This article proposes a model of the ways in which dyadic interactions between employees who occupy 1 of 4 archetypal social roles in organizations can lead to either episodic or institutionalized patterns of victimization. The model shows how the occurrence of victimization involving these 4 role types is influenced by organizational variables such as power differences, culture, and access to social capital. The model integrates behavioral and social structural antecedents of victimization to develop a relational perspective on the dynamics of harmful behavior in the workplace.

SummaryThis paper explores how the social relationships employees have with peers and managers are associated with perceptions of organizational justice. These relationships are theoretically modelled as the conduits for social comparison, social cues, and social identi®cation, which are sources of sense making about fairness`in the eyes of the beholder.' It is argued that perceptions of procedural and interactional justice are affected by this type of social information processing because: (1) uncertainty exists about organizational procedures; (2) norms of interpersonal treatment vary between organizational cultures; and (3) interpersonal relationships symbolize membership in the organization. A structural equations model of data from workers in a telecommunications company showed that an employee's perceptions of both procedural and interactional fairness were signi®cantly associated with the interactional fairness perceptions of a peer. In addition, employees' social capital, conceived as the number of relationships with managers, was positively associated with perceptions of interactional fairness. In the structural model, both procedural and interactional justice were themselves signi®cant predictors of satisfaction with managerial maintenance of the employment relationship. The discussion highlights the key role which the fairness of interpersonal treatment appears to play in the formation of justice judgements.

We integrate the literature on organizational image management and neo-institutional theory to arrive at a better understanding of how organizations routinely represent themselves positively in their external environment. Drawing on a cross-sectional exploratory study of the website communications of 36 firms in the Canadian brewing industry, we investigate how these organizations construct essential and distinctive organizational images in reference to a map of identity attributes and image categories at the organizational field level. We conclude that organizational self-categorizations explain the field-level configuration of images we discovered by establishing legitimacy claims targeted at relevant stakeholders.

This article develops and tests a comprehensive social structural model of social power and status effects on victimization in organizations. Victimization focuses on the extent to which individuals perceive themselves to be the target of negative or aggressive behaviors by others. The conceptual framework elucidates how formal and informal status differences associated with access to social powers in three different social networks are related to victimization perceptions. Using dyads as the unit of analysis in a sample of government employees, we find that asymmetric relationships between two actors in the friendship and advice networks, and structural equivalence in the advice and dislike networks are associated with perceptual agreement. The results suggest that stratification in a social system may create the context in which victimization thrives because it affects access to informal forms of social power.

We track the cognitive legitimation of organizational downsizing over time through an evolution of explanatory accounts in newspaper reports of middle‐management layoffs in Canadian companies from January 1988 to December 1994. We advance an integrative typology of accounts and argue that the form and content of accounts capture sense‐making activity by the press. We find support for our prediction that the form and content of these accounts changes over time as managerial downsizing is taken for granted as a legitimate business practice. Résumé Dans le présent article, nous étudions la légitimation de la réduction des effectifs des entreprises pendant une période donnée. À cet effet, nous nous servons d'une série de comptes rendus de journaux qui traitent de la réduction des cadres moyens dans des compagnies canadiennes entre janvier 1988 et décembre 1994. Nous proposons une typologie d'intégration de ces comptes rendus et alléguons que leur forme et leur contenu, établis par la presse, sont indicateurs du sens de ces réductions d'effectifs. Nous trouvons des arguments en faveur de nos prévisions selon lesquels la forme et le contenu de ces reportages changent avec le temps au fur et à mesure que la réduction de personnel gestionnaire est prise pour acquise et considérée comme une pratique commerciale légitime.