What Do Business Executives Think About Distributive Justice?
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ORIGINAL PAPER
What Do Business Executives Think About Distributive Justice? Susanne Burri1 · Daniela Lup2 · Alexander Pepper3 Received: 18 March 2020 / Accepted: 21 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract While there exist extensive literatures on both distributive justice and senior executive pay, and a number of authors (notably the French economist Thomas Piketty) have addressed the implications of high pay for distributive justice, the existing literature fails to address what senior executives themselves think about distributive justice and whether they consider high income inequalities to be morally acceptable. We address this gap by analysing a unique dataset comprising the views of over 1000 senior executives from across the world, which was constructed using a survey instrument designed by the authors based on a thought experiment resembling John Rawls’s original position. We report four main findings. First, executives conceptualise distributive justice in a pluralistic manner, endorsing different and sometimes apparently conflicting philosophical principles: to explain how this plurality can be accounted for we propose a novel field-theory framework for conceptualising beliefs about distributive justice. Second, executives support similar philosophical approaches at both society and company levels of analysis, thus countering the idea that companies should leave matters of distributive justice exclusively for governments to deal with via the tax system. Third, executives believe that they live in societies and work for companies that fall short of desirable distributive justice outcomes. Fourth, the distributive justice views of the executives in our sample fall into four distinct clusters that are correlated with certain socio-demographic markers. Finally, we note the distinction between distributive justice beliefs and behaviours, from which we derive a number of managerial and public policy implications. Keywords Distributive justice · Empirical research · Executive compensation · High pay · Inequality
Introduction Over the past two decades, the compensation received by those employed at the top of companies (“supermanagers” according to Piketty 2014) has risen dramatically, continuing a trend that began in the 1980s. At the same time, the incomes of regular employees have more or less stagnated in real terms (Willman and Pepper 2020). In combination, * Alexander Pepper [email protected] Susanne Burri [email protected] Daniela Lup [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Logic & Scientific Method, The London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
2
ESCP Business School, London Campus, London, UK
3
Department of Management, The London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
these two developments have fuelled the now widely held belief that our societies, and the companies operating within them, have become increasingly unjust (Atkinson 2015). Within the economics literature, there is an ongoing discussion as to whether the dramatic rise in wa
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