The Problem With Sociologists Solving Problems

Sociologists, like many other kinds of -ologists, are useful. At their best they have a technical expertise that can help us organize, understand, and evaluate vast reams of social data in which we might otherwise drown. They are often able to throw new light on old problems. Other times, however, when they are the least reflective, they can be part of the problem, much like an engineer who makes a destructive machine more effiicent, and hence more destructive.

A good example of the latter is a long article in the current American Sociological Review to which a friend has just pointed me: Kalev, Alexandra, Frank Dobbin, and Erin Kelly. 2006. “Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies.” American Sociological Review 71: 589-617. What appears to be a final draft of the article can be read here, if you’re up to it.

My pointing friend, who both speaks and writes sociology, says that the data and methods are reliable. I have no reason to doubt that conclusion, and even if I were to read the paper more carefully than I have I lack the expertise to have anything useful to say on that score. What I find most interesting about the paper is not what the three authors conclude but what they assume.

They set out to determine what kind of “affirmative action” works best to increase “diversity” at the managerial level of American corporations.

Employers have experimented with three broad approaches to promoting diversity. Some programs are designed to establish organizational responsibility for diversity, others to moderate managerial bias through training and feedback, and others to reduce the social isolation of women and minority workers….

Their conclusion?

Efforts to attack social isolation through mentoring and networking show modest effects. Efforts to establish responsibility for diversity lead to the broadest increases in managerial diversity…. This work lays the foundation for an institutional theory of the remediation of workplace inequality, focused on organizational structures allocating responsibility for reducing segregation.

The most obvious assumption here is that there are fewer blacks and women in management than there should be, resulting in “workplace inequality” and indeed even in “segregation.” Because this assumption of “workplace inequality” is so deeply embedded, and perhaps because the authors are organizational sociologists and not social theorists, it is never discussed. Thus we are not told how many blacks and women there should be in management or whether what the authors regard as their inadequate numbers could be the result of something other than bias or discrimination, or whether that even matters.

Indeed, the authors make a point of emphasizing their lack of interest in the causes of the “workplace inequality” they assume. They obviously believe that the cause is discrimination of some sort, but they distinguish their approach from others by stressing that they really don’t care what the cause is. They just want results, i.e., more women and blacks. “We know a lot about the disease of workplace inequality,” they write, “but not much about the cure.”

Scholars often presume that practices designed to attack known causes of inequality will actually reduce it, as Reskin (2003) argues, making a leap of faith between causes and remedies. Thus, for example, while we know from experimental psychology that unconscious bias is endemic, and likely contributes to workplace inequality, we can only hope that the prevailing treatments – diversity training and diversity performance evaluations – diminish inequality. Understanding the cause of malaria and understanding its treatment are two different things. Whether a prescription for inequality is effective is an inherently empirical question.

The authors argue that the most effective affirmative action programs, i.e., those that result in more blacks and women in better jobs, are those based on corporate “responsibility,” not programs aimed at rooting out the bias of managers or the networking deficiencies of blacks and women.

“Responsibility,” like “diversity,” seems to take on a new meaning here. What it means in this context seems to be little more than insisting that “goals” are met. In other words, as my friend the sociology speaker put it to me in an email, “the best way to ensure demographic diversity is not to solve the putative causes of inequality but to wield naked coercion.”

None of this, of course, makes any sense unless one assumes, as these authors clearly do, that civil rights requires proportional group representation, not an individual right to be free from discrimination based on race or gender.

Say What? (4)

  1. actus September 22, 2006 at 8:22 am | | Reply

    “Thus we are not told how many blacks and women there should be in management or whether what the authors regard as their inadequate numbers could be the result of something other than bias or discrimination, or whether that even matters.”

    It looks like their result is invariant to this number: their result is how to increase the number. Not what it should be.

    Its a bit of an usurprisong conclusion from a perspectie of organizational sociology: the best way to get something done is to make someone accountable for it.

  2. Dom September 22, 2006 at 1:33 pm | | Reply

    Given the assumptions of the article, wouldn’t a better conclusion be “a quota system is the best way to higher more of a group that we want to hire.”

  3. David Nieporent September 23, 2006 at 4:57 am | | Reply

    As a purely technocratic matter, they’re right (and actus is right): the best way to increase the number of minorities is not to dictate a particular method (*), but to find someone with power and tell him to increase the number of minorities or else.

    Whether that’s good for the company — or whether it’s legal — is an entirely separate issue, of course.

    (*) Indeed, if only liberals in favor of government regulation would learn that this principle applies in almost all areas: define an objective, and order people to meet it, and you’re a lot more likely to be successful than if you define a method and tell people to implement it.

  4. actus September 23, 2006 at 7:26 pm | | Reply

    “Indeed, if only liberals in favor of government regulation would learn that this principle applies in almost all areas: define an objective, and order people to meet it, and you’re a lot more likely to be successful than if you define a method and tell people to implement it.”

    Oh. I believe it. I think we should have more accountability in our regulation. More people that face consequences if, say, a company fires a union organizer. That would be much more effective than toothless corporate fines. Actually putting a manager in jail for illegal activity would be quite a motivator.

    Believe me, the liberals know this. I fear that business power knows it too and thats why we don’t have it.

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