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Theoretical Unification in Justice and Beyond

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Abstract

The goal of scientific work is to understand more and more by less and less. In this effort, theoretical unification plays a large part. There are two main types of theoretical unification—unification of different theories of the same field of phenomena and unification of theories of different fields of phenomena. Both types are usually a surprise; even when vigorously pursued, their form, when they finally appear, may differ radically from preconceptions. This paper examines a series of 21 unification surprises in the study of justice and beyond, 16 in the study of justice and 5 in the unification of 3 fundamental sociobehavioral forces—justice, status, and power—and the subsequent unification of the three sociobehavioral forces with identity and with happiness.

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Notes

  1. The terms “theoretical integration” and “theoretical unification” are used interchangeably, as in most scientific and philosophical accounts in both the physical sciences (e.g., discussions of electromagnetism and of the electroweak theory) and the social sciences (e.g., Fararo & Skvoretz, 2002). This paper, however, leans toward “theoretical unification,” given that “integration” is much used in at least two other important senses, the mathematical operation in calculus and the pivotal social process in the sociobehavioral sciences.

  2. The study of justice covers both meanings of the term “distribution”: (1) the “proper-name” distribution of the reward amounts received by particular individuals; and (2) the “anonymous” frequency distribution of reward amounts. As pointed out by Chipman and Moore (1980, p. 402), the English language unfortunately has a single term for both meanings, in contrast to the French (repartition and distribution, respectively). Note that the “proper-name” distribution corresponds to the principles of microjustice—“who should get what, and why”—and the “anonymous” distribution corresponds to the principles of macrojustice—“what should the distribution look like”—following the distinction introduced by Brickman, Folger, Goode, and Schul (1981) and elaborated in Jasso (1983a).

  3. Sometimes there is a third actor—the allocator. In general, the allocator need not be a human person; it may be society or a deity. If human, the allocator need not be alive, as in the case of bequests and inheritance.

  4. Exposition of the derivation of these and other predictions is provided in the original articles. For example, derivation of the first example prediction is found in Jasso (1993b) and of the fourth in Jasso (1993a). For further detail on theoretical derivation, see also Jasso (1988, 2001a, 2005).

  5. For a sampling of predictions for the effects of materialistic and nonmaterialistic regimes, see Jasso (2001a, pp. 672–673).

  6. The distinction between qualitative and quantitative characteristics, long appreciated in mathematics (e.g., Allen, 1938, pp. 10–11) and in statistics and econometrics, has since the pioneering work of Blau (1974, 1977a, b) come to be seen as structuring behavioral and social phenomena in a fundamental way.

  7. Some readers have sought to relate this unification to the classical distinction between subjective things like ideas, attitudes, and judgments and objective behavior, supposing that perhaps ideas of justice are subjective and reactions to injustice are objective. But the justice process is considerably more intricate and more nuanced, for the reactions to injustice include both subjective and objective things. Nonetheless, if we restrict attention to objective reactions to injustice (e.g., signing a petition, contributing time or money, participating in a strike), then we may describe this unification as involving two subjective things and two objective things. The subjective just reward, compared to the objective actual reward, generates the subjective justice evaluation, which in turn triggers the objective reactions to injustice. Before the justice evaluation function was introduced, the links among the four terms—as shown in Fig. 2, the link between the actual reward and the justice evaluation, the link between the just reward and the justice evaluation, and the link between the justice evaluation and the reactions to injustice—were hidden from sight. The justice evaluation function brought to light the exact relations among the four terms and in so doing built a bridge between the two classical literatures on ideas of justice and on reactions to injustice.

  8. As noted earlier, full detail on derivation of these predictions is provided in the original articles presenting them.

  9. In mathematical vocabulary, the status variable is the dependent variable in the status function whose arguments are quantitative characteristics within a group defined by qualitative characteristics.

  10. Notable contributions include Baldwin (1899–1891), Stouffer et al. (1949), Merton and Rossi (1950), Festinger (1954), Thibaut and Kelley (1959), Merton ([1949, 1957] 1968), Runciman (1961), Homans ([1961]1974), Wright (1963), Blau (1964), Hyman (1968), Lipset (1968), Sherif (1968), Zelditch (1968), and Berger et al. (1972). A brief history of comparison ideas is found in Jasso (1990) and a summary in Jasso (2001a).

  11. Relative rank is represented by the open interval between zero and one. Thus, the lowest-ranking person has a relative rank which approaches zero from the right, and the highest-ranking person has a relative rank which approaches unity from the left. In small groups, relative rank is approximated by [i/(N + 1)], where i denotes the absolute rank in ascending order from 1 to the group size N. These approximated relative ranks have the property that the lowest and highest relative ranks are equidistant from .5 and that the distance between the lowest relative rank and zero equals the distance between the highest relative rank and 1.

  12. Other notable contributions to status theory include Sampson and Rossi (1975); Nock and Rossi (1978); Bose and Rossi (1983); Turner (1984, 1995); Ridgeway and Balkwell (1997); Sennett (2003). See Jasso (2001c) for a brief overview of the several status literatures.

  13. The variant associated with Stryker highlights external aspects of a collection of identities, such as their relation to the social structure, while the variant associated with Burke highlights internal dynamics of a single identity (Stets & Burke, 2002, p. 136; Stryker, 2001, p. 228).

  14. By symmetry, a PSO which increases at a decreasing rate with a good will decrease at an increasing rate with a bad; a PSO which increases at an increasing rate with a good will decrease at a decreasing rate with a bad; and a PSO which increases at a constant rate with a good will decrease at a constant rate with a bad.

  15. Note that the distinction between ideas of justice and judgments of injustice, embedded in the four central questions of justice analysis and in the two fundamental quantities—the just reward and the justice evaluation—paves the way to a precise understanding of the components of the human sense of justice and thus of individuals with limited fairness faculties, including the fully justice-insensitive, who may be attuned to status and power but deaf to justice.

  16. Aristotle’s incisive formulation can be traced to Plato’s (Republic, Book VIII) insight that “governments vary as the dispositions of men vary.”

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Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Conference on Social Justice in a Changing World, University of Bremen, Germany, March 2005, and at the biennial meeting of the International Society for Justice Research, Berlin, Germany, August 2006. I am grateful to participants at those conferences and to Peter Burke, Karen Hegtvedt, Samuel Kotz, Jui-Chung Allen Li, Stefan Liebig, Eva M. Meyersson Milgrom, Dahlia Moore, Nura Resh, Clara Sabbagh, Jane Sell, Jan Stets, Jonathan Turner, David Wagner, Murray Webster, Bernd Wegener, and Christopher Winship for many valuable discussions, and to Kjell Törnblom and Riel Vermunt for a close reading of the paper and many valuable suggestions.

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  1. Department of Sociology, New York University, 295 Lafayette Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY, 10012-9605, USA

    Guillermina Jasso

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Jasso, G. Theoretical Unification in Justice and Beyond. Soc Just Res 20, 336–371 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-007-0055-7

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