POWER, STATUS, AND ABUSE AT WORK: General and Sexual Harassment Compared

Workplace harassment can be devastating for employees and damaging for organizations. In this article, we expand the literature by identifying common and distinct processes related to general workplace harassment and workplace sexual harassment . Using both structural equation modeling and in-depth case immersion, we analyze content-coded data from the full population of workplace ethnographies—ethnographies that provide in-depth information on the nature and causes of both general and sexual harassment that would otherwise be difficult to gather. Importantly, both forms of harassment emerge in settings characterized by physically demanding work and minority work groups. In such contexts, both general and sexual harassment enforce formal and informal status hierarchies and social exclusion. Grievance mechanisms and "team models" of workplace organization reduce sexual harassment but have no effect on general harassment. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical, legal, and policy implications for identifying and remedying harassment as a widespread and devastating form of inequality and social exclusion in organizations.     

Race,threat and workplace sexual harassment: The dynamics of harassment in the United States, 1997–2016

Sexual harassment is a persistent problem for women in the workplace. Prior research has explored the effects of sexual harassment on the psychological, physical and economic wellbeing of the victims. Despite the extensive research exploring the causes, most studies focus on micro‐level factors, and few studies examine the role of macro‐level factors on sexual harassment in the workplace. Using public Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) data and a separate dataset of individual level workplace sexual harassment complaints, we test two hypotheses about sexual harassment in American workplaces. First, we show that the decline in workplace sexual harassment complaints has been uneven, with African‐American women experiencing an increased relative risk of sexual harassment in the workplace, even as overall reported harassment complaints are down. Second, we show that economic threat — operationalized in this case through unemployment rates — drives increases in sexual harassment of women in American workplaces. While the data on harassment complaints is limited, data strongly suggests that the changes are driven by shifts in underlying levels of harassment, rather than changes in the likelihood of reporting harassment.     

Sexual Harassment of Women Working as Room Attendants within 5‐Star Hotels

Given the gendered power relations and the isolated nature of women hotel room attendants' working environments, guest‐initiated sexual harassment experienced by room attendants is a significant, under‐investigated problem. This study of women attendants' experiences of sexual harassment was conducted in 5‐star hotels located on the Gold Coast — a notable tourism destination — of Queensland, Australia. Adopting a socialist–feminist critical theory epistemological perspective, the study used a qualitative constructivist grounded theory methodology. The research reveals the pervasiveness of sexual harassment experienced by women hotel room attendants. In particular, this study illuminates the varied forms, meanings and consequences of sexual harassment in a particular organizational context. In focusing on the interacting effects of the gendered nature of the hotel workplace and the hotel workplace culture, the near‐complete ‘normalization’ of sexual harassment within the hotels is revealed. This outcome is a source of considerable concern, with implications for the industry, for employment relations institutions and for public policy.     

“I Didn't Recognize It as a Bad Experience until I was Much Older”: Age,Experience, and Workers’ Perceptions of Sexual Harassment

Analyzing interview data from 33 women and men, we examine how perceptions of sexual harassment are linked to age, experience, and historical context. Participants described workplace experiences from adolescence into their late twenties. Three themes emerged. First, as adolescents, respondents perceived some of the sexualized interactions they experienced at work as fun. Second, while participants did not define some of their early experiences as sexual harassment at the time, they do so today. Finally, participants suggested that prior work experiences changed their ideas about workplace interactions and themselves as workers. In sum, we find age is a fundamental dimension of power shaping individuals’ perceptions of sexualized interactions at work.     

‘It's Just Something that Happens’: the Invisibility of Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

This paper critically examines the construction and definition of sexual harassment — both in policy documents and in everyday life experiences — in order to consider why it is often invisible in the workplace. Drawing on semi-structured interview data, it explores, in particular, the ways in which accounts of experiences of sexual harassment effectively minimize both its incidence and its importance. Finally, it considers the implications of this in order more effectively to combat sexual harassment in the workplace.     

Working for Men-at the Intersection of Power, Gender, and Sexuality

This article examines the dynamics of Bazooms. a "restaurant" in which power, gender, and sexuality come together to color relations between the three major "players" involved: waitresses, managers, and customers. Job-based power relations and inequities, gender roles, implicit and explicit sexual roles, and sexual harassment are all "at work" in such a workplace. But definitions of power, gender roles, sexual identities. and harassment are in constant flux with each interaction among the players inside the Bazooms world. The women who work at Bazooms–the "Bazooms girls"—are disadvantaged in these interactions, but they are not helpless. Dynamics within the restaurant are constantly being negotiated and altered (within constraints) as these women exercise agency in the workplace.     

