Race, Organizations, and the Organizing Process

Melissa E. Wooten, Melissa E. Wooten

• Verlag: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781787564930
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Ethnic Studies

There have been few efforts to conceive of race as a characteristic that organizations possess or at the very least a characteristic that exists at the institutional level with which organizations must contend. In the United States especially, this belies our history of marking organizations and organizational practices as "Black" or "White", essentially "racing" organizations. Despite the undoing of legally sanctioned racial segregation, we continue to use such demarcations to classify organizations as Black colleges or Black media companies.
Sociology is ill equipped to explain this history and its modern day consequences in part because we lack bridges between those studying the problems of race and those studying the problems of organizing. Consequently, we cannot adequately speak to how race affects organizations, markets, or institutions.
This book brings together scholarship that interrogates the relationship between race and the organizing process for the founding of organizations, the organizational pursuit of human, financial, or political resources, organizational choices regarding strategic orientation and structural configurations, and the role of institutional logics that saturate organizations, industries, and markets with racialized ideologies.

RACE AND HIGHER EDUCATION: FIELDS, ORGANIZATIONS, AND EXPERTISE

Christi M. Smith

ABSTRACT

How do racial meanings structure the institution of higher education and the organizations and networks it encompasses? This chapter develops a theory of racial activation to usefully link conceptualizations of race and organizations. This theory examines how racial meanings shape organizational fields, forms or types of organizations, and the strategic use of racial meanings by actors in organizations to create a more robust understanding of the processes by which organizations are themselves made racialized. Predominant scholarship on race can largely be characterized as theorizing the mechanisms by which race is constructed or uncovering the patterns and consequences of inequality along racial lines. Much existing research hovers above at a macro level where national, state, and global powers are understood to impose racial categories, symbols, meanings, and rules onto daily life while higher education has largely been studied as a site where we see the effects of broader social disparities play out. This chapter draws on insights from inhabited institutionalism to develop a theory of racial activation that usefully links conceptualizations of race and organizations to provide an intersectional and interactional approach to the study of fields.

Keywords: Race; higher education; fields; organizations; expertise; theory

LINKING HIGHER EDUCATION, ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY, AND RACE

How do racial meanings structure the institution of higher education and the organizations and networks it encompasses? Beginning in 2015, a wave of student protests against racial injustice spread across universities from South Africa to the United Kingdom and dozens of universities across the United States. Campaigns from Cape Town, Oxford, and New Haven and more called for the removal of oppressive symbols and practices from university campuses. Attention around these events has been focused to understand these as a conflict between student protestors and administrators, too often derided as “PC wars,” and interpreted within the frame of free speech. I suggest, however, that we need to a theoretical understanding of race as it is bound up with organizational powers to make sense of these controversies and inequality in higher education more broadly. This chapter develops a theory of racial activation to usefully link conceptualizations of race and organizations. This theory examines how racial meanings shape organizational fields, forms, or types of organizations, and the strategic use of racial meanings by actors in organizations. Together, this helps us understand how organizations take on racialized characteristics.

As I show elsewhere, US higher education emerged as an organizational field during a time of transition from a racialized quasi-feudal system – as we can describe the political economy of slavery in the antebellum United States – and became an important mechanism to impose racial hierarchy (Smith, 2016b). Universities contributed in multiple ways to the process of institutionalizing racial meanings – from the use of enslaved labor (Wilder, 2013) to the production of knowledge that legitimated White supremacy (Nelson & Harold, 2017). In short, we need to understand the legacies of the old orders – both the antebellum and the segregationist – to explain the importance of race in ordering higher education. By illuminating mechanisms that embed segregation into organizational practices, we can enrich the study of higher education and the sociology of race and ethnicity.

In response to the question of why sociology was irrelevant in feudal societies, Claus Offe and Helmut Wiesenthal (1980, p. 68) remind us that “in order to discover the contrast between the normative equation and actual inequality, one had, not to conduct empirical research, but only to look into the legal codes and statutes that regulated the privileges and hierarchies of feudal society. The conflict was one of norm versus norm, not norm versus fact, for inequality was itself institutionalized by explicit privilege.” It is only because our social norms are in such violation of legal expressions of equality that we need a sociological explanation to understand the mechanisms and processes by which inequality has been normed, rendering legal rights hollow. This disparity plays out in contemporary higher education, and especially among elite HEOs (Espenshade & Radford, 2013).

