Revisiting is to Ought: How Clara Sabbagh’s Socializing Justice Contextualizes Social Justice Research

Sabbagh’s Socializing Justice reorients justice research from a focus on individual development to one of organizational socialization, offering a timely exploration of how social justice unfolds within and across educational settings. This expansive review advances three propositions. First, a cross-disciplinary depiction of justice typologies reveals how distributive, procedural, relational, and institutional logics are variably privileged across sociological, psychological, and philosophical traditions. Second, blending Sabbagh’s sociological focus on organizational structures with a psychological focus on development and relational practice offers an integrative account of socialization: Individual agency becomes situated within institutional, cultural, and policy-driven processes. Additionally, a normative framework conceptualizes learning environments as moral spaces—sites in which social justice is not merely taught or regulated but actively produced.