This study examines the interplay between psychological contract fulfillment, distributive justice, and leader–member exchange (LMX) in shaping affective organizational commitment among university academics. Drawing on social exchange theory, and using simple random sampling, we propose a moderated mediation model to explore how these variables interact. To test the hypotheses, we used the linear moderated mediation test, applying PROCESS for SPSS. Specifically, on a sample of 465 academics, the study tests the hypothesis that distributive justice mediates the relationship between psychological contract fulfillment and affective commitment, with LMX acting as a moderator. Findings reveal that distributive justice is not always necessary for fostering affective commitment when psychological contracts are fulfilled, unless the quality of LMX is low. In low-quality leader–member relationships, perceptions of distributive justice become crucial when it comes to translating contract fulfillment into affective commitment. These results highlight the importance of relational dynamics in academic settings, especially when resources are limited. The study concludes with a discussion of its theoretical and practical implications, as well as limitations and avenues for future research.

This article presents a critique of Sergei Sazonov’s entrepreneurial theory of ownership. The article first reconstructs Sazonov’s response to the private duty imposition objection. It then demonstrates that Sazonov’s theory cannot overcome this objection because it is based on an ambiguity in the meaning of the word ‘use’. The entrepreneurial theory of ownership understands ‘use’ in a rather narrow and contradictory sense, which differs from the meaning in which this concept appears in objections to theories of original appropriation.

Drawing on the two-factor model of organizational justice and social exchange theory, this study investigates the mediating roles of procedural and distributive justice in the relationship between work locus of control (WLOC) and leader–member exchange (LMX). Using data collected from two cultural contexts – the United States and South Korea – this research further examines whether culture moderates the indirect relationship between WLOC and LMX through perceived justice. The findings indicate that subordinates with an internal WLOC tend to report higher-quality LMX relationships, and that both procedural and distributive justice partially mediate this relationship. Moderated mediation analyses reveal that the indirect effects of WLOC on LMX via justice perceptions are significantly stronger in the U.S. sample than in the Korean sample. These results contribute to the literature by identifying perceived justice as a key psychological mechanism linking individual traits to relational outcomes at work, and by highlighting how cultural values shape this process.

Modern market economies use competitions to distribute a range of social goods. Some theorists maintain that such competitions ought not to generate winner-takes-all outcomes. But the arguments that have been given against competitions with winner-takes-all outcomes fail to find fault with winner-takes-all outcomes per se (or so I argue). Is there, then, anything wrong with winner-takes-all outcomes? I argue that there is: winner-takes-all outcomes are wrong, in at least most distributive competitions, because they do not give people what they deserve.

The article examines the relationship between perceived distributive justice and trust in the welfare system within complex and self-contradictory policy setting. Based on thirty-three in-depth interviews with social assistance users in Poland and Czechia, we find that policy assemblages in those countries are experienced as confusing ‘institutional enigmas’. We identify four patterns linking perceptions of welfare system’s distributive justice and trust in this context: perceived rationality of the system combined with trust; perceived lack of system’s empathy combined with distrust; concerns about ‘undeserving claimants’ overusing the system linked to distrust in welfare system; and unexpected (non)receiving of benefits causing surprise and shaping (dis)trust. We argue that in contradictory institutional embedding, achieving users’ trust is challenging due to complex distributive justice principles they adhere to and numerous instances of those principles being violated. Trust can still be fostered when users are well informed or experience receiving meaningful support.

Two important tasks for theorists of justice are to determine the bounds of justice, which explain why some claims are matters of justice and others are not, and to determine the demands of justice, which settle conflicts that fall within those bounds. In this paper, we clarify the distinction between bounds and demands, revealing two striking things. First, while thresholds have typically been understood to be demands of justice, their use as such is confusing and arguably implausible. Second, thresholds appear to be better understood as demarcating the bounds of justice, if a suitable explanation for their use can be found. We explore three explanations for why thresholds can demarcate bounds and assess the prospects for seeing thresholds in this new and different role. These are satiability of the value of goods, satiability of justice, and conceptual engineering.

While prior research has suggested that justice matters for multinational enterprises (MNEs), whether distributive justice affects a subsidiary's tendency to show initiative remains unclear. In this study, we postulate that the extent to which a subsidiary manager regards the sharing of profit and rewards from the headquarters as fair has a curvilinear relationship with the subsidiary's inclination to take initiative. Specifically, although a low to moderate level of distributive justice can motivate subsidiaries to show initiative, this stimulating effect will diminish when distributive justice goes beyond a certain threshold. We furthermore contend that this non-monotonic effect will differ between low internally embedded subsidiaries and high embedded subsidiaries. Results based on a sample of subsidiaries owned by MNEs in Taiwan support our arguments. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Which inequalities among individuals are considered unjust? This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to study distributive choices dealing with arbitrarily unequal initial endowments. In a three-person distribution problem where subjects either know or do not know their endowments, we find impartial behavior to be a stable pattern. Subjects either compensate for initial inequalities fully or not at all in both conditions, and they do so more often when they do not know their endowment than when they know it. Moreover, the type and the size of the good to be distributed also affect the frequency of impartial behavior.

