Alexandra Kalev

Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies

Employers have experimented with three broad approaches to promoting diversity. Some programs are designed to establish organizational responsibility for diversity, others to moderate managerial bias through training and feedback, and still others to reduce the social isolation of women and minority workers. These approaches find support in academic theories of how organizations achieve goals, how stereotyping shapes hiring and promotion, and how networks influence careers. This is the first systematic analysis of their efficacy. The analyses rely on federal data describing the workforces of 708 private sector establishments from 1971 to 2002, coupled with survey data on their employment practices. Efforts to moderate managerial bias through diversity training and diversity evaluations are least effective at increasing the share of white women, black women, and black men in management. Efforts to attack social isolation through mentoring and networking show modest effects. Efforts to establish responsibility for diversity lead to the broadest increases in managerial diversity. Moreover, organizations that establish responsibility see better effects from diversity training and evaluations, networking, and mentoring. Employers subject to federal affirmative action edicts, who typically assign responsibility for compliance to a manager, also see stronger effects from some programs. This work lays the foundation for an institutional theory of the remediation of workplace inequality.

Cracking the Glass Cages? Restructuring and Ascriptive Inequality at Work1

This study shows that the organization of work, particularly the structure of jobs, can sustain or erode gender and racial disadvantage. Restructuring work around team work and weaker job boundaries can improve women’s and minorities’ visibility and reduce stereotyping and thus should reduce their career disadvantage. Proponents of bureaucratic formalization argue, in contrast, that relaxing formal job definitions and emphasizing social relations at work will deepen ascriptive disadvantage. The reorganization of work in corporate America over the last two decades provides a test case. Using unique data on the life histories of more than 800 organizations, the author examines whether alleviating job segregation leads to better career outcomes for women and minorities. This study finds that when employers adopt popular team and training programs that increase cross‐functional collaboration, ascriptive inequality declines. Similar programs that do not transcend job boundaries do not lead to such increases. The results point to different effects at the intersection of gender and race.

You Can't Always Get What You Need: Organizational Determinants of Diversity Programs

While some U.S. corporations have adopted a host of diversity management programs, many have done little or nothing. We explore the forces promoting six diversity programs in a national sample of 816 firms over 23 years. Institutional theory suggests that external pressure for innovation reinforces internal advocacy. We argue that external pressure and internal advocacy serve as alternatives, such that when external pressure is already high, increases in internal advocacy will not alter the likelihood of program adoption. Moreover, institutional theory points to functional need as a driver of innovation. We argue that in the case of innovations designed to achieve new societal goals, functional need, as defined in this case by the absence of workforce diversity or the presence of regulatory oversight, is less important than corporate culture. Our findings help explain the spotty coverage of diversity programs. Firms that lack workforce diversity are no more likely than others to adopt programs, but firms with large contingents of women managers are more likely to do so. Pro-diversity industry and corporate cultures promote diversity programs. The findings carry implications for public policy.

Rage against the Iron Cage: The Varied Effects of Bureaucratic Personnel Reforms on Diversity

Organization scholars since Max Weber have argued that formal personnel systems can prevent discrimination. We draw on sociological and psychological literatures to develop a theory of the varied effects of bureaucratic reforms on managerial motivation. Drawing on self-perception and cognitive-dissonance theories, we contend that initiatives that engage managers in promoting diversity—special recruitment and training programs—will increase diversity. Drawing on job-autonomy and self-determination theories, we contend that initiatives that limit managerial discretion in hiring and promotion—job tests, performance evaluations, and grievance procedures—will elicit resistance and produce adverse effects. Drawing on transparency and accountability theories, we contend that bureaucratic reforms that increase transparency for job-seekers and hiring managers—job postings and job ladders—will have positive effects. Finally, drawing on accountability theory, we contend that monitoring by diversity managers and federal regulators will improve the effects of bureaucratic reforms. We examine the effects of personnel innovations on managerial diversity in 816 U.S. workplaces over 30 years. Our findings help explain the nation’s slow progress in reducing job segregation and inequality. Some popular bureaucratic reforms thought to quell discrimination instead activate it. Some of the most effective reforms remain rare.

