Katerina Bezrukova (Rutgers University-Camden, USA)
E-mail: bezrukov@camden.rutgers.edu
Who Runs Faster and Lasts Longer? A Study of Group Faultlines, Group Values, and
Employee Mobility
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We examine how group values (e.g., values emphasizing the importance of careers and values emphasizing the acceptance of diversity) influence promotion decisions in groups with faultlines. Group faultlines are defined as hypothetical dividing lines that split a group into relatively homogeneous subgroups based on the group members' alignment along one or more attributes (adapted from Lau and Murnighan, 1998). We theorize how different faultline bases (informational and social category) may trigger upward, horizontal, or downward mobility of employees under different group values conditions (e.g., strong emphasis on career advancement opportunities versus no such emphasis). We test our hypotheses using data from 110 groups consisting of 671 individuals in a Fortune 500 information processing company. Results are discussed in light of social network theory (Granovetter, 1995; Tsui and O'Reilly, 1989) and research on mentoring and career advancements (Thomas, 1990).
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Robert Cottrol (George Washington University, USA)
E-mail: (bcottrol@law.gwu.edu)
The Role of Law and legal Institutions in Combating Racial Inequality in Latin America
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This paper examines the role of law in combatting patterns of social exclusion that deny people of African descent equal opportunities in Latin American societies. The paper focuses on six nations, Brazil, Columbia, Venezuela, Peru, Honduras and Nicaragua. All of these nations have substantial issues regarding long term systemic social and economic disadvantage of Afro-American populations. Some of these disadvantages stem from racial discrimination and the legacies of slavery. Still other disadvantages stem from structural barriers to social mobility. This paper will examine the effectiveness of legal remedies including anti-discrimination law and affirmative action measures present in these nations.
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Nancy DiTomaso (Rutgers University, USA)
E-mail: ditomaso@andromeda.rutgers.edu
From Racial to Religious Politics: The Transformation of Post-Civil Rights Politics
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This paper traces the transformation of U.S. politics in the post-civil rights period from politics over race to politics over religion (in the form of the "culture war"). The paper argues that the current religious politics that pervade in the U.S. is in origin and content really about racial politics and emerged in the context of resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, especially in the advent of school desegregation in the South and resistance in the North to busing and affirmative action. As commitment to the Civil Rights Movement became normative in the U.S. in the early 1960s, political candidates who appealed specifically to race, and especially to racial segregation, were not able to win elections, even in the South. The link between race and religion was played out specifically in the rise of "Christian academies" across the South as a means to avoid the desegregation of schools. Whites who sent their children to these alternative schools were angered by the efforts of the Carter administration to tax those Christian academies that would not desegregate. The response to the efforts to challenge the legitimacy of these schools provided an opportunity for members of the far right of the Republican Party to use these events to organize the Religious Right, starting first with the Moral Majority and later with the Christian Coalition. While these formalized groups were not sustained, the link between conservative, white Protestants and the Republican Party was solidified through such efforts. As a consequence, conservative, white Christians are now the heart of the Republican Party in the United States.
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Estrella Gualda Caballero (University of Huelva - Fundacion Centro de Estudios Andaluces, Spain)
E-mail: estrella@uhu.es
Factors Influencing Attitudes Towards Immigration in Europe
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The European Social Survey (ESS) has been in 2003 applied in 21 countries in Europe (EU and non-EU) with a sample of more than 39,000 interviews. The Fundacin Centro de Estudios Andaluces has also applied this survey in Andalusia (Spain), in this case with 3,200 interviews. Both surveys include questions about different issues concerning immigration. In this paper we focus on how Europeans evaluate people coming from other countries, particularly if they think that European countries should allow or deny the entrance of many or few immigrants of different race and ethnic group from majority; if they think that immigrants should have the same rights as majority and if they think that European countries should stop immigration if they want to reduce tension. Factors influencing these opinions are analyzed having into consideration variables as gender, year of birth, country, ideology, employment status, level of education... and also some variables related to Social Capital. We classify the 21 European countries in terms of their acceptation of immigrants. Through regression models we have found similar influencing factors between Andalusia and Europe, and they are discussed in the paper.
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Walton Johnson, (Rutgers University, USA)
E-mail: waltonj@rci.rutgers.edu
Are Whites (and Men) Ready for Democracy?: Social Dominance in South Africa
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Using ethnography on ethnicity and gender in post-apartheid South Africa, this paper argues that the development of a sociology of social dominance is crucial to successful democratization internationally, nationally, and within families. It explains why persons with ascribed social rank necessarily resist egalitarianism and contends that factoring in information about dominance behavior is critical to achieving equality.
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Heather Beth Johnson, Sociology (Lehigh University, USA)
E-mail: hbj2@lehigh.edu
Foothold Steps to Advantage: White Families, Good Schools, and the Use of Wealth
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The history and legacy of the wealth gap play themselves out in the modern-day role of assets in structuring opportunity and disadvantage for families. One of the processes through which this occurs is in the ability or inability on the part of parents to use assets to leverage advantageous schooling for the next generation. This is a living, breathing reality for all families; whether they are families with wealth or without; the consequences-positive and negative-are very real. Within a structure of school inequality all children do not receive the same quality education. Within a structure of wealth inequality those who receive intergenerational transfers of wealth within their families are advantaged through wealth privilege. Wealth privilege is enabling not just for the families who have it but also for the next generation in those families. One of the powers of wealth privilege is that it enables parents to place their children on advantageous educational trajectories that have real impacts on kids' life chances. Good schools aren't just perceived to give kids advantage, they actually do. Education contributes significantly to children's life chances and trajectories. Structurally advantaged from the start, many white families are able to use their wealth privilege to be successful in accessing good schools for their children. Structurally disadvantaged from the start, many families without assets -disproportionately black families-- are limited in their options and are often faced with constrained choices they don't like. It is not a coincidence who ends up where; people don't simply wind up at the top of the education hierarchy or get stuck at the bottom. Furthermore, who ends up where is not simply a matter of who tries harder or who cares most about their children's education. Empirical data based on interviews with 220 families show that wealth and race are monumental in structuring school decisions within families. Wealth secures foothold steps to advantage passed from one generation to the next to perpetuate a structure of privilege.
