The gendering of occupational roles affects a variety of outcomes for workers and organizations. We examine how the gender of an initial role occupant influences the authority enjoyed by individuals who subsequently fill that role. We use data from a microfinance bank in Central America to examine how working initially with a male or female loan manager shapes borrowers’ compliance with future managers’ directives. First, we show that borrowers originally paired with female managers continue to be less compliant with subsequent managers, regardless of subsequent managers’ gender. Next, we demonstrate how compliance is shaped by the gender-typing of the role and the gender of the individual who fills that role. We find that men enjoy significantly greater compliance in male-typed roles, but male and female managers experience similar levels of compliance in female-typed roles. Further analyses reveal that these gendered patterns become especially pronounced after managers demonstrate their authority by disciplining borrowers. Overall, we show how quickly gendered expectations become inscribed into occupational roles, and we identify their lasting organizational consequences. More broadly, we suggest authority mechanisms that may contribute to the “stalled” gender revolution in the workplace.
Does poverty hinder or encourage market creativity? Businesses that offer novel, creative products have greater growth potential than businesses that conform to market norms. Yet the literature offers conflicting views on the relationship between poverty and market creativity. Some research suggests poverty restricts entrepreneurs' capacity to offer novel products, whereas other work suggests poverty facilitates creativity in the marketplace. This paper addresses that tension by examining the shifting relationship between poverty and market creativity across stages of business development. Drawing on survey and interview data from Panama, this paper shows how entrepreneurs are both catalyzed and constrained by conditions of poverty. Poor individuals actively generate novel venture concepts in the early stages of business development. In later stages, however, they struggle to sustain novel businesses. Ultimately, poverty limits entrepreneurs' capacity to profit from the creativity they bring to the marketplace. This paper elucidates the dual relationship between poverty and creativity, and helps explain why economic mobility via self-employment proves elusive for the poor.
Personal relationships are a common feature of financial intermediation. However, existing research offers different expectations about whether personal ties prove detrimental or beneficial for lenders. Research on embeddedness from economic sociology highlights the advantages lenders accrue when they develop personal ties with borrowers, including enhanced trust, information-sharing and greater social control. Yet research from social psychology offers reason to suspect that personal relationships can be costly because lenders who feel personally tied to borrowers run the risk of escalating commitment to poor performers. Drawing on these lines of research, this study uses data from a Latin American microfinance bank to ask: When are personal relationships detrimental or beneficial for financial intermediaries? It shows that, when lenders and borrowers have personal relationships, lenders are less likely to cut ties with poor performers and borrowers miss fewer payments, consistent with expectations from both literatures. However, these trends vary with frequency of contact. When lenders and borrowers interact less frequently, lenders continue to show heightened commitment, but borrowers become less compliant, creating potential problems for lenders. Overall, this study integrates theories from economic sociology and social psychology to offer a more balanced, temporally-informed understanding of personal ties in finance. Forthcoming at American Journal of Sociology.I am grateful to Mario Small, Elizabeth Pontikes, Rodrigo Canales, Richard Taub, and Ray Reagans for reading multiple drafts of this manuscript and providing continued support. I am also grateful for helpful comments from Anne Bowers, Jillian Chown, Jan Doering, Matissa Hollister, Sarah Kaplan, Chris Liu, Bill McEvily, Elena Obukhova, Jayanti Owens, Amanda Sharkey, András Tilcsik, Tiantian Yang, and Peter Younkin, as well as from seminar audiences at Brown, Chicago, Columbia, London Business School, Lugano, New York University, Princeton, and the University of Toronto. Finally, my deepest thanks to MicroBank administrators, loan officers, and clients for making this study possible. 2Scholars across a range of disciplines recognize the importance and pervasiveness of personal relationships in the financial sector (Abolafia 1996;Berger and Udell 1995;Mizruchi and Stearns 2001;Petersen and Rajan 1994). In lending institutions, personal ties between financial intermediaries (lenders) and clients (borrowers) influence how banks distribute capital and overcome information asymmetries (Berger, Klapper, and Udell 2001;Uzzi 1999) Existing research on embeddedness and escalation suggests that personal ties between intermediaries and clients can be both beneficial and problematic for financial intermediaries.However, the specific conditions under which these relationships prove more helpful or harmful remain unclear. In this paper, I aim to clarify these conditions and, in so doing, integrate distinct theoretical perspectives from social psychology and ...
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