Research

Many accounts of DEI implementation ask whether organizational leaders are sufficiently committed to diversity. This paper begins from a different puzzle: what happens when an organization is committed to increasing racial diversity, has policies and resources in place to support that goal, and still resists adopting tools designed to help?

In a 20-month ethnographic study of a fast-growing technology company I call ShopCo, I examined how managers evaluated 13 recruitment platforms intended to help the company widen its pool of technical candidates. Some were traditional recruitment platforms, where the modal candidate was White. Others were targeted recruitment platforms designed to help employers find racial minority engineering candidates. This comparison allowed me to study how managers interpreted similar recruitment tools differently depending on whether the platform made racial minority candidates salient as the object of recruitment.

I found that managers did not resist recruitment platforms in general. They readily accepted transactional approaches to recruiting when using traditional platforms: speed, scale, efficiency, compensation, and opportunity were seen as appropriate ways to attract technical talent. But when targeted platforms used similar transactional logics to recruit racial minority candidates, managers expressed discomfort. They worried that these platforms objectified racial minority candidates, exploited them, or targeted them on the basis of race. As a result, ShopCo rejected targeted platforms that seemed to commodify diversity and favored platforms that framed racial minority recruitment in more developmental terms: individuality, ethics, equity, community, and long-term commitment.

My paper develops the concept of repugnant market concerns to explain this pattern. Managers were not rejecting diversity; they were rejecting a particular market form for pursuing diversity. Yet this moral discomfort had organizational consequences. By preferring developmental approaches for racial minority recruitment and transactional approaches for traditional recruitment, ShopCo used different relational models depending on candidates’ race. That difference shaped which candidates were ultimately recruited: a developmental approach yielded mostly entry-level candidates.

For scholars, my paper contributes to research on organizational inequality and economic sociology. I identify a previously underrecognized demand-side barrier to DEI implementation: resistance that arises not from lack of commitment, competitive threat, or hidden bias alone, but from discomfort with the relational meaning of a diversity intervention. The broader implication is that diversity initiatives do not succeed or fail only because of their technical design. They also succeed or fail because organizational actors interpret what those initiatives imply about race, markets, and appropriate forms of organizational action.

Advocacy is often understood as a dyadic process: an advocate tries to influence a powerful actor or bureaucratic system on behalf of someone disadvantaged by that system. This paper shows that this view misses a crucial third relationship. Advocates must also manage their relationship with the people they are trying to help.

In a two-year ethnographic study of public defenders, Kellogg and I examined how they advocated for disadvantaged clients in interactions with district attorneys. We analyzed 82 advocacy opportunities across six public defender offices, observing courtroom work, client interactions, and negotiations with prosecutors. I attended public defender trainings, shadowed defenders across juvenile, children and family, and adult criminal practice areas, and conducted formal and informal interviews with defenders, trainers, and managers.

The setting allowed us to observe advocacy in a context where the stakes were high and the relationship structure was especially fraught. Public defenders depended on the criminal legal system for access, employment, and professional practice, while their clients often had strong reasons to distrust that same system. Public defenders could often gain benefits for clients, such as reduced bail, improved plea terms, scheduling accommodations, or other case-related outcomes, by working informally and strategically with district attorneys. Yet those same tactics could appear suspicious to clients. A defender who joked with a district attorney, made the courtroom workflow smoother, or offered information to a prosecutor might be advocating effectively, but the client might read those actions as evidence that the defender had been coopted by the system.

We found that advocates engaged in triadic advocacy work: they managed impressions with beneficiaries while also attempting to influence powerful actors within the bureaucratic system. Public defenders assessed not only whether district attorneys were open to advocacy, but also whether their own advocacy tactics might generate client mistrust. When defenders anticipated mistrust, they used beneficiary-facing practices such as verbal disclaimers, distancing themselves from the system, and enlisting trusted allies. They were also more willing to advocate when they had access to preemptive spaces to talk with clients beforehand or when they believed they had built credibility through community loyalty activities.

For scholars, our paper contributes to research on street-level bureaucracy, occupations, and advocacy. We reconceptualize advocacy as a triadic process among advocate, beneficiary, and bureaucratic system rather than a dyadic process between advocate and system. This shift matters because advocacy can fail not only when powerful actors resist, but also when beneficiaries mistrust the actions taken on their behalf. Our paper therefore shows that efforts to advance the interests of disadvantaged people require both system-facing influence and beneficiary-facing interpretive work.

