Organizational Inequalities and Interdependencies Between Capabilities in Work and Personal Life: A Study of Employees in Different Work Organizations

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The project aims to contribute to mechanism-based explanations of social inequality in three respects. First, it will develop an already existing linked-employer-employee-partner panel data set (LEEP) further by adding a third wave to the already existing first two waves. This is important because only then processes indicating substantive social mechanisms can be empirically reproduced, by distinguishing outcomes, antecedents, and moderators; and the directionality of influences can be properly assessed. Moreover, only the longer time span allows for observing enough family and career events to systematically analyze interdependencies between life domains. This data will be made available to other researchers after the project has ended. As a unique data set not only for Germany, but also in international comparison, the data will certainly become a valuable resource for organization-based inequality research beyond the analyses done by the project team members themselves. The reason is the unique combination of a large coverage of the occupational structure with a high number of cases and dense information about within-firm behaviors and processes.Secondly, we aim to advance the theoretical understanding of social inequalities by comparing mechanisms across relational groups and inequality dimensions. We refer to Relational Inequality Theory as a novel sociological theory that has gained importance in theoretical and empirical organizational research to understand how work organizations and their characteristics mute and exaggerate inequality.Thirdly, we contribute to the field by own empirical analyses in three research topics: earning inequality, work-life interface, and employment relationships. With regard to earnings inequality, we ask which factors at the intersection of interactional and organizational mechanisms mute or exaggerate earnings inequalities between different groups. Analyses on the work-life interface investigate organizational inequality generating mechanisms for perceived interferences between work and personal life and implications of personal life demands for work gratifications. It refers also to the vivid discussion about organizational work-life policies and their multifaceted implications for different employee groups. Finally, we investigate various facets of the employment relationships between employee and the work organization at the levels of an abstract employer, direct supervisors, and team members. More than occupation-based studies research on the relation between employer and employees takes into account negotiations at the firm-level and the relation between monetary and non-monetary gratifications for efforts.