Abstract
Looking back on fifty years of justice research and ahead to an accelerated growth of knowledge, I collect seven signposts. Current and future scholars—and nature—will do the rest.
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Notes
The study was reported in Rossi, Sampson, Bose, Jasso, and Passel (1974).
See also Jasso (2006:387–392).
Three notes to this section and to the whole paper. First, the word “equity” is a dangerous word, dangerous because it has two distinct meanings: (1) synonymous with “justice,” as in “justice research” and “equity research” and (2) synonymous with “merit” or “desert,” as in “merit principle of microjustice” and “equity principle of microjustice.” Second, the words “justice” and “fairness” are used interchangeably, though we are mindful of the important argument that they are distinct, proposed by Rawls (1958, 1971) and explored in Adriaans, Liebig, Sabbagh, and Jasso (2021). Third, “impartiality” is also a core term central to the study of justice (Jasso, Shelly, and Webster 2019).
More deeply, the sense of justice manifests itself in three distinct kinds of behaviors – thinking, saying, doing – with an early herald in the signature constant to be introduced in the section on "Justice Analysis" below (Jasso 1980) and subsequent broad explicit codification (Jasso and Wegener 1997, and, following Jerolmack and Khan’s 2014a, 2014b analysis, Jasso 2015b). Omnes trium perfectum (good things come in threes), said the ancients, and, crosscutting the three kinds of behaviors are three distinct kinds of scholarly research (Granato, Lo, and Wong 2021; Jasso 2004) – building a framework, theoretical analysis, empirical analysis. Finally, both the behaviors and the research are embedded in natural language, and as visible in footnote 4 and explicit in the section on "Non-Justice Uses of the Word “Just”", the growth of reliable knowledge requires explicit attention to matters of language (Jasso 2020:19–23, 2021c). It need only be added that, unlike the matters in footnote 4, the matters in this footnote pertain to the general infrastructure of social science, and are as pertinent to, say, status and migration (Jasso 2004, 2011:1312–1315, 2021a:8–9) as to justice.
Further questions concern the possibility of a set of distinct fairness faculties, leading to distinct justice personality types (Jasso 2017:612–613). Relatedly, Anselm of Canterbury ([1070–1109] 1946–1961) proposed that the human will has two inclinations, to the own good and to justice, an idea Duns Scotus ([1300–1308] 1986) later developed (Jasso 1989).
If the sense of justice is universal and fundamental, attempts to block its expression may hinder human development.
To these may be added empirical tests of deduced predictions so far afield that they do not include a single overt justice word – for example, about parental gifts to children, interruptions in conversation, posttraumatic stress among military veterans, theft, divorce, segregation, migration, etc. (as in Jasso 1988, 2021b).
Detailed description of theory types and the four techniques for theoretical derivation is widely available in the justice literature (e.g., Jasso 2021b). These techniques appear to have been first used in justice research, where the starting points are, respectively, the justice evaluation function, the justice evaluation distribution, subsets of actors in justice societies, and observer-rewardee matrices of just rewards and justice evaluations (e.g., respectively, Jasso 1988, 1990, 1993, 1999). Soon the techniques were applied in status research (Jasso 2001). Jasso (2022b) provides an explicit contrast of the macromodel and mesomodel techniques in both justice and status research.
Jasso and Sato (2023) report that data from the International Social Justice Project of 1991, which make it possible to calculate both the average of the justice evaluations and the two inequality measures ATK and MLD, show that the inequality measures are a reasonable approximation to E(J) in the five Western societies but not in the eight post-Communist transition societies. The five Western societies also register the smallest magnitudes of injustice about job income (Jasso 1999:158–159).
Mathematically, this is an application of the classic Newtonian idea that mass accumulates at a point.
Interestingly, when income is lognormal, social distance and intergroup conflict are at their lowest when the subgroups are of equal size.
It is not surprising that results for both models (Table 1, Figs. 2 and 3) are the same in the justice-nonmaterialistic society and the justice-materialistic/power-function society, given that, as noted above, the rectangular distribution is a special case of the power-function. It is also not surprising that results for the justice-lognormal society echo the symmetry of the normal.
Interestingly, the word “status” has two technical meanings in social science – the “prestige” meaning, as in the synonyms listed by Zelditch (1968), and the “condition” meaning, as in “marital status” or “immigration status.” For some time it seemed that social scientists had unconsciously distinguished between the two, pronouncing the “prestige” kind of status with a long “a” (as in “day”) and the “condition” kind of status with a short “a” (as in “map”), as discussed in Jasso (2011:1299). But that unconscious practice seems to be breaking down, as older cohorts leave and newer cohorts bring different languages to the table. Note that in Spanish, for example, it is possible to render the “prestige” kind of status as estatus and the “condition” kind of status as estado.
The Bush ([1945] 2020:10) report stated, “Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.”
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Acknowledgements
A long line of distinguished collaborators contributed to the work on which these reflections are based. I am honored to acknowledge, in alphabetical order, Jule Adriaans, Gabrielle Ferrales, John Hagan, Samuel Kotz, Stefan Liebig, Eva M. Meyersson Milgrom, Karl-Dieter Opp, Nura Resh, Peter H. Rossi, Clara Sabbagh, Yoshimichi Sato, Robert Shelly, Kjell Y. Törnblom, Riel Vermunt, Murray Webster, and Bernd Wegener. I also thank another long line of distinguished correspondents—Joseph Berger, Bernard P. Cohen, Thomas J. Fararo, James S. Granato, Douglas D. Heckathorn, Robert K. Merton, Jonathan H. Turner, David G. Wagner, Joseph M. Whitmeyer, Morris Zelditch—and conference organizers/discussants/participants, as well as the Editors. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the intellectual and financial support of New York University.
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Jasso, G. Fifty Years of Justice Research. Soc Just Res 36, 305–324 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-023-00419-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-023-00419-5