Research on workplace microaggressions has powerfully documented the harm they cause targets. But scholars have often assumed that the relational consequence is straightforward: after a microaggression, the relationship between target and perpetrator deteriorates. Our paper begins from a more complicated empirical and theoretical observation: workplace relationships do not all follow the same path after a microaggression. Some deteriorate. Some remain strained. Some recover. Some adapt in ways that change the relationship going forward.

In our paper, Basima Tewfik and I theorized workplace microaggressions as relational fractures. We developed a theoretical model that integrated research on relational fractures with theory on intergroup relations and the existing literature on microaggressions. Our focus was the workplace relationship between a target, whose marginalized social identity is threatened, and a perpetrator, who typically holds a dominant social identity in relation to the microaggression. We asked: how do the target’s response, the perpetrator’s response, and the relationship between them shape what happens next?

We theorize that a workplace microaggression generally activates a target’s self-protective motivation, a response oriented toward protecting the self, often at the expense of the relationship. Yet targets may shift toward a relationship-promotive motivation under certain relational conditions, including more positive past DEI-related interactions with the perpetrator, greater relational closeness, and greater perceived relational viability. Perpetrators, in turn, may respond with either self-protective or relationship-promotive motivations depending on their own perceptions of the relationship. These motivational pairings then shape the depth of dyadic relational repair work. When both parties remain self-protective, little repair occurs, and the relationship deteriorates. When one party becomes relationship-promotive and the other does not, repair may be partial or restorative. When both parties adopt relationship-promotive motivations, deeper adaptive repair becomes possible.

Our paper’s central contribution is to shift microaggression theory from a target-only account to a relational and dyadic one. This does not minimize the target’s experience; rather, it explains why relational outcomes cannot be understood by focusing on the target alone. Perpetrators and the relationship itself matter.

For scholars, our paper contributes to microaggression research, relational theory, intergroup relations, and workplace relationships. We challenge the assumption that microaggressions have one inevitable relational outcome, specify the process through which varied relational outcomes emerge, and show why the burden of shaping those outcomes should not rest solely on targets. The broader implication is that workplace microaggressions are not only individual experiences of harm; they are relational events whose consequences unfold through interaction over time.

Our chapter asks why some organizational settings are more likely than others to sustain integration across social groups. Building from Edward Laumann’s foundational work on social distance, pluralism, and social networks, we examine a core insight that has received too little attention: middle-status occupations and formal bureaucracies appear more conducive to cross-group relationships than many other social settings.

Rather than treating integration as simply a function of individual tolerance or prejudice, we theorize integration as an ecological outcome. Different organizational forms create different conditions for whether people remain in the same setting, encounter members of other groups, and have opportunities to form cross-group ties. We focus especially on how people derive social validation from the presence of in-group members and how that validation changes as in-group representation increases.

Our chapter revises Schelling’s classic threshold model of segregation by reinterpreting thresholds as the amount of validation individuals need from in-group members to remain in a setting. We then integrate this model with ideas from optimal distinctiveness and organizational ecology. In our framework, in-group members provide validation through two competing processes. Legitimacy increases validation: as more in-group members are present, a setting feels more socially viable. Competition decreases validation: as in-group representation grows, in-group members may compete for status, opportunities, or distinctiveness. The balance between legitimacy and competition produces different organizational ecologies.

We distinguish between two ideal-typical settings. In diminishing-rate ecologies, such as many voluntary associations or religious congregations, validation increases as in-group representation grows, though at a diminishing rate. These settings tend to support homogeneity because more in-group representation continues to make the setting more attractive. In tipping-point ecologies, which we argue are more characteristic of employers and formal bureaucracies, validation initially rises with in-group representation but eventually declines as competition overtakes legitimacy. These settings can support more integration because neither extreme isolation nor complete in-group homogeneity is maximally validating.