Working for Men-at the Intersection of Power, Gender, and Sexuality

This article examines the dynamics of Bazooms. a "restaurant" in which power, gender, and sexuality come together to color relations between the three major "players" involved: waitresses, managers, and customers. Job-based power relations and inequities, gender roles, implicit and explicit sexual roles, and sexual harassment are all "at work" in such a workplace. But definitions of power, gender roles, sexual identities. and harassment are in constant flux with each interaction among the players inside the Bazooms world. The women who work at Bazooms–the "Bazooms girls"–are disadvantaged in these interactions, but they are not helpless. Dynamics within the restaurant are constantly being negotiated and altered (within constraints) as these women exercise agency in the workplace.     

Employer liability for third‐party sexual harassment

While most employers understand the scope of their responsibility to prevent sexual harassment between employees, the scope of an employer's responsibility to prevent sexual harassment by third parties is often less clear. Such third parties may include customers, clients, sales representatives, vendors, investors, or anyone in the workplace who is not a member of the employer's workforce. Although an employer may be unable to easily control non‐employee actions, it is legally obligated to respond to any third‐party sexual harassment of its employees that is brought to the employer's attention. With proper safeguards and remedial action, however, an employer can keep its employees safe from third‐party sexual harassment and protect itself from liability in the process. This Q&A explains employer liability for third‐party sexual harassment, describes the ramifications of an employer's failure to properly address or prevent it, and recommends strategies to reduce an employer's legal exposure.     

Work,Bodies and Boundaries: Talking Sexual Harassment in the New Economy

This article examines sexual harassment in the context of the new economy and highlights the manner in which the changing nature of work — and in particular the acknowledged rise of sexualized ‘body work’ — troubles conventional understandings of what constitutes sexual harassment in the workplace and the means to address it. Using data from a small‐scale qualitative study of service workers and professional employees, we explore the ways in which those definitions of sexual harassment now fail to match participants' accounts of their working lives. We examine sexual harassment in the context of the rise of service roles that require forms of increasingly sexualized ‘body work’ from employees, increased demands for workers to ‘self‐manage’, and new flexible modes of employment that blur the boundaries between being ‘on’ and ‘off’ the job. We conclude that these ‘new’ modes of work may provide the conditions for the revival of ‘old’ stories which limit the capacity of individuals to recognize and label behaviours as ‘sexual harassment’.     

The State,Unauthorized Mexican Migration,and Vulnerability in the Workplace

For the last 20 years, migration scholars have generated a number of important empirical insights about the ways in which the state, through the enactment of immigration policies, creates workplace vulnerabilities such as discrimination, harassment, wage theft, workplace raids, and the threat of deportation. Recent studies of illegality also examine the role of the state but do so in a way that explores what legal status means and how it is experienced in everyday lives of migrants marked as “illegal” by the state. This article reviews recent research that shows that the state operates in a gray zone of enforcement that puts migrants in ambiguous social spaces and heightens their vulnerability at work. However, research also finds that migrants find ways to exert their agency in challenging work environments.     

SEXUAL HARASSMENT COMES OF AGE: A Comparative Analysis of the United States and Japan

Public consciousness of sexual harassment, or sekuhara , emerged much later in Japan than in the United States. This article, the first comparative study of sexual harassment in the two nations, explores how consciousness of a new legal category diffuses across nations and begins to take root in younger cohorts. Analyses of the U.S. General Social Survey and the Japanese Survey on Working Women's Consciousness show how age cohorts entering the labor force following major equal opportunity legislation report more sexual harassment than do older cohorts. We first conduct a separate nation-specific analysis and then pool the data sets to test for national differences with cross-product interaction terms. The effects of age, income, and job satisfaction all differ significantly between the United States and Japan. Family and life course factors are also important predictors, particularly in Japan. We interpret these results based on the extant literature on sexual harassment, legal consciousness over the life course, and comparative research on workplace behaviors.     