How You Downsize Is Who You Downsize Biased Formalization, Accountability, and Managerial Diversity

Scholars and pundits argue that women and minorities are more likely to lose their jobs in downsizing because of segregation or outright discrimination. In contrast, this article explores how the formalization and legalization of downsizing affect inequalities. According to bureaucracy theory and management practitioners, formalization constrains decision-makers’ bias, but neo-structural and feminist theories of inequality argue that formalization can itself be gendered and racially biased. Accountability theory advances this debate, pointing to organizational and institutional processes that motivate executives to minimize inequality. Building on these theories, and drawing on unique data from a national sample of 327 downsized establishments between 1971 and 2002, I analyze how layoff formalization and actors’ antidiscrimination accountability affect women’s and minorities’ representation in management after downsizing. Results demonstrate that, first, downsizing significantly reduces managerial diversity. Second, formalization exacerbates these negative effects when layoff rules rely on positions or tenure, but not when layoff rules require an individualized evaluation. Finally, antidiscrimination accountability generated by internal legal counsels or compliance awareness prods executives to override formal rules and reduce inequalities. I conclude that although downsizing has been increasingly managed by formal rules and monitored by legal experts, this has often meant the institutionalization of unequal, rather than equal, opportunity.

Racial Discrimination, Interpretation, and Legitimation at Work

Research on race stratification and employment usually implies discrimination as a key mechanism in race stratification, although few if any analyses bring attitudes, employee-employer interpretations, and established discriminatory behavior into a singular analysis. In this article, the authors do so and offer a relational account of how discrimination operates, drawing on a large sample of verified racial discrimination cases. Building on racial stratification literature and theory on “color-blind” racism, the analyses focus on employee and employer interpretations and then use dyadic analyses coupled with qualitative case immersion to shed light on the relational nature of discrimination and how employers justify such conduct. Findings highlight significant interpersonal disjunctures in descriptions of common events as well as the ways in which employers evoke broad organizational and societal ideals of meritocracy— ideals that often fall by the wayside in concrete decision-making pertaining to and in evaluation of minority employees.

The State, the Labor Process, and the Diffusion of Managerial Models

This study examines the autonomous goals of state actors and their administrative and cultural capacities to pursue them. Analyzing qualitative and quantitative data from Palestine/Israel during the years 1940–1960, we study the diffusion of joint productivity councils that use scientific management principles (scientific JPCs). We assess explanations for the diffusion of managerial models offered by theories of state autonomy, efficiency, labor control, and professionalization. We demonstrate that the actions of state leaders interested in stabilizing the economy and financing nation-building projects were a necessary condition for the diffusion of scientific JPCs, which were initially rejected by labor, capital, and industrial engineers. State actors used public policy to foster national and plant-level agreements between labor and capital and launched a moral discourse that framed productivity as a precondition for national survival. This case study brings insights from political sociology and the framing literature to organizational research and offers a new set of factors for understanding the nexus between the state, the labor process, and the diffusion of managerial models.

Women at Work

Using a unique sample of 5,022 workers in 94 large German workplaces, the authors explore whether and how women’s access to higher level positions, firms’ human resources practices, and workers’ qualification levels are associated with gender differences in earnings. First, they find that having more women in management reduces the gender earnings gap for jobs with low qualifications, but not those with high qualifications. Second, they find that while men’s compensation is positively affected by having a male supervisor, women with a female supervisor do not receive such an advantage. Finally, they find that human resources practices and job-level qualifications moderate the association between gendered power and gender earnings inequalities. Integrating women into managerial and supervisory roles does not automatically reduce gender inequalities; its impacts are contingent on organizational context.

Are Referrals More Productive or More Likeable? Social Networks and the Evaluation of Merit

Scholars and practitioners agree that referrals provide firms with better workers. Economists and sociologists debate whether the underlying mechanism behind such relations is a better match between workers and firms or an advantage conferred by social relations. Building on insights from network theory and cognitive psychology, we offer a new approach to the debate, arguing that network relations can also create evaluative bias. We reexamine the connection between social ties and workers’ performance using unique data on the actual productivity of sales employees and their evaluations in a large global firm. Results suggest that the preexistence of ties between an incoming employee and insiders in the firm creates an evaluative advantage—an advantage that is unrelated to workers’ concrete performance. We discuss the implications of these results for a relational approach to social stratification, organizations and work, as well as social networks.

Israeli-Palestinian Women in the Retail Industry: Social Boundaries and Job Search Techniques

There is a growing debate among policy makers in Israel regarding Palestinian female citizens’ (hereafter Palestinian women) low labor force participation (LFP) (OECD 2011). This debate revolves mainly around the political and social actions that should be applied to the labor market to motivate Palestinian women’s employment.1 In this debate, however, the question of how processes originating from the labor market itself may enable the incorporation of Palestinian women into its ranks has rarely been addressed.