Liberals, egalitarians, meritocrats, and free marketeers: how business executives view distributive justice

From the beginning of 2020 it has become a statutory requirement for UK listed companies with more than 250 employees to disclose the ratio of their senior executives’ pay to the median, lower and upper quartile pay of UK employees. Alexander Pepper and colleagues investigated how business executives view these efforts. Many of these executives recognise that they live in societies which are not just and work for companies which may not have just pay policies. Most endorse pluralistic views of justice that balance considerations of merit with considerations of need. In the end, the researchers found that executives cluster into four groups of approximately equal size in relation to their views on distributive justice.