FOX 5 Atlanta
April 14, 2021
This is a painful time for our country. Injustice and inequality are just some of the challenges we face. Nobody knows exactly what the next Atlanta will look like, but we need to talk about it. Host George Chidi talks with Prof. Andrea Dittmann on what research has to say about how to increase upward mobility.
Emory Business
February 10, 2021
Join the Office of the Provost in celebrating Black History Month through the extraordinary research, creativity, and diversity of Emory’s faculty. Featuring Goizueta’s Andrea Dittmann, assistant professor of organization and management. Dittmann will share insight into her research on how the social-class contexts in which people grow up shape their obstacles and strengths in professional workplaces.
Medium
August 6, 2020
Working-class people are more accustomed to working together, and in many cases this makes them better at it. Recent experiments led by Andrea Dittmann and co-authors found that college students from working-class backgrounds bested middle-class students at participating in and facilitating teamwork. Research also shows that Black Americans respond better to adversity — perhaps because they have more experience with it.
Managers from non-traditional backgrounds often know more about the people their companies serve, which is essential. Stacy Brown-Philpot, the former CEO of TaskRabbit, was motivated by the prospect of getting jobs back into her hometown of Detroit: “I grew up with people who were hardworking, whose jobs were taken away from them…And here’s this platform that’s creating everyday work for everyday People.” Howard Schultz, who grew up in a housing project, showed how a massive chain like Starbucks could provide generous employee benefits and remain a booming business.
Poets & Quants
December 18, 2019
As colleges and universities admit more first-generation students and students from historically underserved minority and working-class families, many of them find it challenging to meet college’s more rigorous academic demands. But they may find it even more difficult to handle the “culture shock” at institutions whose norms and values may be very different from the ones in which they were raised.
Politico
January 16, 2019
We’ve figured out why it’s so hard for first-generation students to succeed in college. The good news is there are easy fixes.
Harvard Business Review
September 5, 2018
Class background matters in the workplace. Just ask professionals who grew up in blue-collar households — people scholars call “class migrants.” Class migrants are finding their voice: 97% of individuals from working-class backgrounds reported that their social class background affected their work experience, according to research conducted by Andrea G. Dittmann, Nicole M. Stephens, Sarah S. M. Townsend, and Lauren A. Rivera. We can no longer afford to refuse to acknowledge the role that class plays in the workplace.
Christian Science Monitor
March 30, 2018
New research backs up the idea that low-income first gens experience familiar economic, social, and cultural barriers when they get to the workplace. Nicole Stephens and Andrea Dittmann at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and Sarah Townsend at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California interviewed 30 first-generation MBA students about the college-to-work transition prior to business school.
Harvard Business Review
May 22, 2017
The good news is that this social class gap in experience and performance is not static. When colleges include messages about the importance of interdependence, students from working-class backgrounds benefit. In the series of experiments described above, we also showed students a college welcome message that focused on either independence or interdependence (for example, giving back to your community). In the interdependent condition, first-generation students felt just as comfortable and performed just as well on an academic task as their peers from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Further, with doctoral student Andrea Dittmann, our analysis of archival data of college sports teams showed that people from working-class backgrounds report greater fit with the team and ability to perform up to their potential when participating in teams that prioritize interdependence.