Search results

Organizational approaches to racial inequality have provided contextual insight into a host of traditional stratification outcomes (e.g., hiring, earnings, authority). This chapter extends the organizational approach by drawing on the health-stress framework to explore how organizational context affects experiential and health-related outcomes – discrimination, social support, and psychological distress. Drawing on a sample of Black workers in the United States, we examine the relationship between workplace racial composition and psychological distress, as well as two potential mediators – racial discrimination and workplace social support. Our findings reveal that psychological distress is similar for Black workers in token (<25% Black coworkers), tilted other race (25–49.99% Black coworkers), and tilted same race (50–74.99% Black coworkers) job contexts. Workers in Black-dominated jobs (>75% Black coworkers), however, experience significantly less psychological distress than other compositional thresholds, net of individual, job, and workplace characteristics. This relationship is not explained by either racial discrimination experiences or supervisor and coworker social support. This finding suggests that researchers need to theorize and examine other protective factors stemming from coworker racial similarity.

Research on racial inequality in organizations typically (1) assumes constraining effects of bureaucratic structure on the capacity of powerful actors to discriminate or (2) reverts to individualistic interpretations emphasizing implicit biases or self-expressed motivations of gatekeepers. Such orientations are theoretically problematic because they ignore how bureaucratic structures and practices are immersed within and permeated by culturally normative racial meanings and hierarchies. This decoupling ultimately provides a protective, legitimating umbrella for organizational practices and gatekeeping actors – an umbrella under which differential treatment is enabled and discursively portrayed as meritocratic or even organizationally good. In this chapter, we develop a race-centered conception of organizational practices by drawing from a sample of over 100 content-coded workplace discrimination cases and analyzing both discriminatory encounters and employer justifications for inequality-generating conduct. Results show three non-mutually exclusive patterns that highlight the fundamentally racial character of organizations: (1) the racialization of bureaucracies themselves via the organizational valuation and pursuit of “ideal workers,” (2) the ostensibly bureaucratic and neutral, yet inequitable, policing of minority worker performance, and; (3) the everyday enforcement of racial status boundaries through harassment on the job, protection afforded to perpetrators, and bureaucratically enforced retaliation aimed at victims. The permeation of race-laden presumptions into organizations, their activation relative to oversight and bureaucratic policing, and the invoking of colorblind bureaucratic discourses and policies to legitimate discriminatory conduct are crucial to understanding the organizational dimensions of racial inequality production. We end by discussing the implications of our argument and results for future theory and research.

This paper tests whether employers responded particularly negatively to African American job applicants during the deep U.S. recession that began in 2007. Theories of labor queuing and social closure posit that members of privileged groups will act to minimize labor market competition in times of economic turbulence, which could advantage Whites relative to African Americans. Although social closure should be weakest in the less desirable, low-wage job market, it may extend downward during recessions, pushing minority groups further down the labor queue and exacerbating racial inequalities in hiring. We consider two complementary data sources: (1) a field experiment with a randomized block design and (2) the nationally representative NLSY97 sample. Contrary to expectations, both analyses reveal a comparable recession-based decline in job prospects for White and African American male applicants, implying that hiring managers did not adapt new forms of social closure and demonstrating the durability of inequality even in times of structural change. Despite this proportionate drop, however, the recession left African Americans in an extremely disadvantaged position. Whites during the recession obtained favorable responses from employers at rates similar to African Americans prior to the recession. The combination of experimental methods and nationally representative longitudinal data yields strong evidence on how race and recession affect job prospects in the low-wage labor market.

Appearance is part of a person's non-verbal communication, and looks are often associated with the perceived ‘attractiveness’ of individuals for hiring practices in the workplace. As such, physical attractiveness can be a ‘prized possession’ when it comes to leaving a positive impression on managers who are interviewing candidates. In the twenty-first century environment, our society seems to be more obsessed with physical appearance than ever before because society has conditioned us to associate beauty with other favourable characteristics. Of course, such appearance norms, regarding attractiveness, ‘good looks’ and beauty are linked to years of socialisation in culture, cultural norms and materialistic personality standards.

In a business context, managers and employers often make hiring decisions based on the appearance and attractiveness of the job applicants since outward appearance seems to play a significant role in which candidates eventually might get the job. Physically attractive job applicants and candidates tend to benefit from the unearned privilege, which often comes at a cost to others who are equally qualified. Preferring employees who are deemed to be attractive, and consequently discriminating against those who are perceived as unattractive, can present legal and ethical challenges for employers and managers. In this chapter, we provide a discussion and reflection of appearance-based hiring practices in the United States with relevant legal, ethical and practical implications for employers, human resources professionals and managers. We focus on ‘lookism’ or appearance discrimination, which is discrimination in favour of people who are physically attractive. As such, we examine federal, state and local laws regarding appearance discrimination in the American workplace. We also offer sustainable policy recommendations for employers, HR professionals and managers on how they can be fair to all candidates in order to hire, promote and retain the most qualified professionals in their departments and organisations.

