The Power of Transparency
Evidence from a British Workplace Survey
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4522232 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jake Rosenfeld (Washington University in St. Louis, corresponding author), P Denice (0000-0002-7997-8313, University of Washington) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 80 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 1045-1068 |
| Publication date | 2015-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Sociological Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-1224 • E-ISSN: 1939-8271 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0003122415597019 |
| OpenAlex | W2235688199 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 15 |
| References cited | 33 |
Does the dissemination of organizational financial information shift power dynamics within workplaces, as evidenced by increasing workers' wages? That is the core question of this investigation. We utilize the 2004 and 2011 series of the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) to test whether employees who report that their managers disclose workplace financial data earn more than otherwise similar workers not privy to such information. Our findings suggest that disclosure results in higher wages for workers after adjusting for profit and productivity levels and a range of other workplace and worker characteristics. We estimate that workers who report their managers are "very good" at sharing organizational financial information outearn those who report their managers are "very poor" at financial disclosure by between 8 and 12 percent. We argue that disclosure is a key resource that reduces information asymmetries, thereby providing legitimacy to workers' claims in wage bargaining. More broadly, our focus on managerial transparency and its effects on worker earnings reveals a largely ignored characteristic of modern workplaces that has implications for contemporary trends in inequality and wage stagnation in Great Britain and other liberal market economies
Bargaining power · Business · Collective bargaining · Earnings · Economic growth · Economics · Labour economics · Legitimacy · Management · Political science · Productivity · Transparency (behavior · Wage · Accounting · Gender Diversity and Inequality · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Industrial relations · Labor Movements and Unions
Modern Slavery Disclosure Regulation and Global Supply Chains
Tracing two faces of extended visibility
Organizations as the building blocks of social inequalities
Power at a distance
Fairness uncertainty and pay information exchange
Don’t ask or tell
Equal Wage for Equal Work? Gender Wage Equality in Diverse Labour Market Contexts
Why Has Computerization Increased Wage Inequality? Information, Occupational Structural Power, and Wage Inequality
The class dynamics of income shares
Watercooler Democracy
Health Power Resources Theory
Toward a Sociology of Privacy
Is The Sky the Limit? Fair Executive Pay as Performance Rises
Pay talk in contemporary workplaces
Workplace financial transparency and Job distress
What Unions No Longer Do
Relational Inequality
Bringing the Firms Back in
A Relational Theory of Earnings Inequality
Human Resources from an Organizational Behavior Perspective
Does Firm Size Matter Anymore? The New Economy and Firm Size Wage Effects
Working for the Woman? Female Managers and the Gender Wage Gap
Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies
Bringing Managers Back In
Providing Business Information to Production Workers
Information Sharing and Collective Bargaining in Japan
Sexual Harassment in Organizational Context
Organizational Approaches to Inequality
Power Processes in Bargaining
Cracking the Glass Cages? Restructuring and Ascriptive Inequality at Work
Gender, Race, and Meritocracy in Organizational Careers
Earnings inequality within organizations
| Unique citing works | 15 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,67 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2025 (9) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 15 |