Making Sense of Injustice at Work: College Interns’ Struggles to Name and Navigate Unjust Workplace Practices

Abstract

Background:

College internships are widely recognized as high-impact practices that support career development and professional identity formation. Yet internship sites can expose students to unjust workplace conditions, including exploitative, discriminatory, and inequitable practices. Although prior research has documented these conditions, less is known about how interns interpret ambiguous or troubling experiences and navigate decisions about whether to speak or remain silent. Interns occupy a distinctive position as peripheral and liminal actors, which shapes both what they encounter and how they make sense of it.

Focus of Study:

This study examines how college interns perceive, make sense of, and respond to workplace injustice. Drawing on Weick’s sensemaking framework and conceptualizing interns as peripheral and liminal actors, it traces the interpretive processes through which interns come to understand unjust practices and form responses to them, with particular attention to how their positioning shapes what they notice, how they interpret it, and whether they feel able to speak.

Research Design:

This qualitative study is grounded in critical hermeneutic phenomenology and draws on in-depth interviews with 11 U.S. college students. Data were analyzed to surface the interpretive processes through which participants encountered, made sense of, and responded to workplace injustice, attending to both participants’ own understandings and the broader structural conditions shaping their experiences.

Findings:

Participants primarily encountered implicit forms of injustice embedded within everyday organizational routines, which required particular sensitivity to detect. Their sensemaking occurred largely from the periphery, as interns pieced together fragmentary cues from workplace observations and conversations outside of work. Through this process, participants developed complex, evolving relationships with what they understood as “professional” silence, shaped by the implicit nature of what they encountered, their liminal positioning, and their emerging sense of when speaking up might be possible.

Conclusions:

The study highlights that naming workplace injustice is an interpretive process shaped by interns’ peripheral and liminal positioning, the implicit nature of the injustice they encounter, and the professional norms that discourage speaking up. These dynamics warrant particular attention from colleges that promote internships as a learning experience. Educators can support college interns by creating reflective spaces that help them name ambiguous experiences, recognize systemic patterns, and critically examine the silence they have come to associate with professionalism.