Author:

Summer Jackson – Harvard Business School

Interviewers:

Shonita Black – University of Michigan, Ross School of Business

Robert Chico – University of Washington, Foster School of Business

Article link: https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392221083650

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• In developing your research agenda, did you have a sense of how the selection of ShopCo might contribute something distinctive to the literature on organizational inequality?

I joke that the literature is already riddled with the dead bodies of failed DEI initiatives. And so it wasn’t going to be interesting for me to spend a lot of time watching a company fail in the ways we know they could fail because they felt some sort of legal or regulatory pressure to comply. Or they felt as though this was some sort of window dressing exercise. So, it was trying to find a company that I thought, from both the literature and my observation, was trying to do the right thing and still struggling.  I wanted to be at a field site where I thought there would be something interesting to observe and learn.

• ShopCo appeared to be an exemplar of recognizing DEI gaps and taking charge to address them by prioritizing their DEI initiatives. Do you believe that a company at earlier stages of recognizing DEI gaps would have such repugnant market concerns when deciding to use a transactional approach?

I don’t think it’s the stage of an organization’s development that dictates whether or not they have these repugnant market concerns. But I do think it’s the result of the composition of employees that you have there. For example, in the ShopCo case, it’s a progressive technology firm filled with a lot of White progressive employees.  And the employees themselves were like: “[W]e really need to be doing more to have more diverse employees across the company, not just in certain departments.” And they had been trying a couple of different things. They’d seen success in recruiting and hiring more women. But they were not getting the same success using that same method for trying to get racial minorities. So, they were open to trying new things.

The repugnant market concerns go along with being a progressive technology company with a lot of White progressive employees who are very conscious of the credibility deficit they face with certain communities. And concerns about how to be viewed as a reliable and trustworthy actor in this space. So, I don’t know that that’s necessarily true of what stage of an organization’s development they are in or what stage of their implementing DEI that they’re in. That’s an empirical question. But from observing ShopCo, this credibility deficit that White progressives face is a constant kind of cloud that can hang over the decision-making process, whether they’re consciously aware of it or not.

• Was there an iterative process between data and theory that allowed your theoretical puzzle to emerge? If so, what did this look like and how did it evolve over the 20-month period you were present in the field?

Originally, I’ll say that the iteration between the data and the theory was from the moment they said shop. I’d spent a couple months in the company listening to them talk about how hard it was to hire racial minorities. And then they had a demonstration from a platform that specifically focused on hiring racial minorities for engineering roles. And it was almost as if you took what ShopCo said they wanted and what the platform said they did–it aligned perfectly. They’re like: “[W]e will help you quickly find racial minorities. We will screen them to make sure they have the technical skills you need. And we guarantee a truncated timeline between when you first meet them and when you hire them so you don’t have to worry about losing them to competitors.” As I was taking field notes on this, I thought: “Okay, maybe what I’m going to do now is follow the implementation of how they use this platform and who they hire…they’re gonna adopt this platform clearly.”

But when I went into the debrief room after the platform had finished talking about their product, it was very tense and uncomfortable. One of the first comments was, “it feels like they want us to shop for racial minorities.” That use of the word shop stood out to me because of the work of Viviana Zelizer on the commodification of sacred and taboo things. As I listened to them morally hand wringing over whether or not they should use this platform, it seemed really rich that they would think of this as “shopping.” Particularly when I had already observed them using transactional (emphasizing speed and quantity) platforms for the modal candidate who was White. But when they’re Black and Brown, it feels like “shopping.”

This is an area for future research, because no one said this explicitly, but it did raise this idea of a time when here in the United States, we had a transactional way of quickly taking the labor of Black and Brown people that could have been operating in the heads of White progressives. Like, for them, this is a little too reminiscent of “shopping” for Black and Brown labor. So, it seemed super rich and interesting. The concerns they had were very different from what the literature expected. And the genuineness with which they spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do here was very interesting.

• So, you were in a space where this puzzle was emerging but it was not consistent with the literature? What happened next?

I considered alternative explanations that could be driving this. Is this covering? Moral licensing? And then I started to collect data to triangulate around it. Leaving aside some of the normative questions around what ShopCo did, because it is an empirical question, as to which approach (developmental vs. transactional) is the “right” approach. You know? Is it right because it could be emblematic of a deeper commitment to belongingness? Or because you realize you have a credibility deficit? Is it wrong because it ends up recruiting at the entry-level and reinforcing organizational inequality? Or because it’s a type of paternalism?  It’s unresolved in this paper. But it’s part of a broader conversation and you have people on different sides of it.

Elijah Anderson has this quote on the dance White people have when they’re in White spaces, which I think is emblematic of ShopCo White progressives.By my presence (as a White person in a White space) am I here because I intentionally chose to be in a White space and my presence means, to non-White people, I only want to affiliate with White people? Or am I here because this is a broader structural issue? Therefore, I may want to do something to signal: Yes, I’m in a majority White company. But I really want you to know that I’m not like the other people here who we assume only want to be around White people. I’m here because this is the unfortunate reality. And, if you’re in the “dance,” you start to come up with these costly, strange, counterintuitive signals to try and demonstrate your progressivism and anti-racism despite your association with a White space.

