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.
At the turn of the century, regulators introduced policies to control bank risk-taking. Many banks appointed chief risk officers (CROs), yet bank holdings of new, complex, and untested financial ...derivatives subsequently soared. Why did banks expand use of new derivatives? We suggest that CROs encouraged the rise of new derivatives in two ways. First, we build on institutional arguments about the expert construction of compliance, suggesting that risk experts arrived with an agenda of maximizing risk-adjusted returns, which led them to favor the derivatives. Second, we build on moral licensing arguments to suggest that bank appointment of CROs induced "organizational licensing," leading trading-desk managers to reduce policing of their own risky behavior. We further argue that CEOs and fund managers bolstered or restrained derivatives use depending on their financial interests. We predict that CEOs favored new derivatives when their compensation rewarded risk-taking, but that both CEOs and fund managers opposed new derivatives when they held large illiquid stakes in banks. We test these predictions using data on derivatives holdings of 157 large banks between 1995 and 2010.
Why Diversity Programs Fail Dobbin, Frank; Kalev, Alexandra
Harvard business review,
2016, Letnik:
94, Številka:
7/8
Magazine Article
Odprti dostop
Businesses started caring a lot more about diversity after a series of high-profile lawsuits rocked the financial industry. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Morgan Stanley shelled out $54 million ...-- and Smith Barney and Merrill Lynch more than $100 million each -- to settle sex discrimination claims. In 2007, Morgan was back at the table, facing a new class action, which cost the company $46 million. It's no wonder that Wall Street firms now require new hires to sign arbitration contracts agreeing not to join class actions. They have also expanded training and other diversity programs. But on balance, equality isn't improving in financial services or elsewhere. It shouldn't be surprising that most diversity programs aren't increasing diversity. Despite a few new bells and whistles, courtesy of big data, companies are basically doubling down on the same approaches they've used since the 1960s -- which often make things worse, not better.
Research on how discrimination lawsuits affect corporate diversity has yielded mixed results. Qualitative studies highlight the limited efficacy of lawsuits in the typical workplace, finding that ...litigation frequently elicits resistance and even retribution from employers. But quantitative studies find that lawsuits can increase workforce diversity. This article develops an account of managerial resistance and firm visibility to reconcile these divergent findings. First, we synthesize job autonomy and group conflict theories to account for resistance that occurs when dominant groups perceive non-dominant groups to be attempting to usurp managerial authority, in this case through litigation. Second, we integrate insights from organizational institutionalism, which suggests that highly visible firms seek to demonstrate compliance with legal and societal norms. Drawing on this theory, we predict that only large, visible firms will see increases in diversity following lawsuits, and, by the same token, that the most visible workplaces of those large firms, their headquarters, will see the greatest changes. We test our hypotheses with data on litigation and workforce composition from a diverse set of 632 firms that were sued by the EEOC between 1997 and 2006. This study shows that understanding the consequences of lawsuits across firms, and across organizations within them, is key to tackling workplace discrimination.
To examine the effects of policy on markets and competition we outline hypotheses about the effects of three common policy regimes-public capitalization, pro-cartel, and antitrust-on competition and ...the founding of new firms. Analyses of Massachusetts railroad foundings between 1825 and 1922 show that public capitalization raises the number of foundings by increasing available resources, pro-cartel policies raise the number of foundings by dampening competition from incumbents, and antitrust depresses foundings by stimulating competition. Ecological factors only show the expected effects once policy is controlled. Industrial organization factors show no net effects. We argue that public policy establishes the ground rules of competition and thus creates varieties of market behavior.
American organizational theorists have not taken up the call to apply Bourdieu's approach in all of its richness in part because, for better or worse, evidentiary traditions render untenable the kind ...of sweeping analysis that makes Bourdieu's classics compelling. Yet many of the insights found in Bourdieu are being pursued piecemeal, in distinct paradigmatic projects that explore the character of fields, the emergence of organizational habitus, and the changing forms of capital that are key to the control of modern organizations. A number of these programs build on the same sociological classics that Bourdieu built his own theory on. These share the same lineage, even if they were not directly influenced by Bourdieu.
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