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This address highlights the potential role of the social psychology of justice in the analysis of phenomena anchored in substantive areas like health, the environment, education, and racial and gender dynamics. To do so, I ask three questions: (1) Do sociologists attend to justice in their scholarly work? (2) When sociologists do attend to justice, do they conceptualize it clearly? and (3) Could the social psychology of justice scholarship further contribute to sociologists' attention to and clarity of conceptualization and understanding of social phenomena? To answer the first question, I coded references to justice in the contents of publications in three American Sociological Association journals over a five-year period. For the latter two questions, I leverage illustrations drawn from the health domain. My answers are, respectively, not so much, not really, and yes. The last response, importantly, ensures that justice is seen so that it can be done.

Although the abstract notion of justice implies attention to fairness not simply for one individual but for many, emphasis on how individuals perceive and react to injustice obscures the role of the group in justice research. Justice, as distinct from individual deserving, holds promise for the well-being of the group. Indeed, the group plays multiple roles in justice research, as a collective standard, a structure in which evaluations occur, a source of identity, and a context of interaction. Analyses of these roles help to explain underlying orientations of group members, delimiting the scope of justice in groups and the implications of justice in conflict situations. This review concludes with directions for future research that more explicitly draw attention to the rightful role of the group in understanding justice in society.

Preface -- Acknowledgments -- About the authors -- Introduction to the interrelated processes of social psychology -- Methods of developing social psychological knowledge -- The individual in a social world -- Identity processes -- Intra-individual processes : social cognitions -- Intra-individual processes : attitudes -- Beyond cognition : affect and emotions -- Status processes in groups -- Power relations in groups and social networks -- Legitimacy : shaping behavior in groups and organizations -- Justice processes and evaluations within groups -- Intergroup processes

Legitimacy generally compels people to feel an obligation to follow the social rules dictated by an authority. While much social psychological research focuses on the consequences of legitimacy, far less pertains to its emergence. Here the authors examine the role of justice and power in establishing the legitimacy of a decision maker. The authors outline the identity-based model offered by Tyler that highlights the role of procedural justice and offer a complementary resource-based model. The authors argue that the power structure in an organization and the nature of power use by authorities affect the availability of the material and nonmaterial resources necessary for subordinates to do their jobs well, which in turn creates social obligations that allow for the germination of legitimacy. With emphasis on resources, the analysis thus reconsiders the role of distributive justice. The authors conclude by emphasizing the conditions under which identity concerns and resource concerns are relevant to the emergence of legitimacy and by speculating on how these social psychological processes may parallel arguments in this volume regarding the emergence of state legitimacy.

This chapter provides a general review of the research conducted over the past two decades on individuals' conceptions of equity and distributive justice and their reactions to inequity. Various theoretical formulations are identified and important topics for further theoretical development and empirical investigation are discussed. In conclusion, the authors suggest that micro-level concepts of distributive justice have certain limitations. Consideration of more macrolevel concepts suggests possibilities for integrating equity and distributive justice theories with sociological theories of power, conflict, and collective action. This integration, if achieved, would bring notions of justice to the forefront in the analysis of social change.

The greater exposure of communities of color and poor communities to environmental harms compared with white and middle-class neighborhoods constitutes "environmental injustice." Here, we examine how environmental attitudes and experiences with discrimination, as well as environmental and racial identities, affect environmental injustice assessments. Specifically, we focus on environmental injustice pertaining to actual distributions of environmental harms among low-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color (distributive environmental injustice), and prescriptions regarding fair decision-making procedures underlying the distribution of environmental burdens in communities (procedural environmental justice). Our data stem from a survey of black people living in the United States. Seemingly unrelated regression analyses indicate that environmental attitudes influence assessments of injustice regarding the distribution of environmental harms in disadvantaged neighborhoods and prescriptions regarding just decision-making procedures about distributing such harms. And while experiences with discrimination only affect assessments of distributive environmental injustice, black identity strongly predicts both forms of justice related to the environment (even controlling on environmental identity, which only affects procedural environmental justice prescriptions). Our discussion focuses on the profound impact of black identity on shaping meanings of environmental justice even for those unaffected by such harms.

Previous research demonstrates that both procedural justice and distributive justice are important predictors of work attitudes. This research, however, fails to examine conditions that affect the relative importance of each type of justice. Here we argue that prior experiences with regard to downsizing shape individuals' workplace schemas, which in turn affect the relative salience of each type of justice for organizational commitment. We test hypotheses using data from a nationally representative sample of workers. Only distributive justice predicts organizational commitment among victims of downsizing, while procedural justice is the stronger predictor among survivors of downsizing and unaffected workers. Comparisons across models indicate that procedural justice is a more important predictor of organizational commitment for survivors and unaffected workers than for victims, while distributive justice is more important for victims than for either survivors or unaffected workers. We conclude by discussing the theoretical implications of our findings.

People typically respond with negative emotions when they perceive an authority's outcome distribution to be unjust. We argue, however, that legitimacy of the authority—"what others think" in terms of support coworkers and superiors extend to an individual occupying an authority position—acts as an opposing force, attenuating negative emotions and thus helping to sustain stratified orders. Likewise, legitimacy may stymie intentional displays of felt emotions. Our experiment examines the effects of perceived distributive injustice, legitimacy of the authority, and authority's procedural fairness on members' self-reported emotions and likelihood of intended emotional displays toward that authority, a superordinate authority, and coworkers in a work group context. Findings demonstrate that while perceived injustice arouses expected self-reported negative emotions, legitimacy (authorization as support by a superordinate authority and endorsement as support by coworkers) reduces such feelings. Also, strong authorization and endorsement indirectly affect intended emotional displays through self-reported negative emotions.