‘But It's Your Job To Be Friendly’: Employees Coping With and Contesting Sexual Harassment from Customers in the Service Sector

This article analyses how employees in the service sector respond to sexual harassment from customers and attempts to explain why this is so. There are only a small number of previous studies examining the issue of customer‐perpetrated sexual harassment. Those that have been conducted have detailed the nature and prevalence of sexual harassment from customers, but this research lags behind employee experience and some emerging policy responses to this issue. The extant literature, whilst growing, remains largely limited to documenting the phenomenon. In this article, we attempt to create a deeper analysis of customer‐perpetrated harassment by conducting a new review of the literature to develop propositions about how employees respond to it and the factors that influence their responses. These propositions are analysed in relation to a qualitative pilot study with 15 interviewees who had experienced sexual harassment from customers to understand how they reacted and why. The article shows how the social norms and precarious working conditions of the service sector constrain employees from seeking formal redress, leading to the enactment of informal coping strategies and temporary contestations of the situation. This research is important for building our understanding of the influence of workplace context for framing employee responses to customer sexual harassment.     

Sexual Harassment and the Construction of Ethnographic Knowledge

It is not uncommon for women researchers to experience sexualized interactions, sexual objectification, and harassment as they conduct fieldwork. Nevertheless, these experiences are often left out of ethnographers’ “tales from the field” and remain unaddressed within our discipline. In this article, we use women's experiences with harassment in the field to interrogate the epistemological foundations of ethnographic methodology within the discipline of sociology. Based on more than 50 qualitative interviews, we examine three “fixations” of contemporary ethnography that inform women ethnographers’ understandings of and reactions to harassment in the field. These fixations are solitude, danger, and intimacy. Our data show that these fixations not only put researchers in danger but also have implications for the construction of ethnographic knowledge. They contribute to silence surrounding sexual harassment, and are motivated by and reproduce androcentric norms that valorize certain types of fieldwork. We argue that acknowledging and analyzing experiences with harassment and other unwanted sexual attention in the field is part of a more fully developed understanding of ethnographic research itself.     

Attachment and personality predicts engagement in sexual harassment by male and female college students

The purpose of this study was to examine a trait model of personality (Five-Factor Model) as a mediator of the relationship between attachment styles and sexually harassing behavior in a sample of male (N = 148) and female (N = 278) college students. We found that gender (male) and low Agreeableness predicted engaging in sexual harassment and all three of its subtypes; gender harassment, unwanted sexual attention, and sexual coercion. Further, low Conscientiousness predicted overall sexual harassment, gender harassment, and unwanted sexual attention. Personality traits mediated the relationship between insecure attachment styles (Preoccupation with Relationships and Relationships as Secondary) and sexually harassing behaviors. Thus, factors beyond gender can help predict students' propensity to sexually harass others.     

Marijuana,Gender, and Health-Related Harms: Disentangling Marijuana's Contribution to Risk in a College “Party” Context

Sociological studies suggest that there is social change occurring in the acceptance of lesbians and gay men in the workplace. Compared to prior decades, there are more businesses that welcome, value, and even privilege nonheterosexual sexual identities and relationships. Few studies have analyzed workers' experiences in these types of work contexts. In this article, we explore the experiences of “out” LGB women and men who work for organizations that they consider “gay-friendly.” In-depth interviews demonstrated that, although gay and lesbian workers feel that they are accepted in “gay-friendly” organizations, they nevertheless described differential treatment because of their sexual identity. We discuss evidence of stereotyping, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination in their work experiences. Although the movement toward greater acceptance of gays and lesbians in the workplace has made significant progress, the transformation is so far incomplete. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this research for the study of equality in organizations.     

Customer First and Customer Sexual Harassment: Some Evidence from the Taiwan Life Insurance Industry

Empirical research suggests that customer sexual harassment is a far more common problem than employee to employee harassment for female salespeople. However, to date, there has been relatively little research conducted on the problem of customer sexual harassment. Insurance salespeople sometimes need to meet customers outside the company, and customer sexual harassment problems may occur. Hence, by using Taiwan's life insurance industry as an example, this study explores three research questions: (1) When the idea of ‘customer first’ is fully recognized by insurance salespeople, does it make the salespeople more tolerant of customer sexual harassment problems? (2) When the idea of customer first is supported by the insurance company, will insurance salespeople expose customer sexual harassment problems? (3) Will insurance salespeople tend to be more tolerant of quid pro quo sexual harassment? A total of 223 full‐time and self‐employed insurance salespeople participated in and completed this study survey. The results showed that the company's attitude may significantly affect the respondents' intention to expose the customer sexual harassment, but the personal belief in ‘customer first’ may not affect the respondents' intention to expose the customer misconduct. Since the three research questions have been less studied in the literature, and customer sexual harassment problems could have serious effects on salespeople, we think the results of this empirical study may have some implications for researchers and practitioners.     

