Racialization at Work: Coercive, Cognitive, and Normative Linkages between Who and How

• In Event: 30283 - Cultural Mechanisms of Inequality

Abstract

My paper builds on racialized organizations theory (Ray 2019; Wooten & Couloute 2017) and on my own empirical research about racialized organizations (Popielarz 2025). One question raised by this new work is how to conceptualize variability in organizational racialization, or which aspects of an organization make it racialized? Often what is most salient about an employing organization is its purpose (what it does) and the people associated with it (who it employs or serves). These are important factors, but an organization’s structures and practices (how it operates) also demand attention. In other words, “[h]ow groups organize is as important as what they organize for and the resources they can muster” (Clemens 1997:6). This orientation challenges us to surface the institutionalized or taken for granted ways of operating in a workplace, to resist facile justifications of them as efficient and thus unchallengeable, and most importantly to reject the assumption that organizational structures and practices are racially neutral. I propose to extend institutional theory to address how racialized organizations contribute to systemic racial inequality within and across workplaces. I ask how positions, occupations, and tasks become associated with different racialized categories of workers, or who may operate how. I propose that the three pillars of institutional theory – regulatory, cultural-cognitive, and normative – help to identify three different linkages between who and how (DiMaggio & Powell 1983; Scott 2001). These linkages are contained in legally sanctioned coercive processes, culturally comprehensible cognitive processes, and morally appropriate normative processes. Each type of linkage renders racial inequality as a social accomplishment. Although the three types are analytically separable, they may overlap empirically. The complete paper will develop more fully the three types of linkages that create racial inequality, including how linkages come into being and are reproduced, and will propose ways to empirically study normative linkages.

Author

• Pamela A. Popielarz, University of Illinois-Chicago