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Purpose – All modern societies are marked by unequal relationships between dominant and subordinate groups. Given that dominant group members often have the resources to determine if and how inequities might be dealt with, it is important to know when and how dominant group members will respond to inequity.

Approach – In this chapter, we present a new framework for how individuals experience inequality: the inequality-framing model. According to the model, individuals distinguish between inequities of advantage and inequities of disadvantage, which is predicted to lead to different experiences of inequity. We then review prior literature that indicates that perceptions of ingroup advantage and outgroup disadvantage can influence when and how dominant group members will respond to inequity. We specifically investigate hierarchy-attenuating responses to inequity, such as support for affirmative action policies, and hierarchy-enhancing responses, such as denial of inequity, disidentification from the group, the motivated construal of inequity, and the motivated use of colorblind ideology.

Research and practical implications – The model suggests that researchers and practitioners alike would do well to pay attention not only to the magnitude of inequity, but also to the way in which it is described. Importantly, dominant group members are more likely to have the power over how inequalities are discussed, which has ramifications for their experience of and willingness to remedy inequity.

Originality – This chapter provides an overview of research indicating that how inequity is described – advantage or disadvantage – can have implications for how dominant group members experience and respond to inequity.

Purpose – This capstone chapter introduces Amartya Sen's important and innovative theory of justice to researchers on fairness in groups and organizations. Here, I discuss how Sen's theory can provide grounding for both philosophical and social scientific work on justice and how social science research can inform and be informed by Sen's theory.

Design/methodology/approach – In this chapter, I discuss Sen's new book, A Theory of Justice, and explain the main aspects of Sen's theory of justice. I then draw conceptual linkages between Sen's theory and those introduced in each of the other chapters included in this volume.

Findings – I show that Sen's view of justice goes beyond social contract theories that attempt to identify ideal institutional arrangements to seek practical solutions that increase justice as experienced by actual people in the world. Rather than parallel endeavors, Sen's approach reveals philosophy and social science to be deeply connected to each other and to justice by providing a unifying theme by which various social scientific traditions are shown to study aspects of the same underlying phenomena. Further, I demonstrate how philosophy and social science together can increase justice in the world.

Originality/value – Sen's theory of justice, though influential in economic and policy circles, is largely unfamiliar to social psychologists and organizational scholars. I introduce these fields to Sen's theory of justice and show how it is useful for social psychological approaches to the study of fairness in groups and organizations.

This study tests the relationship between financial leverage and a firm's operational and financial short term responses to poor performance, based on Jensen's (1989) argument that higher predistress leverage increases a firm's incentive to respond more quickly to poor performance. This research is conducted on a sample of 45 poorly performing New Zealand firms between 1985 and 1994. The results indicate that higher leverage increases the probability of firms taking action in the short term. In particular, the evidence suggests that the probability of asset sales is positively associated with long‐term leverage, in addition to its relationship with the firm's stock return. Increased probability of management replacement is related to higher levels of short‐term leverage and surprisingly, the probability of dividend cuts decrease with higher levels of total and short‐term leverage. Poorly performing firms with higher leverage also appear to cut asset levels and dividends more aggressively than those with lower leverage levels.

This study seeks to examine the presence of voluntary intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) in Australian company reports and the influence of company characteristics (industry type, ownership concentration, listing age, leverage and auditor type) on ICD.

This is an empirical quantitative study that statistically tests a theoretically motivated explanatory model of ICD. ICD data were gathered from the annual reports of 70 Australian publicly listed firms using content analysis (CA).

Presence of ICD was low, with external capital being the most frequently disclosed category. Correlation and regression analysis demonstrated that companies that operate in high technology‐based or knowledge‐intensive industries, and companies with large Big Four auditing firms show more extensive ICD than those in other industries and without Big Four auditors. A company's ownership concentration, leverage level and listing age did not influence the occurrence of ICD.

Data collection is limited to one year (2006) and only from annual reports.

This is the first Australian study to test the explanatory relationship between a large number of firm‐specific characteristics and ICD for a diverse group of industries. Rigorous manual CA is applied.