All My Relations: Understanding Perceptions of Justice and Conflict between Companies and Indigenous Peoples

Research on organizational justice typically investigates how perceptions of justice affect encounters between internal organizational actors, with few studies analyzing perceptions between firms and external stakeholders. In addition to a narrow focus on employer-employee relations, the organizational justice literature is dominated by western and European cultural perspectives. My paper addresses these gaps by exploring how justice theory may be useful in understanding conflicts between local Indigenous Peoples and multinational firms from the natural resource sector. I argue that this applied research problem can make a number of conceptual contributions to organization studies of justice. I illustrate how organizational justice theory applies within this new context, and also how indigenous cultural visions of justice enrich and challenge our very notion of organizational justice.