• Building off of your research and findings, are there any questions that you would like to pursue or want others to pursue?

With support from the blackbox Lab run by my colleague, James Riley, I have started to map this universe of tech-enabled DEI products. And they fit into different parts of an employee’s lifecycle from attraction and hiring; to retention and promotion; to their general sense of belongingness within the company. First is mapping what are the technologies that exist? Where in the employee lifecycle are they meant to intervene? What existing biases are they meant to address or overcome? Recall, founders of these platforms were aware that hiring managers can interject bias, so they were trying to overcome this by using algorithms to match candidates to open positions instead of using referrals. Instead of having individuals look at a person’s CV to decide if they’re a good fit. It’s ironic, because there ends up being a whole other set of issues that come with it. And I think, as I said at the beginning, there is an empirical question around whether developmental platforms are more likely to attract junior-level versus senior-level candidates.

Another area I’m curious about is, I think we underestimate and undertheorize what drives racial minority candidates and employees. But the space is ripe to look at. As an employer, there’s almost this Field of Dreams mentality among employers: “[I]f I build it, they will come.” I just have to say that I care about diversity and all of the diverse, underrepresented, minority candidates will come my way. And it’s not clear that that’s all you have to do. How do racial minority candidates make decisions around what firms to join? What are they looking for? These things are undertheorized. And so companies think: “I just need to do these big public things and people will come my way.” Unclear that that’s the case.

• When you started your fieldwork, Shop Co was curious about multiple DEI initiatives. How did you balance your scholarly agenda with the DEI goals of a site where you have the expertise the organization is seeking out?

There’s a great paper by Fred Davis called: The Martian and the Convert: Ontological Polarities in Social Research (1973). And you think in one sense, I’m going to be the Martian. I’m going to be the objective third party who just observes everything that happens and I am not going to be emotionally involved. Or you’re going to become the Convert and basically you’re going to become invested in your site and your participants. And the reality is, you’re constantly tacking back and forth between both. When I think about providing an organization with information about DEI (or any subject really), I don’t see the tension, as it’s not my belief that an information deficit is driving a lot of what we see in the world. Even if you provide an organization with information, they still have to run it through their own internal belief system. The information you provide may help them have a language and a way of understanding what action they want to take. But is information alone really going to change their behavior? I don’t think so, because, as researchers, we’re trying to understand how people synthesize information, competing tensions, opposing beliefs and values (and everything like that) to come up with an action. Their actions are their own and the outcome of that process.

• What are the key takeaways that you would like academics and practitioners to gain from reading your paper?

Academics. I think it’s a couple of things. First, the 2 x 2 that I have in the paper is an important explanation for why progress towards more diverse companies can be difficult to achieve. It shows that your company’s approach to DEI and your vendor’s approach to DEI need to match. But, you can imagine this misalignment where the companies that are perhaps best set-up to care about retention and belonging are looking for these developmental approaches that are less common (based on new research by Georgeac & Rattan, 2023). And so, my paper offers an explanation why DEI and addressing organizational inequality is slow. Which brings me to my second takeaway for academics. Just staying curious even in a space that feels like it’s got a lot of explanations for why things fail. Like even amongst all the dead bodies, still staying curious and listening to what’s happened, listening deeply to what’s happening and what people are saying, and trying to make sense of it in a new way. So, it’s basically still trying to keep an open mind. Whenever you’re thinking, “[T]his field is over-saturated, or the explanations are over-determined, or there are lots of competing explanations,” if  you stay engaged with the work and really listen to what people are saying, you may find a different explanation that doesn’t have to explain all of it or even a majority, but it can explain an important minority of behavior.

Practitioners. I think the label of repugnant market concerns is helpful. As I said at the outset, you can think of how these concerns can implicitly or explicitly drive people’s behavior. And I think the first battle is making them conscious of the idea that this is something they may be implicitly concerned with. And it could be driving you to make certain decisions that may or may not be the right fit for your company. For instance, if you need junior-level candidates and you want to create this internal labor market, then a developmental approach may not be so bad. If you need senior-level, TBD on the empirics of this, but in the ShopCo case, these developmental platforms did not yield senior-level. So, you’re pursuing the wrong strategy, that’s the wrong fit for your company, out of these repugnant market concerns. In terms of how to overcome them, it’s almost like translating these concerns that you have about the platform and how the platform engages with the candidate, internally.

I think that’s sort of a strange element of what ShopCo did. Because of these broader credibility deficits, I think they wanted the selected platforms to be a reflection of who they were as a company. When it’s like, you can still demonstrate that these candidates matter to you as employees, that they’re not numbers, but individuals. And that you care about the community, once they’re your employees. You don’t need to hold the platform to a reputational standard. So, for practitioners, if you find yourself feeling these repugnant market concerns, number one, know that there’s a name and number two, take that concern and think about how you’re going to translate it internally once these people are your employees. The goal is to get people in your door and not a competitor that doesn’t care about them.