Sexual Harassment in Small‐Town New Zealand: A Qualitative Study of Three Contrasting Organizations

This research investigates women's experiences of sexual harassment in three different organizations in the same New Zealand town. Women working at the local meat‐processing plant, a retail store and a local bank were interviewed about their personal experiences of sexual harassment. The interviews revealed that sexual harassment took different forms and was interpreted and responded to differently in each organization. Women at the meatworks were often socially isolated from other women and had few effective strategies for combating the verbal and physical harassment collectively perpetrated by male employees. In contrast, women at the store had a range of collective coping strategies which enabled them to regard harassment from fellow‐workers and customers as an irritant rather than a serious threat. Women at the bank also had various collective coping strategies, but were more constrained by customer service norms in the organization. These findings are discussed in relation to three key themes; firstly, the influence of the local environment on organizational life; secondly, the effects of differing organizational structures and cultures on the expression and interpretation of sexual harassment and thirdly, the effectiveness of the various ‘communities of coping’ which women develop to combat sexual harassment in the workplace.     

Installing Circuit Breakers: Mechanisms to Avoid Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

This paper suggests that a synergy is both possible and necessary between two traditionally distinct management approaches: the Weberian approach, which contends that the bureaucratic structure of a company affects the daily activities of employees, and the human relations model, which holds that small group leadership dynamics at the divisional/department level affects daily activities of employees. The tendency within organizations is to promote one approach over the other. A resolution to the debate is suggested in applying mechanisms to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. Indeed, the courts have inadvertently pointed the way: the reasonable woman standard urges a human relations approach to resolving the problem of sexual harassment, placing the burden of solving the problem on supervisor personnel and their ability to direct their employee's behavior; the hostile environment issues promotes a Weberian structural solution, requiring sound policy be developed at the executive level to ensure workplace compliance to appropriate normative behavior. A one-sided approach is doomed to failure, which may explain why the issue continues to rage in the corporate sphere.     

Gender-biased behavior at work: Exploring the relationship between sexual harassment and sex discrimination

This paper examines survey-based reports of sexual harassment and sex discrimination in order to identify the stylized facts about the nature of the relationship between them. In particular, we are interested in assessing whether these concepts measure similar forms of gender-biased behavior and whether they have the same effect on workers’ job satisfaction and intentions to leave their jobs. Our results provide little support for the notion that survey-based measures of sexual harassment and sex discrimination capture the same underlying behavior. Respondents do appear to differentiate between incidents of sexual harassment and incidents of sex discrimination in the workplace. There are gender differences in the consequences, however. Both sex discrimination and sexual harassment are associated with a higher degree of job dissatisfaction. However, women’s intended job changes appear to be more sensitive to experiencing sex discrimination, while men’s are more sensitive to experiencing sexual harassment. Although exploratory, when taken together these results give us hope that in the future sufficiently detailed surveys could provide a useful foundation for quantifying the link between sexual harassment and sex discrimination. They also suggest that the best prospect for developing—and then testing—a conceptual framework of gender bias lies in adopting a multi-disciplinary approach incorporating the insights of disciplines such as sociology, psychology, and economics.     

Sexual Harassment in the Creative Industries: Tolerance,Culture and the Need for Change

The economic, social and cultural contributions of the creative industries are essential elements of many societies and their governments' policies. However, there is growing evidence that precarity, competition and lack of regulation within these industries is exacerbating inequalities with respect to gender, race and class. With a focus on gender and sexual harassment among female workers, this study involved 32 in‐depth interviews with women working in the Netherlands' creative industries. Data were analyzed using content analysis. Findings suggest that sexual harassment is prevalent, and many women considered it to be part of their occupational culture and career advancement. Four factors influenced this phenomenon: competition for work; industry culture; gendered power relations; and the importance of informal networks. Implications include the need for a climate of non‐tolerance, sector‐specific research and guidelines, sensitivity training and further work with unions and professional associations to provide worker protection strategies traditionally undertaken by organizations. The article concludes that effective sexual harassment prevention requires action at the individual, educational, sectoral and governmental levels, beginning with public conversations to convey the message that sexual harassment is never acceptable.