Lauren A. Rivera

Hiring as cultural matching: The case of elite professional service firms

This article presents culture as a vehicle of labor market sorting. Providing a case study of hiring in elite professional service firms, I investigate the often suggested but heretofore empirically unexamined hypothesis that cultural similarities between employers and job candidates matter for employers’ hiring decisions. Drawing from 120 interviews with employers as well as participant observation of a hiring committee, I argue that hiring is more than just a process of skills sorting; it is also a process of cultural matching between candidates, evaluators, and firms. Employers sought candidates who were not only competent but also culturally similar to themselves in terms of leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles. Concerns about shared culture were highly salient to employers and often outweighed concerns about absolute productivity. I unpack the interpersonal processes through which cultural similarities affected candidate evaluation in elite firms and provide the first empirical demonstration that shared culture—particularly in the form of lifestyle markers—matters for employer hiring. I conclude by discussing the implications for scholarship on culture, inequality, and labor markets.

Managing Spoiled National Identity : War, Tourism, and Memory in Croatia

Approaching the public representation of a “difficult past” as a macro-level impression management dilemma, this article addresses how states manage reputation-damaging elements of their histories on global stages. Through an empirical case study, I examine how the Croatian government has represented the country to international audiences via tourism after the wars of Yugoslav secession. Challenging assumptions that contentious historical moments will be commemorated, I find that the state has managed Croatias “difficult” recent past through covering and cultural reframing rather than public acknowledgment. The country has omitted the war from representations of national history and repositioned Croatia as identical in history and culture to its Western European neighbors. I draw from Goffmans work on stigma to explain the Croatian case and to develop a broader theoretical framework for understanding the conditions under which public recognition of reputation-damaging events is likely not to occur. I conclude by discussing theoretical implications for scholarship on collective memory, cultural sociology, and world polity theory.

Class Advantage, Commitment Penalty The Gendered Effect of Social Class Signals in an Elite Labor Market

Research on the mechanisms that reproduce social class advantages in the United States focuses primarily on formal schooling and pays less attention to social class discrimination in labor markets. We conducted a résumé audit study to examine the effect of social class signals on entry into large U.S. law firms. We sent applications from fictitious students at selective but non-elite law schools to 316 law firm offices in 14 cities, randomly assigning signals of social class background and gender to otherwise identical résumés. Higher-class male applicants received significantly more callbacks than did higher-class women, lower-class women, and lower-class men. A survey experiment and interviews with lawyers at large firms suggest that, relative to lower-class applicants, higher-class candidates are seen as better fits with the elite culture and clientele of large law firms. But, although higher-class men receive a corresponding overall boost in evaluations, higher-class women do not, because they face a competing, negative stereotype that portrays them as less committed to full-time, intensive careers. This commitment penalty faced by higher-class women offsets class-based advantages these applicants may receive in evaluations. Consequently, signals of higher-class origin provide an advantage for men but not for women in this elite labor market.

Diversity within Reach Recruitment versus Hiring in Elite Firms

Despite the popularity of diversity management, there is little consensus on how to design diversity practices that work. In this article, the author provides an inside look into one type of diversity practice: diversity recruitment. Drawing on qualitative evidence from hiring in elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms, the author analyzes what diversity recruitment looks like in these firms in theory and in practice. The author finds that although these firms tend to have the ingredients for success on paper, in practice the presence of structural and status divides between those responsible for overseeing diversity recruitment and those making hiring decisions, alongside widespread cultural beliefs among decision-makers that diversity is not a valid criterion of evaluation, stymies firms’ efforts to diversify. The author’s findings highlight that to be successful in translating diversity programs into results, those charged with overseeing diversity programs need not only formal organizational authority but also sufficient informal power and status to wield influence.

Go with your gut: : Emotion and evaluation in job interviews

This article presents hiring as an emotional process rooted in interpersonal evaluation. Drawing from Randall Collins’s theory of interaction ritual, the author offers a qualitative case study of elite professional service firms to unpack how employers’ emotional reactions to applicants in job interviews affect hiring evaluations. She finds that employers use subjective feelings of excitement and enthusiasm toward candidates—akin to Collins’s concept of emotional energy—to evaluate applicants and make hiring decisions. With these data, she constructs an original theoretical framework of emotional energy development, which highlights the qualities that tend to produce or inhibit the subjective experience of emotional energy in job interviews. Additionally, she outlines the particular phases of an encounter where energy gains and losses are most consequential for influencing hiring outcomes and inequalities. She discusses the implications of these findings for research on hiring, labor market stratification, and interaction rituals.

When Two Bodies Are (Not) a Problem: Gender and Relationship Status Discrimination in Academic Hiring

Junior faculty search committees serve as gatekeepers to the professoriate and play vital roles in shaping the demographic composition of academic departments and disciplines, but how committees select new hires has received minimal scholarly attention. In this article, I highlight one mechanism of gender inequalities in academic hiring: relationship status discrimination. Through a qualitative case study of junior faculty search committees at a large R1 university, I show that committees actively considered women’s—but not men’s—relationship status when selecting hires. Drawing from gendered scripts of career and family that present men’s careers as taking precedence over women’s, committee members assumed that heterosexual women whose partners held academic or high-status jobs were not “movable,” and excluded such women from offers when there were viable male or single female alternatives. Conversely, committees infrequently discussed male applicants’ relationship status and saw all female partners as movable. Consequently, I show that the “two-body problem” is a gendered phenomenon embedded in cultural stereotypes and organizational practices that can disadvantage women in academic hiring. I conclude by discussing the implications of such relationship status discrimination for sociological research on labor market inequalities and faculty diversity.