The Power of Organizations by Heather A. Haveman;

Author:Heather A. Haveman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

Demographic and Cultural Perspectives

The combination of demographic and cultural perspectives has been immensely generative for both micro and macro research. It has enriched demographic research by making explicit causal mechanisms that have often been implicit. And it has enriched cultural research by explicitly recognizing that norms, values, and behavioral expectations of different demographic groups vary widely, and that organizational cultures are lenses that yield very different understandings of different demographic groups.

Cultural schemas and institutional logics shape evaluations of demographic groups. On the micro side, a growing stream of research reveals how the evaluation of workers with different demographic attributes is shaped by cultural schemas. Most of this research focuses on gender. For example, in financial services firms, women face competing cultural expectations—devotion to work and devotion to family—while men face only the former; this harms women’s careers by making them seem less well-suited to jobs in this type of firm (Blair-Loy 2003; Turco 2010). This finding is not limited to financial services. In general, job applicants who leave work to care for children are less likely to be hired when they re-enter the labor market, because they violate the gendered ideal-worker stereotype, the cultural lens through which workers are evaluated (Weisshaar 2018). In a similar vein, the cultural schemas law firms deploy when they evaluate recruits vary in terms of how much weight they give to stereotypically masculine traits (ambition, assertiveness, and self-confidence) versus stereotypically feminine traits (cooperation and friendliness) (Gorman 2005). Law firms with cultural schemas that were more stereotypically masculine (feminine) hired more men (women). Gendered cultural schemas about family versus work affect even those who do not (yet) have children. For instance, university hiring committees were concerned with the relationship status of female applicants but not of male applicants, because they assumed women with partners were less moveable than men with partners (Rivera 2017).

Gendered cultural schemas about family versus work can trump other cultural schemas, including racial ones. For example, in the leveraged buyout (LBO) industry, gender is a more relevant criterion for social exclusion than race, because women do not possess key cultural resources and do not fit the ideal-worker profile, while Black men do (Turco 2010). To gain acceptance at work, LBO employees need access to knowledge of and interest in sports, a cultural resource that is more likely to be possessed by Black men than by women of any color. Moreover, the ideal LBO worker is highly aggressive, competitive, and work-obsessed, attributes that fit cultural beliefs about masculinity, including Black masculinity, but conflict with cultural beliefs about femininity and motherhood.

Gendered cultural schemas can vary across jobs. For example, when engineering jobs are primarily technical (e.g., involving research, product development, or coding), women are disadvantaged more, relative to men, than when engineering jobs are primarily social (e.g., involving administration or teaching), because the ideal-worker stereotype for more technical jobs is more masculine and for more social jobs it is more feminine (Cech 2013). Gendered cultural schemas can also vary within a single job over time.

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