Organizational Legating: How Historical Kkk Groups Sustained Racial Exclusion In American Sundown Towns

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 16: Theorizing Organizations

Abstract

Why are some communities more likely to perpetuate historical patterns of racial exclusion, while others abandon these patterns? We introduce organizational legating—the process whereby organizations institutionalize and enforce community norms, creating social structures that persist through individual imprinting and residential sorting. Examining American sundown towns (communities systematically excluding people of color from the 1890s through 1960s), we argue that Second Wave Ku Klux Klan organizations (1915-1944) institutionalized and enforced racial exclusion, embedding it deeply into community structures. These structures imprinted adolescent residents with negative racial attitudes toward Black people. Imprinted individuals subsequently engaged in residential sorting—remaining in or relocating to sundown towns with strong historical KKK presence while avoiding those without such legacies. Consequently, Second Wave KKK prevalence significantly predicts contemporary residents’ negative racial attitudes in historical sundown towns. We find robust evidence for our hypotheses with a sample of over 600 surveyed participants from historical sundown towns. Our study advances institutional theory by demonstrating how organizations have embedded legacies, whose effects are manifested through individual imprinting and residential sorting. We extend social structure and personality research by revealing bidirectional macro-micro dynamics where psychology (imprinted attitudes) can feed back to reconstitute components (community composition) through sorting.

Authors

• Kunyuan Qiao, Northeastern University

• Ashley Veronica Reichelmann, Virginia Tech

• Matthew O. Hunt, Northeastern University