Work

Psychosocial Harm as an Inequality Regime at Work: Intersectional Accounts From Portugal

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: ABSTRACT This article examines psychosocial harm at work as a sociological problem of inequality rather than only an issue of individual stress. Drawing on Acker's concept of inequality regimes together with minority stress and intersectionality, and based on 60 in‐depth interviews with workers in Portugal, it analyses how overload, insecurity, work‐family conflict, poor leadership, and weak reporting systems are organized through gendered, heteronormative, racialized, and migration‐related relations of power. Reflexive thematic analysis developed three themes: the organization of harm through workload, insecurity, and leadership; recognition, legitimacy, and the cost of difference; and conditional belonging through redress, informal networks, and compounded exclusion. Across these themes, diversity initiatives organized around single categories left a structural gap for workers marginalized on several dimensions at once. Psychosocial harm was not evenly distributed but produced through labor‐process intensification, unequal legitimacy, conditional belonging, and the individualization of coping. Diversity and well‐being initiatives offered limited protection when unsupported by workload regulation, accountable management, and credible mechanisms of redress. The article contributes to sociology of work debates through an integrative framework that links inequality regimes and minority stress as complementary levels of a single account of psychosocial harm, showing how the proximal mechanisms of minority stress operate through the organisational arrangements that inequality regimes analysis identifies, and how recovery, credibility, and redress come to be distributed unequally through those arrangements across workers' intersecting positions. Workplace well‐being, on this account, requires structural reforms designed around workers' unequal and intersectional exposure to risk.

Source: Gender Work and Organization

DOI: 10.1111/gwao.70279

Authors: Iara Teixeira, Felipe Alckmin‐Carvalho, Guilherme Welter Wendt, Jóni Ledo, Henrique Pereira

Institutions: Universidade Politécnica de Castelo Branco, University of Beira Interior, Centro de Investigação em Desporto Saúde e Desenvolvimento Humano, Universidade Estadual do Oeste do Paraná

Language: English

Topic: Workplace Health and Well-being

Subfield: General Health Professions

Field: Health Professions

Domain: Health Sciences

SDGs: Reduced inequalities, Decent work and economic growth, Gender equality, Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $4,880