My other advice for practitioners is based on research by Matthew Bidwell and Sandra Kalev: that if you want to use the developmental platform because you need junior-level talent, make sure you’re not over-reliant on your internal labor market. You may be thinking: “I’ll hire them, and in three to five years, I’ll promote them.” But your timeline and the candidate’s timeline may not align. In those three years they may move to be somebody else’s middle manager, and you may find yourself back at square zero, because your internal labor market takes too much time.

• What were the most challenging and rewarding aspects of conducting your research? What guidance would you give to PhD students interested in conducting ethnographic research?

Challenging. What I find most challenging, but also good in a sense, is you spend so much time in the organization getting to know your participants and you hear about different elements of their lives and what drives them. But then you go to present your research and one person says: “[B]ut what about…” And really, that’s an opportunity to flesh out your argument. To give space for your participants and the data to breathe so that other people can come along with you. At moments, it can feel like they don’t understand your setting or they don’t understand your research or they don’t understand your participants. For me, there were moments when I was like, “Oh, I’m not doing a good job of representing the ShopCo case because some people are not following along.” And I learned, maybe I didn’t make it clear how much time I spent across many different scenarios. And how I was triangulating the data. And how everyday I was writing memos. And every week I was making sure that I was thinking about alternative explanations. So, when people don’t understand your argument at first, it’s an opportunity, not a challenge (even though it can feel that way).

Additionally, it can be emotionally challenging and draining to be in spaces of inequality. When I think about my public defender ethnography, there was a lot of cognitive dissonance. Watching cases and the ways in which people were treated by the criminal justice system. The outcomes. Watching people have to go into custody because they didn’t have $100 to make bail. And then going back to class and having to engage, or being asked the more theoretical implications of my research and I’m thinking “theoretical implications?!” I literally wanted to reach in my wallet and give this person $100 so they didn’t have to go back into custody. The reality is you care. You care about this for your community. And you care about this for the theoretical contribution. And you’re just trying to balance these multiple perspectives as you’re doing good, rigorous research.

Rewarding. I think it is such a gift that people share so much of their lives, their thinking, and their approaches with–what in the beginning–is a complete stranger. At the end of the day, we all just want to be understood. And you’re giving people an opportunity to share their approach to things and using theory to make sense of it all. Additionally, you can sometimes identify things that help the company do better. So, there’s a direct impact on the people that you’re studying as you debrief them on your findings over time. Or you may do small research projects on other elements. For example, ShopCo had a lot of questions about the motherhood penalty. So, putting together a presentation on what the motherhood penalty is and how to think about addressing it. This job is such an amazing opportunity to be intellectually curious about the world. I really love being an academic.

PhD Students. I know it can be hard when you’re reading all of these papers and thinking, “where can I make a contribution?” It’s a busy space. And there’s a lot of competing theories. But stay engaged with what’s happening at your setting. Be curious about what your participants are saying. And because you don’t find the insights yourself, share your work and what you find curious or surprising with others. Hearing from them can help you craft your contribution, identify your space, and turn your insights into a paper.

There are times where you have to have the courage of your convictions that what you want to study is interesting. And it’s going to matter. You don’t need everybody to agree with you at the outset. You just need a few people. And those few people can make the difference in helping you continue to push forward in your research and understand why it’s important to study settings like this. As for ethnographic research? I love it. I really need to know on a deep level how people’s beliefs influence their behaviors. And this gap between what people say and what they do–it’s fascinating. If you’re interested in conducting ethnographic research, you have to keep an open mind and cast a wide net. All the data can eventually be useful. There’s no wasted effort here.

Finally, I always write down at the end of every day at site: what’s something that I thought was really strange? Or interesting? Or confusing? At the end of the week, I would pick a few of those to test out. For instance, if I think it is strange they think of this as shopping, why might that be the case? What kind of literature does this speak to? And then sharing the work and ideas and getting feedback early. Because that’s how you start to surface alternative explanations, which become critical in any research, in any method. But can be, perhaps, more damaging in ethnographic research if you don’t have the data to rule out some of the alternative explanations and you’ve left the setting. So, it’s being conscious from the beginning about what else could explain what you’re seeing. Run that to ground as hard as you can. But you present it to other people as well so that you might hear, what’s sticking out to them? What do they think is driving this behavior? And then you interrogate: Okay, well, if that was the case, I would expect to see such and such in the data, or I’d expect to see them doing X, Y and Z. And then you go back to see if that kind of thing is happening. Do the research. Share it. Present the new idea. Push the field. And do it again.

Interviewer bios:

Shonita Black (blacksm@umich.edu) is a PhD student in Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research examines the extent to which certain identity groups of entrepreneurs (defined by gender, race, and/or ethnicity) vary in their propensity to declare bankruptcy and the performance and survival implications of doing so.

Robert Chico (rchico@uw.edu) is a PhD student in Organizational Behavior at the University of Washington. His research interests lie at the intersection of employee voice, diversity and inclusion, and research methods. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, he seeks to better understand the lived experiences of traditionally marginalized employees (i.e., women, people of color, LGBT+, as well as those at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities) within organizations, and how these employees are best able to express themselves as it relates to work-related tasks as well as their identity and culture.