ABSTRACT

Employer-employee relations are charged. The foregoing dialogue brims with themes of power and deference, loyalty and fairness, paternalism and rebellion. Employers include households, self-employing individuals, and organizations built around nonmarket goals as well. The social formation of employer objectives plays out in battles for the souls of middle managers. Capitalist firms and other employers, like any recipients of value, pursue objectives of quality, efficiency, and power. Employers who make hiring, promotion, and firing decisions draw on stereotypes of African-Americans as hostile, immigrants as industrious, and women as physically weak, among many others. Power is particularly invisible, but nonetheless present, in employers’ self-described objectives. Employers frame many of their interests in terms of some variant of organizational maintenance. Organizational maintenance not only shores up the status quo within the organization but also connects to systems of status and power that extend beyond a particular employer.