Documenting Desegregation: Racial and Gender Segregation in Private Sector Employment Since the Civil Rights Act

Chapter 8. Contemporary Workplace Dynamics

250 We have been focusing on the influence of political, industry, and spatial environments on workplace equal employment opportunity trajectories. In most approaches to organizational dynamics, it is such environmental factors that motivate firms to adjust their behavior. Capitalism, for example , is a dynamic economic system. That dynamism is thought to arise primarily from competition in markets that threaten the survival of stagnant firms. Market competition is the environmental pressure that forces innovation in production technologies and the invention of new products and services. In contrast, organizations in stable environments have a tendency toward inertia. Monopolists become lazy. Similarly, in the absence of new environmental pressures for equal opportunity , existing divisions of labor and recruitment and selection processes , along with bureaucratic rules, will tend to preserve and reproduce existing hiring and promotion patterns and the inequalities linked to them. If in the 1960s employers had to speculate about how much they had to do to prove nondiscrimination, in the absence of sustained environmental pressures today they may no longer be asking the question at all. Or they may be asking a less fundamental question, such as: What are the minimum opportunities or respect that must be extended to racial minority and female workers in order to avoid lawsuits? We are now in a period when it is likely that organizational inertia is settling in, if at a more integrated status quo than in 1964. Inertia in organizational racial and gender inequalities is reinforced by the legitimacy and taken-­for-­grantedness of current employment patterns. In the absence of external actors questioning the legitimacy of current practices, such as social movements or federal regulators, we are left with internal constituChapter 8 Contemporary Workplace Dynamics Contemporary Workplace Dynamics   251 encies pressuring for change. It is also possible that there will be internal constituencies within firms motivated to roll back equal opportunity advances . In this chapter, we encounter evidence of both tendencies. We begin our investigation of organizational variation in EEO trajectories by distinguishing between contemporary change produced by changes in hiring and promotion practices within workplaces and those produced by the birth and death of workplaces. Firms and workplaces are constantly being founded, even as others go out of business. If the new firms are less segregated than the ones they replace, then we have good evidence that something in the institutional or political environment may still be producing pressures toward more equal employment opportunity. For example, if younger people have more diverse networks or lower levels of cognitive bias, the workplaces they found might be more diverse and less segregated than those they replace. What we find is that new firms tend to be slightly more race-­ segregated but also slightly less gender-­ segregated than the firms they replace. In our analyses, we identify the context in which contemporary workplace segregation is produced. We reconfirm that at this point in history there is very little temporal variation in segregation levels. We also show that both industry and firm context are in the present period relatively weak influences on race and gender staffing patterns. What we do find is that most variation happens at the workplace level and that workplace segregation is now fairly stable over time. We also examine the contemporary relevance of the affirmative action requirements targeted at federal contractors and the impact of lawsuits and EEOC compliance reviews on equal opportunity progress. Although local and national politics around equal opportunity have weakened substantially and so removed the more general uncertainty that propelled the rapid desegregation of the 1960s and 1970s, the regulatory and legal apparatus remains, and when they are activated there is some contemporary evidence of both backlash and EEO progress. Regulation and legal pressure to promote further equal opportunity progress are now effective only if situated in supportive normative environments or when there is substantial managerial accountability. Even under these restrictive conditions , only white women consistently benefit from contemporary environmental pressures. We go on to examine the impact of internal organizational practices. We focus on the long-­ term impact of hiring more diverse workforces and the integration of managerial jobs on future progress toward desegregated workplaces and increased diversity in good-­ quality jobs. Here the most important and consistent finding is that management accountability, 252    Documenting Desegregation rather than symbolic compliance or diversity training, fosters contemporary equal opportunity progress. We also review the literature on the human resource practices that seem to promote more meritocratic...