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Julie Kmec and Michele L. Robertson (Washington State, USA)
E-mail: jkmec@wsu.edu
Team Racial Diversity and Performance: Results from a Longitudinal Study of Men's Major League Soccer
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Previous research on the effects of group racial diversity and group performance is inconclusive: researchers have found both positive and negative diversity effects on performance. Our inability to identify the mechanisms linking diversity and performance contributes, in part, to these mixed results. The present analyses draws on psychological and workplace theories in an effort to identify the intervening mechanism linking diversity and performance. To explore this relationship, we assembled a data set containing information on the racial diversity, performance records, and other attributes of teams in one organization-men's U.S. Major League Soccer-from 1996 to 2002. Findings support two main conclusions: (1) team racial, diversity defined as the degree to which a team is heterogeneous with respect to race, has a positive effect on team performance net of team skill, age and language diversity, (2) mandatory league-wide diversity training does not significantly influence the effects of team racial diversity on the outcome but mediates the negative relationship between team language diversity and performance. We conclude by discussing which causal mechanism best interprets the link between diversity and performance.
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Karyn Lacy (Emory University, USA)
E-mail: lacy@rsage.org
Growing Up Around Blacks: Identity Construction in Middle-Class Suburbia
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Many members of the black middle class routinely travel back and forth from the black world to the white world, yet we know very little about how this group conceptualizes its integration into American society. Drawing on data collected through in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation in two suburban communities, I reveal the cultural resources middle-class blacks rely on to negotiate black-white boundaries.
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Maritsa Poros (Illinois Institute of Technology, USA)
E-mail: poros@iit.edu
Networks of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Economic Concentrations of Asian Indian Immigrants in New York and London
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The role of social networks is central to the phenomenon of employment or ownership in ethnic businesses, ethnic enclaves, and more generally ethnic economies. Social capital within migrant or co-ethnic social networks is generally viewed as an aid to niche employment, in other words as processes of network inclusion. This paper examines both processes of inclusion and exclusion in the social networks of Asian Indian migrants in and outside of ethnic economies. Evidence from the life histories of these migrants in New York and London allows us to see the role of social networks in producing cooperation and conflict within modes of economic inclusion and exclusion.
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Ryan Smith (CUNY, USA)/James R. Elliott (Tulane University,USA)
E-mail: rasassoc01@aol.com
Workplace Diversity, Power, and Wages: An Ethnoracial Analysis of Men and Women
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We use data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality to extend prior inquiries into patterns of ethnoracial and gender differences in wage returns to authority. Several empirical conclusions are reached. First, the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender do affect the financial rewards that authority brings. When transitioning from supervisory to managerial positions, black women's net wages are significantly increased-a pattern that is not observed among other groups. Second, and consistent with recent authority studies based on diverse samples, authority explains very little of the wage gap between sub-groups (cp. England et al. 1999). Third, there is no evidence that group differences in wages increase with movement up the authority hierarchy or at higher occupational levels. Instead, there is a fairly constant, double digit wage gap between white men and women and minorities within each level of authority. Finally, there is partial support for the hypothesis that women and minorities receive lower returns than white men to their human capital investments at increasingly higher levels of power. Our overall conclusion is very much consistent with that of Wright & Perrone (1977:52): not only are women and minorities less likely to advance up authority hierarchies, but when they do, they are also rewarded less than their white male counterparts.
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Kevin Stainback, Corre L. Robinson, and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey (North Carolina State, USA)
E-maiL: kmstainb@server.sasw.ncsu.edu)
Race and Workplace Integration: A 'Politically-mediated' Process?
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Racial job segregation has declined since the late 1960s. While these trends are well documented, we still know very little about the mechanisms that are responsible for this change. Interestingly, the trends in sex segregation have been consistent over time, producing gradual but steady increases in integration, which suggests a mechanism of general normative change. The racial trend in workplace segregation is less even. It seems to decline rapidly from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, but then levels off and has changed little since. We suspect that the mechanisms driving sex and race workplace segregation are different. We develop a political process theoretical model of racial segregation change and using EEO-1 reports of workplace segregation estimate a series of politically mediated models of workplace change in black-white and Hispanic-white employment segregation from 1966-2000.
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Bill Tucker (Rutgers University-Camden, USA)
E-mail: btucker@camden.rutgers.edu
Exploiting Science to Support Racism
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Establish in 1937 by textile multi-millionaire Wickliffe Preston Draper, the Pioneer Fund has become one of the most controversial non-profit organizations in the United States. As the source of financial support for almost every psychologist in the last four decades who has concluded that blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites, Pioneer has consistently portrayed itself as a completely non-political organization, interested only in funding scientifically significant research that is too politically incorrect to receive assistance from government granting agencies or more traditional private foundations. Archival records, however, tell a different story, indicating that Pioneer's directors have been involved in a number of organized attempts to prevent blacks from attaining their constitutional rights and have subsidized various projects designed to encourage ethnic prejudice. The evidence thus suggests that the fund desires to use science to support a specific political agenda. Of course, this does not mean that every recipient of support shares that agenda, but it does raise some important ethical issues for social scientists.
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