ABSTRACT

This chapter examines societal impacts on worker's opportunities to negotiate employment conditions. It considers three prerogatives workers require to successfully negotiate an i-deal and by exploring the forms prerogatives take in other countries compared with the United States. Idiosyncratic arrangements may have different content, symbolic value, and social significance in work settings located in different countries a topic for future cross-national research on i-deals. Arrangements gives some workers different perks and benefits than their peers can generate an array of reactions among colleagues, from indifference, to protest, to the desire to get themselves an even better deal. As Robert Frank has cogently argued, people may be programmed in an evolutionary sense to "'feel bad' when we are not as well-off as our peers". The standardized social guarantees societies provides workers can reduce the need for i-deals. When society's norms promote equality and downplay differences, workers will accept fewer legitimate reasons for differences in employment conditions.