Tainting or Telling: How the Meaning of Social Ties Varies Across Discipline

• In Event: 50612 - Hiring, Firing, Discrimination, and Wrongdoing: Investigating Understudied Organizational Mechanisms

Abstract

While previous research has analyzed how the presence or absence of social ties shapes labor market outcomes and inequalities, less is known about how employers interpret the value of social relationships in personnel decisions and how these meanings may vary by context. We examine these issues in the context of a high-stakes moment of stratification in academic careers: faculty tenure decisions. Drawing from an archival analysis of more than ten years of external tenure evaluations across four disciplines at two R1 universities, we analyze how evaluators describe their relationships with candidates and the meanings they attribute to various types of ties when evaluating tenure cases. We find distinct cross-disciplinary patterns, which were strongest in sociology and computer science. Sociologists view ties to candidates as tainting, corrupting the integrity of the evaluation process by including potentially biasing information unrelated to the quality of a person’s scholarship. Conversely, in computer science, ties were seen as telling, providing useful information about a candidate’s intellectual, social, and moral qualities that were seen as integral to evaluating the strength of a tenure case. Regardless of the actual strength of the tie, sociologists frequently engaged in a strategy of social distancing, in which they asserted their impartiality by downplaying their existing connections to a candidate, while computer scientists emphasized the closeness of their social ties with candidates as valuable affective and informational resources to be embraced in review. Interviews with faculty in both disciplines shed light on processes underlying these patterns. Overall, the study reveals that the use and value of social ties in personnel decisions are not universal but rather vary according to cultural norms embedded within different institutional contexts and the structure of work in particular settings.

Authors

• Hannah Wohl, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Lauren Rivera, Northwestern University