Higher education has been fertile ground for major theories in organizational research and, for this reason, offers a prime site to explore linkages between the activation of racial meanings at the organizational level. Indeed, as Michael Bastedo (2012, p. 9) argued, modern organizational theory has been built upon the study of colleges and universities. Resource dependency theory, “old” and “new” institutional theory, garbage can theory, and loose coupling – all grew from empirical evidence found in the academy. As such, higher education provides a fitting place for us to then examine how organizations are structured by racial hierarchies. To do so, I develop a theory of racial activation to specify the conditions and mechanisms through which organizations promote, utilize, and advance meanings about race.

After decades of sociological research, social scientists confidently claim race as a social concept (Acker 1992; Polleta and Jasper 2001). By this I mean simply that race is important in the ways in which it is made important by social actors. As is oft repeated, race is a social construct with very real consequences. Predominant scholarship can largely be characterized as theorizing the mechanisms by which race is constructed or uncovering the consequences of inequality along racial lines. This is all, of course, important work. However, most existing research hovers above at a macro level where national, state, and global powers are understood to impose or influence racial categories, symbols, meanings, and rules onto daily life (for a review, see Winant, 2000) And while the cognitive turn has added to the sociology of race and ethnicity, this research nonetheless relies heavily on macro forces (for review, see Reskin, 2012).

We need a more robust understanding of the processes by which organizations are themselves made racialized. Higher education has largely been studied as a site where we see the effects of earlier disparities in education and housing disparities play out. A smaller but important stream of scholarship has also begun to consider organizational effects: that is, the ways in which organizational structure shapes social mobility pathways (Armstrong & Hamilton, 2013; Rivera, 2016). These studies have largely examined social class rather than race. However, this chapter investigates an alternate formulation of the problem: How do racial meanings structure the institution of higher education and the organizations and networks it encompasses?

There is a wealth of scholarship that interrogates the production of ethno-racial categories as part of state-making processes, largely through historical case studies (Feagin, 2010; Fox & Guglielmo, 2012; Go, 2008; Goldberg, 2007; Haney-Lopez, 1996; Loveman, 2014; Loveman & Muniz, 2007; Telles, 2014) and even more that document and interrogate consequences of racial inequality (Carnevale & Strohe 2013; Carter, 2012; Karabel, 2005; Khan, 2012). While there is robust scholarship highlighting the role of the state in racial categorization, the nation state is a relatively brief mode of power when compared to the work of religious organizations in racial categorization and meaning (Stamatov, 2013). Though Peter Stamatov delves less explicitly into the topic of racial meaning, his research examines religious reformers combatting imperial injustices in defense of the rights and interests of distant “others.” Further, the production of race through organizations can also help to advance the burgeoning attention to linking sociologies of postcoloniality and race (Go, 2018).

To understand the development of racialized organizational fields, I turn to civil society organizations, and here I am thinking of a broad range of organizations from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), Girl Scouts, neighborhood associations, and so on to professional organizations and philanthropy, though this chapter will focus exclusively on US higher education organizations. Such organizations operate in adjacency, a space defined by Khurana, Kimula, and Fourcade (2011, p. 1) as existing “between institutional fields that provides these organizations with the advantages of connectivity across a wide variety of institutions and with a vantage point that allows them to think strategically about key intervention points for changing an institution.” It is the ability to connect across multiple social structures and fields that makes race a powerful organizing principle (Reskin, 2012) and adjacent organizations – particularly those that are able to operate with little scrutiny – are well-positioned to normalize particular institutional rules and cultural scripts (Bartley, 2007).

This chapter offers an exploration of the ways in which race has been activated in higher education organizations (HEOs). That is, the meanings of race are socially produced through effects of time and place and these meanings were then embedded into the field of higher education. The field of higher education – constituted by layered organizational forms that were designed with attention to race, class, and gender – demonstrates how race is organizationally crafted and the contours and meanings of race are adapted to organizational needs. It provides an important corrective to the current limited view that racial meanings and logics are predominately made from above or through interpersonal interactions. The racial stratification and demarcation of higher education organizations offer a useful lens into understanding the nexus at which race and organizations meet.

A THEORY OF RACIAL ACTIVATION

What is race and how does it intersect with sociological analyses of the work of organizations? As Matt Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer write, there is scarce scholarship to clarify the dynamics of race and racial domination. Desmond and Emirbayer (2009, p. 334) offer this definition of race: “a symbolic category, based on phenotype or ancestry and constructed according to specific social and historical contexts, that is misrecognized as a natural category.” Desmond and Emirbayer’s conceptualization usefully lays out a concrete definition to work through the complexities of racial categorization and modes of domination.

