“It’s Not My Fault!” Status, Attributions, and Perceptions of Injustice: The Case of Custodians and Teachers

ABSTRACT

Perceptions of injustice rely upon a sense-making process in which individuals attempt to understand why and how it occurs. We draw from the attribution-of-blame model of justice judgments to examine how two work groups of disparate status make sense of the treatment and outcomes engendered by their interactions. Data from 27 in-depth interviews with custodians and teachers reveal that when custodians perceive disrespect from teachers and teachers perceive that custodians do not fulfill properly their duties, their attributions are shaped by their status position. Although both make internal attributions to each other for their injustice, teachers do not recognize how they perpetrate injustice against custodians and custodians perceive greater injustice by identifying how external factors affect their performance and blame. This unjustified blame fosters counterproductive work behaviors, illustrating how interdependencies fuel a cycle of injustice. We discuss the implications of these findings for the school and justice processes.

Notes

¹Some scholars cast injustice in terms of violations of entitlement or deservingness (e.g., Feather 2015). Here, we follow Mikula (2003) by simply representing expectations for fair outcomes and treatment, without distinguishing between entitlement and deserving.

²One teacher was employed in another similar school district.

³We recognize that respondents’ gender differences may likewise affect how they talk about events and actions that contribute to their justice assessments. However, in our case, gender is largely confounded with occupational status.

⁴Interviews did not reflect issues of procedural and informational justice as custodians and teachers are rarely involved in formal decision-making processes that affect one another.

⁵Custodians ready the school each day by opening doors and turning on lights, maintaining the heating and cooling equipment of the school, setting up the cafeteria for lunch, planning special events by setting up chairs and other equipment, and unloading and delivering boxes that come to the school (Klingel and Noyed 2001). In the classroom, custodians are required to empty the wastepaper basket and pencil sharpener; dust mop or vacuum the floor; wash chalkboards and trays; spot-wash walls, doors, and switch plates as necessary; clean desks as needed; spot-mop the floor as necessary; dust furniture and countertops; align furniture; lock windows; close shades or drapes; check room temperature; check lights and change lightbulbs as needed; note any maintenance needs; and leave the room in a clean and orderly condition (School District Agreement between the Town and Union 2006).

⁶The job of a sub-custodian is a position that is usually filled by college-age individuals, or people trying to get a job as a full-time custodian. Being a sub-custodian requires you to do most of the same job duties as a custodian, except for specialized tasks such as boiler maintenance.

⁷The small sample size and response rate is in part a product of when participant recruitment took place and the occupations of the participants. The first phase of recruitment occurred during the end of the school year and summer, making it difficult to access teachers. Teachers in other schools may also have been resistant to participating in an academic study due to negative views toward research (Troman 1996:77; Walford 2001). In addition, the stigmatization of their occupational status (Kreiner et al. 2006) may have made custodians reticent to participate in an academic study. For these reasons, we relied primarily on snowball sampling techniques to gain access to these populations (Saunders 2012). Despite these limitations, saturation was reached. In addition, the sample is diverse in regard to including teachers of various grades, custodians of different shifts, and a range of individuals who were employed for different years within their respective occupations. Participants in general focused on the cooperative nature of the custodian–teacher relationship across their careers, which involved other schools and districts. This pattern suggests that further interviews would not have revealed new information (Saunders 2012) and that those who agreed to participate did not differ in a meaningful way from those who did not agree to participate.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heather L. Scheuerman

Heather L. Scheuerman is an assistant professor in the Department of Justice Studies at James Madison University. Her research centers on how social psychological concepts and processes structure behavior, including crime. She focuses on issues of justice broadly and in terms of how conceptualizations of justice and injustice affect behavioral and emotional outcomes.

Karen A. Hegtvedt

Karen A. Hegtvedt is a professor of sociology at Emory University. Her work focuses on perceptions of and responses to injustice. Recent empirical and theoretical work has examined the interrelationship of collective sources of legitimacy, justice, and trust. In addition, she has examined antecedents to perceptions of environmental injustice and to environmentally responsible behavior in a series of papers. She is a previous coeditor of Social Psychology Quarterly.

Cathryn Johnson

Cathryn Johnson is a professor of sociology and a senior associate dean of the Laney Graduate School at Emory University. Her work focuses on legitimacy processes within groups and organizations, identity processes, and emotions. She also examines the impact of legitimacy of institutional sustainability policies and programming on environmental justice perceptions, environmental identities, and behaviors. She is a previous coeditor of Social Psychology Quarterly.