Anand Swaminathan

2016

Organizational leaders remain predominantly white despite increasing U.S. workforce diversity and efforts to increase racial minority representation in leadership. We propose that performance-reward bias (i.e., lesser rewards for equivalent performance) generates racial disparity in leadership by suppressing the rate at which minorities, relative to equally-performing whites, are promoted to positions considered prerequisite for organizational leadership. Career history analyses of over 1,200 National Football League coaches from 1985 to 2012 support this claim. Various fixed-effects specifications hold constant a coach’s initial and current position, enabling us to differentiate performance-reward bias from allocative mechanisms that match minorities, at hire and post-hire, to positions with inferior upward mobility prospects. We also examine racial disparity before and after implementation of a league-wide policy explicitly designed to increase the number of minorities interviewed for leadership positions. Although the disparity in head coach representation decreased after implementation, pre-implementation demographic trends prevent us from conclusively attributing this increase to the policy. Less equivocally, after implementation white assistant coaches continued to be promoted at higher rates than similarly-performing minority ones. Moreover, consistent with our arguments, this white advantage in promotion rates is specific to the transition from lower level positions to the one typically occupied prior to promotion to head coach (i.e., coordinators); no racial advantage is evident among occupants of this position. We conclude that racial disparity in organizational leadership is largely attributable to performance-reward bias in lower level positions.

The number of small specialty brewers in the U.S. beer brewing industry has increased dramatically in recent decades, even as the market for beer became increasingly dominated by mass‐production brewing companies. Using the resource‐partitioning model of organizational ecology, this article shows that these two apparently contradictory trends are fundamentally interrelated. Hypotheses developed here refine the way scale competition among generalist organizations is modeled and improve the theoretical development of the sociological bases for the appeal of specialist organizations' products, especially those related to organizational identity. Evidence drawn from qualitative and quantitative research provides strong support for the theory. The article offers a brief discussion of the theoretical and substantive issues involved in application of the model to other industries and to other cultures.

In this longitudinal study of the California Wine industry between 1946 and 1984, we used event-history analysis to examine the joint effect of organizational characteristics and of environmental variation on organizational change. Organizational change was assessed with two forms of diversification and with land acquisition and divestment. We then examined the joint effects of organizational characteristics and of organizational change on the probability of disbanding to see if either predicted organizational disbanding. We found evidence of organizational change that is responsive to environmental variation but little evidence that such organizational change affects the probability of disbanding.