The state has a crucial role in legislating opportunity structures. Yet, because we have largely ignored the role of organizations, sociologists have more often studied the organizational level as site where racial inequality can be observed rather than where meanings around race are actively produced, and few sociologists have considered how organizations are themselves racialized.

Since the abolition of slavery, civil rights activists and advocates have fundamentally understood the state as the primary agent for the development and maintenance of racial hierarchy, and the dominant response has been through legal channels. After the Civil War, extensive Civil Rights legislation was passed. Some of these legal measures were overturned but most were merely never implemented. In the wake of the Civil Rights movement of the mid-twentieth century, a surge of African Americans and other activists pursued legal careers to dismantle Jim Crow.

The colorline was not only the problem of the twentieth century, but perhaps the problem for every epoch in US history, and yet, there has been little sociological attention to the variety of meanings attached to race and color over time and across context. I argue that race has proven a highly malleable means to organize inequitable power relations. Rather than thinking of race as durable, we should consider the ways in which it has been made flexible and nimble such that racial logics have been utilized by a wide array of organized actors and repurposed to new aims in ways that has, when viewed with a historical undifferentiated gaze, made race appear as stable. When, instead, we use the sociological imagination to interrogate historically specific productions of racial meanings, we get a very different account – and one that reveals complexity, manipulation, and change.

There are fewer empirical works that interrogate the transformation of racial meanings. What we find in common in these works, however, is the importance of civil society organizations. These have included worker’s collectives (Gerteis, 2007; Paschel, 2010) and religiously organized social and charitable organizations (Jewell, 2007). Although McAdam’s, 1982 study of the development of mid-twentieth century Black resistance movements centers on a different analytical question, it is notable that this study focused on organizations – Black churches, Black colleges, and Southern papers of the NAACP – as the three launching grounds for civil rights social movements.

Let me first lay out some specifications for a theory of racial activation to specify a key process by which race comes to characterize and determine the nature of organizations, markets, or institutions. By racial characterization, I mean both that some organizations are understood as appropriate and/or inclusive for particular racial and ethnic groups or that they are not. This theory suggests that organizations may come with racial meanings attached from their foundings or they may elevate race as a defining feature of their organization’s uniqueness at a later point. This may be explicit such as in organizations where racial identity is a qualification for members (Blee, 1991).

To offer an historical example, the American Medical Association denied membership to doctors who earned their medical degrees from institutions educating women and African Americans. This led Black physicians to create the National Medical Association (Cobb, 1967). Some organizations can be clearly read. For instance, a code developed during the early years of Jim Crow that signaled racial members by the use of “American” or “National.” There is a broader terrain of unmarked but felt segregation of organizational spaces, as Bonilla-Silva describes in his writings on racial grammar and the unmarked “Historically White Colleges and Universities” (2012).

Since the end of de jure segregation, organizations are more often racialized in more subtle mechanisms, as such explicit racialization has often given way to racism expressed as color blindness (Bonilla-Silva, 2014). The racialization of organizations can also be the result of interpretations by insiders. Hirsh and Kornrich (2008) find employees act on their understandings of the racial identity of their workplace. This leads employees to act differently dependent upon their interpretation such that underrepresented minority employees are less likely to file claims of racial discrimination if they perceive the organizations internal composition as inclusive. To understand how organizations develop racial meanings, we need a more robust theory of racial production than currently exists and one which more fully connects with the tools available through organizational theories.

Firstly, this theory posits race as a construct used to constitute social fields. Race is a set of meanings, a constellation of symbols, and an institution – and it is real insofar as it is experienced. When w...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Race, Organizations, and the Organizing Process
• Race and Organization Theory: Reflections and Open Questions
• Race and Higher Education: Fields, Organizations, and Expertise
• The Unbroken South: Political Parties and the Articulation of White Supremacy
• Fighting (for) Charter School Expansion: Racial Resources and Ideological Consistency
• Organizing Reentry: How Racial Colorblindness Structures the Post-imprisonment Terrain
• Race, Knowledge, and Tasks: Racialized Occupational Trajectories
• The Colorblind Organization
• Bureaucracy, Discrimination, and the Racialized Character of Organizational Life
• Theorizing a Racialized Congressional Workplace
• Index