This chapter is partially based on an unpublished Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) background report, titled ‘OECD Research Project on Diversity in the Workplace: Country Report Germany’, which was written by the authors of this chapter. While the OECD country report illustrates how diversity policies and related diversity instruments targeting various diversity dimensions have developed in Germany over recent decades, this chapter focuses solely on the management of ethnic diversity and its related policies. Diversity policies are broadly understood as any policy that seeks to increase the representation of disadvantaged social groups such as migrants and ethnic minorities, women, disabled persons, older workers and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual, intersex and queer/questioning (LGBTIQ) in the workplace, both in the public and in the private sector. The central idea of this chapter is to provide an overview of which policies and instruments have been implemented for migrants and ethnic minorities at the workplace and to evaluate their success or failure where possible. In doing so, this chapter also discusses obstacles, success factors and challenges for policy implementation for the past and for the future.

Purpose – Research has shown that employers often disfavor racial minorities − particularly African Americans − even when whites and minorities present comparable resumes when applying for jobs. Extant studies have been hard pressed to distinguish between taste-based discrimination where employers' racial animus is the key motivation for their poor treatment of minorities and variants of statistical discrimination where there is no assumption at all of racial animus on the part of the employer. This chapter proposes a test of these theories by observing whether employers use employee referrals as a “cheap” source of information to help assess applicant quality.Methodology/approach – Unique quantitative data encompassing the entire pool of 987 candidates interviewed by one company in the western United States during a 13-month period are used to test our arguments.Findings – We find that employers in this setting are making use of the cheap information available to them: Consistent with statistical discrimination theory, minority referrals are more likely to receive a job offer than non-referred minority applicants, and are not disfavored relative to referred whites.Originality/value of the chapter – Both statistical and taste-based theories of discrimination propose similar observable outcomes (lower rates of disfavored minority hiring). While different mental processes are being invoked by taste-based and statistical discrimination theories, the theories are extremely difficult to distinguish in terms of observable behaviors. Especially for the purpose of designing legal remedies and labor market policies to ameliorate the disparate treatment of minority groups, differentiating between these theories is a high priority.

Why do so many African Americans get stuck near the bottom or at the middle of the corporate ladder? Why do so many continue to complain about discriminatory pay and promotion decisions many decades after the enactment of anti-discrimination laws? Law and economics commentators who have written about the issue of employment discrimination have failed to address the complexity of the problem of implicit bias and the effects of the frequently inaccurate heuristics used by some white workers when making judgments about their black colleagues. Economic theory without context is useless. But with context, law and economic analysis can help us understand and address specific problems like workplace discrimination that persist within corporate cultures because of an overestimation of the cost of anti-discrimination efforts and an underestimation of the gravity and likelihood of workplace discrimination.

In this chapter, I explore the economic and socioeconomic reality of African American low and mid-level corporate managers in order to capture a more complete picture of the costs of discrimination in the corporate workplace. I also explore the heuristic assumptions that are made about African American professionals and the effects those assumptions have on the black community. Finally, to understand the gravity of the harm to individuals, their families and the communities to which they belong, narratives about the economic and psychological harm caused by discrimination are essential. I offer the narratives of six middle managers and low-level professionals who faced discrimination in the corporate workplace to provide an important context about discrimination's real costs.

Purpose – Differential racialization experiences influence ethnic and racial self-identification. This research assesses how ethnic self-identification colors perceptions perceived discrimination and how this in turn influences adolescent depressive symptomatology.

Methodology/Approach – We use the second wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS) to examine the children of Caribbean immigrants. This research uses descriptive statistics, bivariate, and multivariate analyses to test hypotheses. The primary statistical method used is linear regression with OLS estimators.

Findings – Variations in the depression score exist among the racial/ethnic groups, with those identifying as non-black Antillean experiencing greater depression than the other three groups, and those identifying as white Cuban experiencing the lowest depression levels. The findings also show that some of this association is due to perceived discrimination.

Research Limitations/Implications – Future research should examine the association between discrimination and mental health longitudinally. We did not explore this option due to the lack of availability of relevant variables across multiple waves of the study.

Originality/Value of Paper – The results have implications for better understanding the second generation and elucidate how race and ethnicity shape adolescent perceptions of discrimination, and how these perceptions, in turn, are associated with mental health.