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In this chapter, we develop a model of envy and unethical decision making. We postulate that unfavorable comparisons will induce envy in outperformed coworkers, who are subsequently motivated to engage in unethical acts to harm the envied target. In particular, we consider the differential effects of unfavorable individual-level and unfavorable group-level social comparisons on attitudes and norms for engaging in social undermining behaviors. Envy is a self-sanctioned emotion and often difficult to detect. Even so, envy is likely to be both prevalent in and harmful to organizations. Organizational culture may play an important role in moderating the prevalence and consequences of envy within organizations. For example, managerial actions designed to boost organizational identity may significantly curtail envy within their organization.

In this chapter, we explore the implications of benign and malicious envy in the workplace and suggest methods by which leaders can manage the situational context to minimize negative responses to envy and promote positive responses. We argue that three aspects of the organizational context are especially influential in the development of envy: perceptions of fairness, employees’ feelings of control over their situation, and organizational culture. All three impact whether felt envy will be benign or malicious. In addition, the right organizational culture can prevent any feelings of malicious envy from leading to undesirable behaviors. We suggest that by fostering justice, promoting employee feelings of control, and exemplifying an ethical organizational culture leaders can manage the manifestation of envy and resulting behaviors in a positive direction.

Corporate venturing initiatives, which exemplify corporate entrepreneurial behavior, follow an evolutionary path of variation, selection, and retention. While their external selection is a consequence of their performance, their internal selection is subject to forces of complementarity and legitimacy, and how well competition from other initiatives is overcome. This chapter aims to unfold the dynamics of the internal selection process of initiatives, focusing on its emotional dimensions. Assuming that organizational agents have a deliberate role in guiding the internal selection process of initiatives, the chapter examines how organizational agents' emotional dynamics influence this process. The chapter draws its theoretical basis from the intraorganizational evolutionary perspective and the literature on emotions in organizations. The case of a corporate venturing initiative and the narratives of four managers involved directly and indirectly in the initiative are used to illustrate how the emotional dynamics of organizational members evoked envy toward a venturing initiative and directly impacted its degree of competition and complementarity with other interacting initiatives, ultimately hampering its selection.

Our purpose is to examine the “envy” within the context of income inequality measurement.

We use a simple axiomatic structure that takes into account “envy” in the income distribution. The concept of envy incorporated here concerns the distance of each person's income from his or her immediately richer neighbour.

We derive two classes of inequality indices – absolute and relative. The envy concept is shown to be similar to justice concepts based on income relativities.

This is the first time a complete characterisation has been provided for envy-related inequality.

Introduction: As a type of poverty, relative poverty can be defined as being below the average welfare of society. Basic needs can be afforded, but individuals can’t take advantage of the welfare created by society. Today coding the reflection of welfare, sharing experiences has new meanings by new social media means. Instagram is especially preferred in visual sharing because of its filter options, live feed, or story mode. These features help the message sender to increase the effect of the message and the receiver to understand the reality with its different dimensions. It is not shocking that the images of welfare and its indicators are shared increasingly in social networks because storytelling in this media is fed. The visual strengthening is underlining the possession of the owner and the deficiency of the non-owner from their perspectives.

Purpose: This study examines the emotional effects of ideal life images shared on Instagram on other individuals. The aim is to reveal and define the meaning ascribed to such fractions of life with a visual appeal by people who cannot lead this kind of life.

Methodology: In accordance with the Social Learning Theory, the study assumes that people with relative poverty take notice of their own poverty through social media. The study investigates the emotions manifested by individuals who take notice of the things that they lack through social media. Thus, a qualitative study was designed and conducted using a phenomenological approach. The phenomenon of this study is failing to have. The objective of the study is to understand and determine what the individuals who do social comparisons feel they lack. For this purpose, the fundamental research questions of this study are as follows: RQ1: What are the main categories of Instagram posts that evoke a sense of deprivation in individuals?; RQ2: What do glamorous Instagram posts mean to individuals who are above the relative poverty threshold? The data gathered via the in-depth interview technique were analyzed using the computer-assisted qualitative analysis program (MaxqDa 2020). Qualitative content analysis and descriptive analysis were the forms of analysis used in the study.

