Sharing Power at Work: Rethinking Inequality, Autonomy, and Trust in Contemporary Employment

Abstract

This thesis examines how employee power is constructed, constrained, and experienced in contemporary workplaces. It offers a multidimensional account of worker participation by analyzing how formal authority, market pressures, workplace design, and interpersonal trust jointly affect power relations at work. Across four empirical chapters, it moves from the formal structure of command to the lived realities of control, voice, and participation.

The thesis begins by examining formal authority as the institutional basis of workplace power. Using employee survey data from EU countries, it analyzes who holds command over others and how authority is distributed by gender, tenure, education, industry, and country. This focus on organizational dimension of class analysis provides the foundation for analyzing how power operates within workplace hierarchies.

Building on the formal distribution of power, chapter 2 examines how broader market conditions influence firms' openness to participatory practices. Drawing on establishment-level data from European firms, it shows that external market pressures are more strongly associated with variations in employee influence than internal firm characteristics.

Chapter 3 shifts focus to the lived experience of work, by examining how job design impacts employee wellbeing. Using established occupational health frameworks, it analyzes how job demands, autonomy, managerial support, and rewards affect stress levels and physical health risks.

The final chapter turns to the relational dimension of power: trust between employees and management. It finds that trust primarily facilitates autonomy rather than employee influence in management decisions.

Together, power at work is not just about formal authority, it is about whose decisions carry weight, whose preferences get heard, and whose careers depend on whom. Understanding who holds power in the workplace - and why - is essential for anyone who wants to make sense of inequality more broadly.