on the emotional force they can arouse in order to motivate social movement involvement. Standards of justice are also highly variable, and the sense of rightness and good they create contributes to the creativity of movement repertoires.
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McAdam, Doug. 1982. Political process and the development of black insurgency, 1930–1970. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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McAdam’s influential work introduces the important concept of “cognitive liberation” and situates it within his political process model of mobilization. As McAdam claims, individuals may submit to oppressive conditions indefinitely unless those conditions are defined as both unjust and subject to change. As a function of perceived injustice and a sense of collective efficacy, cognitive liberation often triggers collective mobilization.
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McVeigh, Rory, Kraig Beyerlein, Burrel Vann Jr., and Priyamvada Trivedi. 2014. Educational segregation, Tea Party organizations, and battles over distributive justice. American Sociological Review 79:630–652.
DOI: 10.1177/0003122414534065Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
McVeigh and his co-authors reveal the structural context for the kinds of shared values that can contribute to conservative social movement mobilization. In American counties with high levels of residential segregation by educational level, support for the conservative Tea Party is strong among individuals with a college education. In this context, these individuals are predisposed to making distributive justice evaluations that favor retrenchment of state welfare, believing that equal opportunity is a reality in the United States and that anyone can “make it” through hard work.
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Tilly, Charles. 1977. From mobilization to revolution. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
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Tilly’s seminal work argues that the standards of rights and justice that are present in a given population play a critical role in the development of collective action repertoires for social movements. These prevailing standards dictate the acceptability of the components of repertoires, though importantly they do not directly govern particular forms of action.