Ethnic Matching of Supervisors to Subordinate Work Groups: Findings on "Bottom-up" Ascription and Social Closure

Abstract

Research on minority authority attainment tends to stress top-down processes of social closure, whereby the dominant social group produces and preserves positions of power and in uence byOne explanation for why racial and ethnic minorities are relatively unlikely to occupy positions of authority in U.S. workplaces is that, like all groups, those in power tend to prefer others like themselves, especially when relations of trust are at stake (Baron and Pfeffer 1994;Kanter 1977; Pfeffer and Salancik 1978:146;Salancik and Pfeffer 1978). Because whites have historically been the primary decision makers in organizations, they bene t most from this ingroup preference, leaving minorities under-represented in positions of authority. Kanter (1977) refers to this process as "homosocial reproduction," whereby the group in charge reproduces its ascriptive characteristics in those they select to join them (see also, Bergmann 1986; Brewer and Brown 1998:567).While we do not dispute this "top-down" process of ascription, we believe that it is incomplete, especially when it comes to understanding opportunities for minority authority attainment. In addition to top-down ascription, we believe that pressures for "bottom-up" ascription also play a key role, whereby the race and ethnicity of lower-level supervisors are matched to the numerically dominant race and ethnicity of their subordinates. As a result, blacks are much more likely to gain authority over largely black work groups; Latinos are much more likely to gain authority over largely Latino work groups; and so forth. In drawing attention to this process, we do not claim that top-down ascription is unimportant, but rather that pressures for bottom-up ascription push against it to shape when and where authority opportunities are likely to arise for minority workers.Data for this analysis come primarily from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality (MCSUI) and are available from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. Direct all correspondence to: James R. Elliott, Department of Sociology, 220 Newcomb Hall, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118. E-mail: jre@tulane.edu. Ethnic Matching 259Broadly speaking, our objectives in advancing this argument are twofold. First, we wish to provide further intellectual support to the idea that labor market opportunities depend not just on individual human capital, but also on group membership. In other words, we advocate a contextual approach to understanding social mobility in which the causal dynamics of authority attainment are embedded in group composition. Second, we wish to provide a corrective to the traditional assumption, based on identity theory and truncated interpretations of homosocial reproduction, that elites only reproduce themselves. We argue that the closer one gets to elite status, the more powerful forces of top-down ascription become, but that forces of bottom-up ascription can also be very powerful at lower levels of work organization, where out-group ...

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