Fixing the NFL’s Rooney Rule: A Collective Action Approach to Policy Change

• In Event: 20861 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 12: Rethinking Social Movement Theories

Abstract

Social dilemmas are situations in which individual and collective incentives are at odds, leading to suboptimal collective outcomes that make all individuals worse off. Modeling policy problems stuck in stasis as social dilemmas reveals new solution pathways that promise progressive change. The solution to a social dilemma is collective action, yet since the introduction of the collective action problem in the 1960’s, a solution to this problem that results in a repeatably effective process for mobilizing collective action has yet to be found. Research work on collective action has been mostly theoretical and esoteric, particularly regarding applied efforts to combat policy problems in field settings. This study uses a framework that synthesizes the latest progress in collective action theory to resolve policy problems framed as social dilemmas by outputting issue-specific intervention strategies through a repeatable process.

Inequitable hiring outcomes for senior positions across all major organizational and institutional settings in the U.S., particularly when focusing on disparities in minority representation in such positions, is an unresolved policy problem that can be modeled as a social dilemma. The National Football League (NFL) is an American institution that has a well-documented history of inequitable hiring outcomes for its head coaching body. Further, the NFL deployed an intervention strategy, the Rooney Rule, in 2003, yet this intervention has achieved no measurable effect on outcomes at all.

The results of this experiment showed conclusive and substantial progressive effects of the use of a collective action approach to change.

Author

• Matthew Bond, University of Massachusetts Boston