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Diversity Management and Decoupling: How Social Capital, Formal Authority, and Professional Skill affect Practice Implementation

Sat, August 16, 4:30 to 5:30pm, TBA

Abstract

I consider how diversity management strategies and practices are implemented within organizations, using this empirical setting to develop theory as to processes of decoupling. While extant literature attributes a great deal of agency to top management in suggesting they strategically decouple for legitimacy gains, I find diversity managers themselves shape the particular strategies used to drive implementation. While top leadership attention matters, diversity managers have a range of strategies to implement practices even when constrained by low power, as measured by lack of formal authority and low social capital. While high power managers are able to stave off decoupling and adopt diversity programs characterized by measurement and tracking, accountability, and formalization, low power managers use a variety of different strategies to drive change. Here I argue for the importance of what I call “stealth coupling”, where managers embed diversity efforts into existing HR practices, shielding them from scrutiny by moving diversity efforts behind the scenes. Additionally, while decoupling is often treated as a dichotomous variable, my findings suggest there are a range of ways to implement practices and decoupling should instead be viewed as a continuum. I also add to the decoupling literature by finding that decoupling does not operate in the often assumed trajectory, where initial decoupling is strategic and later gradually coupled as actors seek to remove internal contradictions within organizations. Rather, while this former type of decoupling does occur, in other cases, practices and structures are abandoned over time.

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