Findings: The fact that there are negative links between passively consuming information on social media and well-being is supported by previous studies. This study exposes the experiences of “failing to have” due to upward social comparison in individuals who are above the relative poverty threshold in Turkey. The categories of shared content that evoke the feeling of deficiency in the participants are as follows: Travel/vacation, participation in social life, physical attractiveness, material possessions, and professional/academic career. The participants of the study are individuals who are above the relative poverty threshold for Turkey. The participants want to have “more than what they already have.” For this reason, it can be suggested that the main keyword summarizing the findings of the study is “more.” The study demonstrates that failing to travel and participate in social life deeply affects the participants and causes them to experience negative emotions.

Purpose – This chapter aims to understand how the Bugkalot, or the Ilongot, as they are known in the previous anthropological literature, engage with capitalism in ways that are deeply shaped by their indigenous idioms of personhood and emotion.Methodology/approach – Long-term intensive fieldwork including five weeks of pilot visits to Bugkalot land in 2004 and 2005, and fifteen months of residence from 2006 to 2008.Findings – The development of capitalism in the Bugkalot area is closely linked with the arrival of extractive industry and the entry of Igorot, Ilocano, and Ifugao settlers. Settlers claim that they have played a centrally important role in developing and “uplifting” the Bugkalot, and that before their arrival the Bugkalot were uncivilized and didn’ t know how to plant (irrigated) rice and cash crops. However, the Bugkalot deny that they are at the receiving end of the settlers’ tutelage. Rather, they perceive the acquisition of new knowledge and technology as initiated by themselves. Envy and desire are identified by the Bugkalot as the driving force behind their pursuit of a capitalist economy. While the continuing significance of emotional idioms is conducive to the reproduction of a traditional concept of personhood, in the Bugkalot’s responses to capitalism a new notion of self also emerges.Originality/value of chapter – Different notions of personhood are intertwined with local ideas of kinship and economic rationality. The Bugkalot’ s attempt to counter the politics of development with their own interpretation of economic change highlights the importance of indigenous agency.

Scandinavian societies do not figure prominently as study objects in the international social science literature. To the extent they do, their analysis tends to revolve around one seemingly unavoidable concept, that of equality. There is much agreement among Scandinavia experts that if there is one cultural trait that recurs again and again in this part of the world it is what some have described as “the passion for equality” (Graubard, 1986). Many writers have suggested that the Nordic passion for equality springs from a peculiarly strong preoccupation with equity (rettferd). But this is not the only reason why: according to Hans Frederik Dahl (1984, p. 95) “[t]he Nordic equity ethos…appears to apply both to the political action of leveling out – making the rich pay, taxing the top – and, in a jealous comparison, of making sure that nobody overtakes and passes you in position or possessions.” Like Dahl, other Norwegians consider envy to be a central element in this quest for equality, a sort of Nordic “crab antics” (Wilson, 1973).¹ Envy provides a plausible explanatory frame for the drive at leveling out – “making the rich pay, taxing the top” – a meaning the Norwegian term likhet does indeed encompass. But in addition to equality likhet also means similarity or sameness, a parity that does not necessarily have to do with equity and cannot always be described in terms of getting rid of (unfair) privileges. Earlier debates on the Norwegian notion of equality were often inconclusive because they failed to address this critical duality of meaning which lies at the core of the concept of likhet. To assume that likhet is only a matter of equality, and that it all boils down to envy is too simplistic. In this case, the question that needs to be addressed is: can envy account for the drive at cultural assimilation? Can it explain demands made by the masses to individuals who are neither richer nor more powerful? I am thinking for example of the kind of relations that have been observed between Norwegians and Saami in the Helgeland region (Henriksen, 1991). Here, Saamis’ claims to a different identity and a different experience are frequently met with the non-Saami majority’s counter-claim that there are no differences, cultural or otherwise, between the Saami and themselves. “When the Saami person insists that his or her identity is rooted in a Saami culture, s/he may be requested to specify what such differences consist of,” writes Henriksen (p. 410). This emphatic denial of difference is not perceived by Saami as an inclusionary device to integrate them within the warm embrace of a universal Norwegian Gemeinschaft. Rather, says Henriksen, they view it as “a lack of recognition by the encompassing Norwegian society of their cultural and social identities and their expression, and of what they perceive to be their legitimate rights” (p. 414); in other words, they view it as an attempt by the Norwegian majority to deny Saami their right to experience life in general and ethnic encounters in particular in a way that differs from the majority’s experience. When played out in relation to individuals and groups that are marginal, dominated, or simply in minority, the quest for likhet cannot be motivated by envy. Rather than “passion for equality,” therefore, it would be more accurate to describe this cultural trait as “antipathy for difference.” Such antipathy, I suggest, is grounded in a normative expectation of conformity in behavior, experience, and awareness, to an unquestioned cultural pattern embedded in, and structured by, daily practice, and with ramifications in all areas of social life. In this sense, equality (sometimes translated into Norwegian as likeverd, literally “equal worth,” but more commonly as likhet) rests on the fundamental requirement of cultural similarity (also known, as we have seen, as likhet): to be equal is first and foremost to be alike (see Gullestad, 1984, 1992). The opposite of likhet, ulikhet, can mean either difference or inequality. Most of the time it is conceptualized as both.² Of course, the conceptual and sociological boundaries between equality and similarity are blurred everywhere, not only in Norwegian culture. Nor am I suggesting that Norwegian society is empirically devoid of inequality or that instances of anti-egalitarian behavior do not obtain in real life. Nonetheless, these empirical observations do not make the Norwegian normative discourse on equality-as-similarity any less real or any less compelling.