All children have rights to care, education, food, shelter, and more besides. The creation of children is, therefore, the creation of costly entitlements. But who, other than the parents, can be expected to share these costs? And how much can they be expected to contribute? To date, political theorists have only attended to the first question. But without a well-reasoned answer to the second question, we won’t know whether sharing should be generous or very little, equal or unequal. In this paper, I provide the first examination of the extent of cost sharing required if children are public goods. I argue that viewing children as public goods places important limits on the total costs to be fairly shared by non-parents. This casts doubt on the view, assumed by many political theorists, that the costs of all children’s entitlements must be equally shared between parents and non-parents.

Public sector allocative decisions should reflect, as far as possible, the preferences of those affected by the decisions. Conventional benefit–cost analysis (BCA) will simply aggregate individuals’ private willingness-to-pay (WTP) over all affected individuals to estimate the total benefits of a policy that delivers a public good. Given the nature of a public good, it is not unreasonable to consider that an individual may have altruistic preferences over the consumption of the public good by others. In this paper, we set out the theoretical underpinnings for a new citizen-based WTP, informed by political philosophy. Our model extends the standard social utility model (Bergstrom, 2006) of WTP for a public good when individuals are altruists by incorporating a Veil of Ignorance (VoI; Harsanyi, 1955). Our findings show that our WTP (Citizen) correctly includes altruistic as well as distributional preferences of individuals in society into WTP for use in a BCA. When WTP (Citizen) are aggregated for use in a BCA, equal weight is given to each individual’s preference and the BCA will correctly identify potentially Pareto-improving projects in a consistent manner.

Recently, convergence liberals, such as Kevin Vallier, argue that the principle of social insurance could be publicly justified. Our paper challenges this marriage of convergence liberalism and welfare state. We begin by examining Vallier’s three reasons for the principle of social insurance: risk aversion, injustice and the promotion of political trust. We then argue that all these reasons are intelligibly objectionable. After examining five possible responses that convergence liberals may offer, this paper concludes that the principle of social insurance is not conclusively justified in the convergence conception of public justification.

In her groundbreaking paper “Having too much” Ingrid Robeyns introduces the principle of “limitarianism,” arguing that it is morally impermissible to have more resources than needed for leading a maximally flourishing life. This paper focuses on one component of limitarian theory, namely the nature of the riches threshold, and critiques Robeyns’ absolute threshold, that limits wealth above what is needed for satiating human flourishing. The paper then suggests an alternative, relative threshold for determining excessive wealth, and also argues that limitarianism is best understood as a set of wealth-limiting principles, each with its own threshold, justifications, and conditions for operation.

Racial justice is widely seen as a central moral and political ideal of our time, especially on the liberal-egalitarian left. And racial justice goes hand in hand with racial equality. The centrality of these ideals would be hard to justify if they had no bearing on material or economic inequality, or applied solely to semiotic and cultural issues. But we argue that, at present, the only plausible basis for understanding racial equality as a distinctive aim for the economic domain—rather than a mere implication of more general egalitarian or progressive principles—rests on minimal state, right-libertarian foundations. As such, racial equality is a strange focus for the left.

Standard accounts of what makes exploitation wrong ground its wrong in distributive unfairness: when A exploits B he wrongs her by taking a greater share of the benefits from their interaction than he ought. I argue that this standard account does not succeed; distributive unfairness is neither the sole, nor the primary wrong of exploitation. I assume that distributive unfairness is pro tanto wrong. However, I argue that in situations where transactors’ consent to a transaction is morally valid, it is also morally transformative and overrides distributive unfairness’s pro tanto wrong. Thus, wrongful exploitation requires morally invalid consent.

A common idea, both in ordinary discourse and in the desert literature, is that wages can be deserved. The thought is not only highly intuitive, but it is also often appealed to in order to explain various injustices in employment income – pay gaps, for instance. In this paper, I challenge the idea that income from employment is the kind of thing that can be deserved. I argue that once one gets clear on the metaphysics of jobs and wages within the context of economic exchange more generally, there are natural principles concerning such exchanges which generate puzzles for that view. The puzzles, I argue, are especially acute for meritocrats who conceive of justice in wages in terms of desert. Additionally, I argue that appealing to dignity (rather than desert) offers better hope of explaining the kinds of injustices in wages that motivate the appeal to desert. In that case, no explanatory gap is left by abandoning the idea that wages can be deserved either, and so, I argue, we have good reason to doubt it.

Research on the relationship between performance and trust is commonplace in social sciences, yet trust in child protection systems (CPS) remains an emerging area of study. This research delves into how three dimensions of performance – distributive justice, procedural fairness, and functional effectiveness – affect trust in CPS in England and Norway, drawing insights from organisational and social psychology literature. A cross-sectional survey collected data from 981 individuals in England and 1,140 in Norway. Results suggest that procedural fairness and the competences indicator of functional effectiveness significantly and positively impact trust in CPS in both countries. Resources significantly influence trust in Norway’s CPS, while distributive justice has no impact on trust in either country’s CPS. These findings hold theoretical and practical implications for trust in CPS.