Legal Consciousness and Responses to Sexual Harassment

Abstract

Studies of legal mobilization often focus on people who have perceived some wrong, but rarely consider the process that selects them into the pool of potential "mobilizers." Similarly, studies of victimization or targeting rarely go on to consider what people do about the wrong, or why some targets come forward and others remain silent. We here integrate sociolegal, feminist, and criminological theories in a conceptual model that treats experiencing sexual harassment and mobilizing in response to it as interrelated processes. We then link these two processes by modeling them as jointly determined outcomes and examine their connections using interviews with a subset of our survey respondents. Our results suggest that targets of harassment are selected, in part, because they are least likely to tell others about the experience. Strategies that workers employ to cope with and confront harassment are also discussed. We find that traditional formal/informal dichotomies of mobilization responses may not fully account for the range of ways individuals respond to harassment, and we propose a preliminary typology of responses.How do individuals respond when they feel their rights have been violated? Do those who perceive a wrong simply tell the wrong-doer, do they tell others, or do they ignore it? Following Ewick and Silbey's (1998) groundbreaking work on the common place of law, a growing body of literature has taken up these and related questions of legal consciousness and mobilization (e.g., Albiston 2005;Connolly 2002;Fleury-Steiner 2003;Hoffman 2005;Litowitz 2000;Lovell 2006;Marshall 2005; Marshall and Barclay 2003;Richman 2001). Central to these studies are the interrelated processes by which individuals first come to experience or perceive some wrong and then do something about it. In this study of sexual harassment, we attempt to link these two processes -in this case, subjectively experiencing sexual harassment and then going on to tell a supervisor or government agency that it has occurred. We also examine how individuals respond to harassment and why they employ particular response strategies. We find multidimensional responses to harassment, such that traditional formal/informal dichotomies may not adequately account for diversity of strategies that individuals employ. We therefore propose a preliminary multidimensional typology of mobilization responses.We first describe legal consciousness, targeting, and mobilization within the context of sexual harassment. Next we outline a general model of sexual harassment and legal mobilization based * An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2003 meetings of the Law and Society Association, Pittsburgh. We thank Jeylan Mortimer for support in several phases of this research, Jason Houle for research assistance, and Steve Barkan, Lance Blackstone, Steve Cohn, Andy Halpern-Manners, Mike Vuolo, and Sara Wakefield for helpful comments.Direct correspondence to Amy Blackstone, Department of Sociology, University of Maine, 5728 Fernald Hall, Orono, ME 04...

Sexual Harassment, Workplace Authority, and the Paradox of Power

“…This process is partly a function of legal consciousness – individuals’ awareness, understanding, and response to law and legality (see, e.g., Ewick and Silbey 1998; Blackstone, Uggen, and McLaughlin 2009; Hirsch and Lyons 2010). Authority position and other independent variables are likely tied to both legal consciousness and sexual harassment.…”

Workplace Sexual Harassment 30 Years on: A Review of the Literature

“…Nevertheless, a number of theoretical perspectives have been influential in guiding SH research. Covered here are: the natural‐biological model; sociocultural explanations which focus on the ways in which harassment stands as a manifestation of a wider system of asymmetrical power relations between men and women (Thomas 1997); theories of legal consciousness which address how perceptions of SH are shaped and the likelihood of subsequent responses (Blackstone et al . 2009); and organizational perspectives which ascribe the incidence and form of SH to particular workplace contexts (Blackstone et al .…”

“…Theories of legal consciousness address how perceptions of SH are shaped and the likelihood of subsequent responses (Blackstone et al . 2009).…”

The Antecedents of Disputes: Complaining and Claiming

“…One area that has received a lot of attention is consumer problems, both by legal scholars and by researchers interested in consumer behavior more generally (Warland et al 1975, Best and R.Andreasenn 1977, Day and Hunt 1978, Best 1981, Ladinsky and Susmilch 1985, Office of Fair Trading 1986, Vidmar 1988; in fact for those working in the latter tradition there is a specialized journal, Journal of Consumer Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction & Complaining Behavior, published now on an annual basis. 4 Two related areas that have received significant attention from scholars are discrimination (Bumiller 1987, Bumiller 1988, Kritzer et al 1991b, Hirsh and Kornrich 2008 and sexual harassment (Quinn 2000, Marshall 2003, Marshall 2005 Oñati Socio-Legal Series, v. 1, n. 6 (2011) ISSN: 2079-5971 7 Blackstone et al 2009). One other area where there has been at least one study looking at the decisions of grievants to seek redress is medical negligence (May and Stengel 1990).…”

“…Oñati Socio-Legal Series, v. 1, n. 6 (2011) ISSN: 2079-5971 16 sexual harassment, Blackstone et al (2009) included a measure for personal efficacy (a person's belief about his or her own ability to obtain a desired result), but found that it had no relationship with seeking redress. The most extensive examination of psychological factors was done by Vidmar and Schuller (1987) who report a series of four studies examining "claim propensity," which they measured as a combination of six components: aggressiveness, competitiveness, assertiveness, perceptions of control, preference for risk, and preference for winning over compromise.…”