Psychosocial Harm as an Inequality Regime at Work
Intersectional Accounts From Portugal
Bibliographic Data
This article examines psychosocial harm at work as a sociological problem of inequality rather than only an issue of individual stress. Drawing on Acker's concept of inequality regimes together with minority stress and intersectionality, and based on 60 in‐depth interviews with workers in Portugal, it analyses how overload, insecurity, work‐family conflict, poor leadership, and weak reporting systems are organized through gendered, heteronormative, racialized, and migration‐related relations of power. Reflexive thematic analysis developed three themes: the organization of harm through workload, insecurity, and leadership; recognition, legitimacy, and the cost of difference; and conditional belonging through redress, informal networks, and compounded exclusion. Across these themes, diversity initiatives organized around single categories left a structural gap for workers marginalized on several dimensions at once. Psychosocial harm was not evenly distributed but produced through labor‐process intensification, unequal legitimacy, conditional belonging, and the individualization of coping. Diversity and well‐being initiatives offered limited protection when unsupported by workload regulation, accountable management, and credible mechanisms of redress. The article contributes to sociology of work debates through an integrative framework that links inequality regimes and minority stress as complementary levels of a single account of psychosocial harm, showing how the proximal mechanisms of minority stress operate through the organisational arrangements that inequality regimes analysis identifies, and how recovery, credibility, and redress come to be distributed unequally through those arrangements across workers' intersecting positions. Workplace well‐being, on this account, requires structural reforms designed around workers' unequal and intersectional exposure to risk.
diversity initiatives · employee well-being · Gender · Heteronormativity · inequality regimes · informal networks · Intersectionality · Job insecurity · Migration · Minority stress · poor leadership · Portugal · Race · Redress · reporting systems · work-family conflict · Workload · Employment, Labor, and Gender Studies · Gender Diversity and Inequality · Workplace Health and Well-being
Contesting the Corporation
Economic Crisis, Quality of Work, and Social Integration
Covered by Equality
Thematic Analysis
Structural stigma
The Time Bind
Consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative research (Coreq)
The Job Demands‐Resources model
Parental Leave Policies, Gender Equity and Family Well-Being in Europe
Axes and fluidity of oppression in the workplace
Intersectionality and precarious subjectivities
Liberalised dualisation. Labour market reforms and the crisis in Portugal
Snowball sampling
The Theory and Praxis of Intersectionality in Work and Organisations
Belonging and the politics of belonging
Contradictions of Capital and Care
Gay men at work
Mapping the Margins
Revealing Intersectional Dynamics in Organizations
Complexity Theory, Systems Theory, and Multiple Intersecting Social Inequalities
Sample Size in Qualitative Interview Studies
Concealment of a Sexual Minority Identity in the Workplace
Inequality Regimes in Coworking Spaces
Relational Responsibilisation and Diversity Management in the 21st Century
Conceptualising Work as a 'Safe Space' for Negotiating LGBT Identities
Experiencing Gender Regimes
The Many Faces of Gender Inequality at Work
Intersectionality
Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies
Inequality Regimes
Sexuality in the Workplace
Getting a Job
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