To clarify the implications of our theory, we develop an agent-based model in which majority- and minority-group agents choose among organizations based on whether each setting provides enough validation relative to their individual threshold. The model compares segregation outcomes across diminishing-rate and tipping-point ecologies. We find that diminishing-rate ecologies produce substantially more segregation, while tipping-point ecologies produce much lower levels of system-wide segregation and more opportunities for intergroup contact. In the simulations, highly segregated organizations appear in the diminishing-rate ecology but not in the tipping-point ecology.

Our chapter’s central insight is that some organizational forms can reduce social distance not by eliminating group preferences, but by changing the ecology in which those preferences operate. Formal organizations may be able to sustain integration when they create conditions in which moderate in-group representation is validating, but high in-group concentration becomes less attractive.

For scholars, our chapter contributes to research on social networks, organizational theory, and intergroup relations. We extend Laumann’s ecological approach to pluralism, refine Schelling’s model of segregation, and shift attention from individual attitudes alone to the organizational contexts that structure whether integration can be sustained. Our broader implication is that organizations are not merely sites where inequality is reproduced. Under some conditions, they can also be ecologies that make cross-group relationships more likely to form and persist.

My paper asks how and when Black workers are promoted in technology companies. Prior research on racial disparities in advancement has emphasized mechanisms such as racial stigma, exclusion from networks, and biased evaluations. This project begins with a different puzzle: what happens when Black and White workers receive similarly strong performance evaluations, but still experience different promotion outcomes?

In a 20-month ethnographic study of a fast-growing technology company I call ShopCo, I examined promotion mobility in the company’s customer experience department. ShopCo was a “high-road” employer: customer experience agents were salaried, received benefits, had schedule stability, and worked in roles that were both routinized and highly discretionary. I drew on archival documents, 608 hours of observation, and in-depth interviews to trace the career trajectories of 65 customer experience agents over time.

I found that ShopCo’s hiring and promotion systems rewarded what I call an organizational preference for “middle-classness”: proactivity, entrepreneurialism, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to shape one’s role without waiting for explicit permission. Middle-class workers were more likely than working-class workers to understand and enact these expectations, which gave them an advantage in performance rankings and promotion. But class did not operate the same way across race. Even among middle-class workers who shared an entrepreneurial orientation toward work, Black and White employees enacted that orientation differently.

Black middle-class customer experience agents tended to use what I call a deep expertise toolkit. They expressed entrepreneurialism within the boundaries of their formal role by developing platform workarounds, improving internal processes, and becoming indispensable technical problem-solvers. These workers were often highly respected and deeply embedded within the customer experience function. Yet their contributions were interpreted as evidence that they were excellent performers in their current roles, not necessarily as signs of leadership potential.

White middle-class customer experience agents, by contrast, tended to use what I call a strategic visibility toolkit. They expressed entrepreneurialism beyond the boundaries of their formal role through side projects, self-directed business development, cross-functional networking, and informal leadership. These behaviors made them more visible across the organization and better aligned with managers’ implicit image of promotability. As a result, they were more likely to be recognized as potential leaders and promoted.

My paper develops the concepts of promotion mobility toolkits and racialized class enactment to explain these patterns. Promotion mobility toolkits are class-based repertoires of strategies for career advancement that shape workers’ behaviors, decisions, and self-presentation at work. Racialized class enactment captures how race shapes, constrains, or enables the ways workers draw on class-based strategies in professional settings. The key finding is not simply that class matters, or that race matters, but that race and class jointly shape which strategies workers see as viable, how they enact those strategies, and how managers interpret them.

This matters because it redirects attention from whether Black workers are ambitious, agentic, or high-performing to whether organizations recognize the forms of agency they actually enact. In this setting, Black middle-class workers were not less entrepreneurial than their White counterparts. They were entrepreneurial in a different location: within the role rather than beyond it. The issue was that the organization rewarded one form of entrepreneurialism more than another.

For scholars, my paper contributes to research on organizational inequality, race, class, and career mobility. I show how racial disparities in promotion can emerge even when performance ratings do not show straightforward evaluation bias. The mechanism lies in how race and class jointly structure workplace strategy and managerial recognition. By focusing on promotion mobility toolkits, my paper brings worker agency back into the study of inequality without falling into an individual-deficit account. Workers are not simply excluded from opportunity; they are navigating opportunity structures with strategies shaped by their social locations.