Social Class in the Organizational Sciences: A Conceptual Integration and Meta-Analytic Review

Abstract

Social class has become increasingly popular in the organizational sciences. Despite the burgeoning interest in this topic, there remains a great deal of ambiguity concerning the conceptualization and operationalization of social class. For instance, scholars have used income, education, and subjective ratings to measures one’s social class. In order to improve the conceptual clarity of social class, we develop and present a model that draws on the dominant theories of social class from both sociology and psychology while organizing their key principles to explain how social class influences an individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. By using this model as a framework, this study attempts to refine the conceptualization of social class by testing core research questions pertaining to the construct validity of this construct. After a comprehensive, interdisciplinary literature search, which yielded over 4,000 effect sizes, we conducted a meta-analysis to test the proposed model. The findings offer clear support for two distinct components of social class (i.e., objective and subjective) that are both highly related to one another and associated with other microlevel constructs (i.e., job attitudes). Given the timeliness and importance of social class, the findings of this conceptual review and empirical meta-analysis offer a means of summarizing this large, interdisciplinary literature while guiding future management research on this critical topic.