Title: All Work and No Pay: Hero Narratives and the Selection of Upwardly Mobile Individuals for Unpaid Work

Speaker: Shuang Wu, Assistant Professor, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Host:Shike Li, Assistant Professor,Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Time: 13:30–15:00, Wednesday, Monday 25, 2026

Venue: Room A509, Antai Building, Xuhui Campus, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Brief introduction of the content: 

Organizations play a critical role in shaping social class mobility. Existing theories focus on how organizational gatekeepers’ negative stereotypes constrain the careers of upwardly mobile individuals and call for greater recognition of their strengths. Drawing on research on complementary stereotypes, we propose a novel perspective: positive stereotypes can also propagate social class disparities. We show that upwardly mobile individuals, such as first-generation college students, are often framed through a hero’s journey narrative. Accordingly, others tend to perceive them as possessing more heroic traits such as resilience and determination than their counterparts with higher social class origins. While seemingly laudatory, this hero narrative has an insidious consequence: employers are more likely to select first-generation than other college students for unpaid internships and assign them additional tasks with no pay. Across six studies, including a randomized résumé audit (N = 1,106) and controlled experiments (N = 4,900), we find consistent evidence that the perceived hero’s journey and heroic traits mediate the effect of social class origin on selection for unpaid work. Complementing prior research on negative stereotyping, our findings show how positive stereotypes can legitimize the exploitation of upwardly mobile workers.

Speaker's profile:

Shuang WU is an Assistant Professor of Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School. Her research focuses on leadership emergence, social hierarchy, and social class. Specifically, her research examines the barriers employees encounter and the strategies they can employ to achieve upward mobility within social hierarchies. Her research has been published in leading psychology journals such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and has received revision invitations from major business journals such as Organization Science and Journal of Consumer Research. She received her PhD from the University of California San Diego, and Bachelor’s from Tsinghua University. 

Welcome all!