Dr. Erin Reid - McMaster University

Authors: Lumumba Seegars, Serenity Lee, Erin Reid and Lakshmi Ramarajan.

Some organizations are addressing income inequality by implementing a living wage for their lower-wage workers: a pay rate that allows workers to live a meaningful life above bare subsistence. In a qualitative field study of one such organization, Dr. Reid and co-authors investigated how the introduction of a living wage, which they theorize as a humanistic intervention, resulted in a partial reimagining of employees’ work roles as professional- rather than working-class. Analyzing interviews with 64 employees across two sites collected over multiple time points, they uncovered how the living wage altered both workers’ and managers’ ideas about workers’ roles. Despite the organization’s attempt to separate the living wage from escalations in work expectations, employees who received the wage increase experienced it simultaneously as a signal of care that affirmed their personal lives and a signal of unearned merit that threatened their identities as workers worthy of their wages. Managers, for their part, were lost as to how to manage employees without the instrumental incentive of wage increases. Workers and managers attended to these concerns by jointly increasing informal role expectations for work hours and agency, characteristics associated with professional-class roles. Workers strived to exhibit fit with the new role expectations, and were pushed out if they did not. Based on these findings, they theorize a process of instrumentalizing humanism.

Dr. Erin Reid (Ph.D. Harvard University) is the Canada Research Chair in Work, Careers and Organizations (Tier 2) and a Professor of Human Resources and Management. She studies the connections between careers, diversity, inequality and the design of contemporary knowledge work. One line of research focuses on the reasons for the persistence of gender inequality in time-greedy professions and organizations, such as consulting. Another series of projects explores how professionals working in the gig economy build careers, in fields such as science, journalism, and graphic design. Throughout her work, Dr. Reid pays careful attention to mechanisms of inequality, and people's strategies for success. The goals of her research are two-fold: to help people build satisfying careers, and to help employers build inclusive workplaces. Her research is published in top management journals, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal. She also writes regularly for non-academic audiences, in outlets such as Harvard Business Review and The Conversation.