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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

Existing explanations of tokenism predict similar experiences for all numerically small, low-status groups. These explanations, however, cannot account for variation in the experiences of different low-status minority groups within the same setting. This article develops a theory of tokenism that explains such variation. Drawing on 117 interviews in the leveraged buyout industry (LBO) and a comparison of the differing experiences of female and African American male tokens in that setting, I argue that tokenism is contingent on the local cultural context in which it is embedded. Specifically, I identify two elements of an occupation’s culture—its hierarchy of cultural resources and its image of the ideal worker—that can specify some status characteristics as more relevant to and incompatible with the occupation’s work than others. In LBO, the industry values cultural resources that, on average, women lack but men possess, and the ideal worker is defined such that it directly conflicts with cultural beliefs about motherhood. Consequently, in this context, gender is a more relevant status characteristic for exclusion than is race, and female tokens are differentially disadvantaged. In addition to revising received wisdom about tokenism, this study integrates and advances social psychological and cultural theories of exclusion by deepening our understanding of the role of cultural resources and schemas in occupational inequality.

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This article develops a sociologically informed approach to market bubbles by integrating insights from financial-economic theory with the concepts of voice and dissimulation from other cases of distorted valuation studied by sociologists (e.g., witch hunts, unpopular norms, and support for authoritarian regimes). It draws on unique datalongitudinal interviews with private equity market participants during and after that market's mid-2000s bubble-to test key implications of two existing theories of bubbles and to move beyond both. In doing so, the article suggests a crucial revision to the behavioral finance agenda, wherein bubbles may pertain less to the cognitive errors individuals make when estimating asset values and more to the sociological and institutionally driven challenge of how to interpret complex social and competitive environments.

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