When screening candidates, organizations often give preference to certain applicants on the basis of their familial ties. This “legacy preference,” particularly widespread in college admissions, has been criticized for contributing to inequality and class reproduction. Despite this, studies continue to report that legacies are persistently admitted at higher rates than non-legacies. In this article, we develop a theoretical framework of three distinct sense-making strategies at play when decision-makers screen applicants into their organizations—the meritocratic, material, and diversity logics. We then apply this framework to investigate how legacy preferences either support or undermine each organizational logic using comprehensive data on the population of applicants seeking admission into one elite U.S. college. We find strong support for the material logic at the cost of the other two organizational logics: legacies make better alumni after graduation and have wealthier parents who are materially-positioned to be more generous donors than non-legacy parents. Contrary to the meritocratic logic, we find that legacies are neither more qualified applicants nor better students academically. From a diversity standpoint, legacies are less racially diverse than non-legacies. We conclude with a discussion of our study’s implications for understanding the role of family relationships and nepotism in today’s organizational selection processes.
Despite recognizing potential ramifications for employees who protest in the workplace, researchers rarely explore the career consequences that stem from such instances of workplace protest participation. We integrated research on employee activism, workplace deviance, and careers to theorize that workplace protest represents a perceived deviation from workplace norms that can influence an individual’s organizational and labor market mobility outcomes. We investigated this premise with the 2016 National Football League “take a knee” protests as a strategic research setting. The results indicate that protesting is associated with an increase in organizational exit although this effect is moderated by the degree to which the organization is sensitive to the underlying social movement (with an organization’s movement sensitivity operationalized with a four-part index composed of the team’s managers, personnel decision makers, owners, and customers). Protesting also is associated with labor market sorting across organizations as players who protest are more likely to make subsequent transitions to more movement-sensitive teams compared with players who do not protest. Overall, our findings offer contributions for research on employee activism, workplace deviance, and careers.
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