Purpose – This chapter presents a social emotions-based analysis of justice dynamics, emphasizing the important influence of social emotions (e.g., envy, empathy, schadenfreude, and vicarious joy) on justice judgments and reactions. The chapter also identifies a dimension for organizing social emotions, based on the degree of congruence they reflect between self and other. Congruent social emotions align the individual experiencing the emotion with the individual who is the target of their emotion, thus leading individuals to reason about and perceive justice in ways that are aligned with the target. Conversely, incongruent social emotions create misalignment and lead to justice perceptions that are misaligned and oppositional with regard to the target.

Methodology/approach – The chapter is informed by research suggesting that justice judgments are subjective. We consider the perspective of each of the key parties to justice (i.e., decision makers, justice recipients, and third parties) to evaluate the effect of (in)congruent social emotions on justice.

Findings – The core argument advanced in the chapter is that the (in)congruence of parties’ social emotions shape whether people evaluate the outcomes, procedures, and treatment encountered by a target as being fair. Fairness judgments, in turn, shape parties’ actions and reactions.

Originality/value – The chapter is the first to offer a framework integrating research on organizational justice with research on social emotions, arguing that social emotions strike at the very foundation of justice dynamics in groups and teams. In addition, the congruence dimension described in the chapter offers a novel and potentially important way of thinking about social emotions.

It may be daunting for those who do not know or care for Shakespeare, but Othello is a compelling case study of destructive emotions in an organizational setting. Iago's chilling words from The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice are the title of this chapter, “I am not what I am”. Passed over for promotion, Iago wreaks havoc in the personal and professional life of the General who chose not to appoint him. We use this play as a case study of destructive emotions – specifically jealousy, anger, and shame – in an organizational hierarchy. The premise is that those who are passed over present a special managerial problem, one that we address at the end of the chapter after carefully looking at how revenge came to manifest from the emotions of the principal characters in the play. In addition, this chapter contributes to the growing literature on specific emotions as experienced in organizational life as well as advancing the links between management and the humanities by using one of Shakespeare's best-known tragedies as a case study.

By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst waste-pickers and recycling traders in the waste paper, plastic and scrap metal sectors, and engaging with literature from economic anthropology and history, as well as archival sources, this paper documents changing perceptions of just price, morality and fairness in the Turkish recycling market. The paper suggests that multiple markets imply multiple prices, which are contingent and contested. When dealing with price mechanisms largely outside their control, actors tend to associate a fair price with the going market price, rather than factors such as state regulation. Approaches to morality and assessments of fairness become more ambiguous when prices are mediated by actors’ own practices. These range from gift relations to paternalism, envy and deception.