Subordinating Humanism: How Colliding Beliefs about a Living Wage Shape Personal Fulfillment and “Professional-Class” Identities in Working-Class Jobs
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a society dominated by market-based ideology and management practices that prioritize financial considerations, some organizations are shifting toward humanistic ideology and practices that emphasize human welfare. To examine this transformation in pay-setting, we studied a U.S. company that introduced a living wage for its low-wage workers. Interviews with 64 participants across two sites revealed both intended and unintended effects. Motivated by humanistic aims, the living wage was designed to reduce financial insecurity; indeed, workers felt more financially secure and fulfilled in their personal lives. However, its humanistic intent conflicted with the dominant market-based ideology linking wages to performance, raising concerns about whether these workers deserved higher pay. To resolve this tension, managers and workers altered expectations for workers to reflect two aspects of professional-class roles: autonomy and overwork. As workers internalized these expectations, they adopted elements of professional-class identities while remaining in working-class jobs. Simultaneously, managers reaffirmed their own role identities as shapers of performance despite their weakened control over wages. These findings inform a multilevel model conceptualizing how a transformative humanistic practice can be subordinated to market-based ideology through identity work. We contribute to research on humanistic management and the interconnections between wage, class, work roles, and identity.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it