Pathways in the Workplace: The Effects of Gender and Race on Access to Organizational Resources (American Sociological Association Rose Monographs)

Rationalistic theories of the workplace and the claims typically made by organizations stress that an individual's access to the resources and advantages of an organization are determined by his or her qualifications and contributions to the collective enterprise, and that the payoffs for effort are essentially the same for all those doing similar work. However, as Jon Miller shows in this book, negotiating for workplace rewards is actually far more complicated than this model allows, and he demonstrates that access to networks of organizational communication is in fact fundamentally influenced by race and gender. Drawing on his study of American public service organizations, Professor Miller compares patterns of access to informal colleague networks and relations to the decision-making apparatus for white and nonwhite men and women. He shows that although no group monopolized the advantages of the workplace, and none was disadvantaged on all dimensions of work, no two race-gender groups faced the same set of reward allocation rules. Only white males experienced a fairly close correspondence between their bureaucratic "investments" and their workplace rewards, whereas for others more particularistic factors, such as age and ties to the external community, came to the fore. This revealing demonstration of the systematic and potentially divisive variations that exist in the ways in which qualifications and accomplishments are linked to the rewards enjoyed by individuals within the workplace will appeal to sociologists and other social scientists interested in formal organizations, as well as in the study of gender and race. It will also be of interest to readers concerned with organizational psychology and management studies.

The Arnold and Caroline Rose Monograph Series of the American Sociological Association

Pathways in the workplace

Other books in the series J. Milton Yinger, Kiyoshi Ikeda, Frank Lay cock, and Stephen J. Cutler: Middle Start: An Experiment in the Educational Enrichment of Young Adolescents James A. Geschwender: Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers Paul Ritterband: Education, Employment, and Migration: Israel in Comparative Perspective John Low-Beer: Protest and Participation: The New Working Class in Italy Orrin E. Klapp: Opening and Closing: Strategies of Information Adaptation in Society Rita James Simon: Continuity and Change: A Study of Two Ethnic Communities in Israel Marshall B. Clinard: Cities with Little Crime: The Case of Switzerland Steven T. Bossert: Tasks and Social Relationships in Classrooms: A Study of Instructional Organization and Its Consequences Richard E. Johnson: Juvenile Delinquency and Its Origins: An Integrated Theoretical Approach David R. Heise: Understanding Events: Affect and the Construction of Social Action Ida Harper Simpson: From Student to Nurse: A Longitudinal Study of Socialization Stephen P. Turner: Sociological Explanation as Translation Janet W. Salaff: Working Daughters of Hong Kong: Filial Piety or Power in the Family? Joseph Chamie: Religion and Fertility: Arab Christian-Muslim Differentials William Friedland, Amy Barton, Robert Thomas: Manufacturing Green Gold: Capital, Labor, and Technology in the Lettuce Industry Richard N. Adams: Paradoxical Harvest: Energy and Explanation in British History, 1870-1914 Mary F. Rogers: Sociology, Ethnomethodology, and Experience: A Phenomenological Critique James R. Beniger: Trafficking in Drug Users: Professional Exchange Networks in the Control of Deviance Andrew J. Weigert, J. Smith Teitge, and Dennis W. Teitge: Society and Identity: Toward a Sociological Psychology

Pathways in the workplace The effects of gender and race on access to organizational resources

Jon Miller University of Southern California

The right of the University of Cambridge to print and sell all manner of books was granted by Henry VIII in 1534. The University has printed and published continuously since 1584.

Cambridge University Press Cambridge London New York Melbourne Sydney

New Rochelle

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521323659 © Cambridge University Press 1986 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1986 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Miller, Jon, 1940Pathways in the workplace. (The Arnold and Caroline Rose monography series of the American Sociological Association) Bibliography; p. Includes index. 1. Discrimination in employment — United States 2. Sex discrimination in employment — United States. 3. Race discrimination - United States. I. Title. II. Series. HD4903.5.U58M58 1986 331.13'3'0973 85-19550 ISBN-13 978-0-521-32365-9 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-32365-7 hardback Transferred to digital printing 2006

For Bob Hagedorn, Dick Ogles, and, of course, Sandy Labovitz

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Research setting Preview of the findings 1 Rationality and equity in professional networks Gender and race as factors in organizational stratification Description of the organizations and specific research objectives Methods and measures

page ix xi 1 4 6 8 8 15 22

2 Ascription, achievement, and network centrality Stage 1: comparison of means and overall regression analyses Stage 2: the interaction of ascribed and achieved attributes Stage 3: considering the simultaneous effects of race and gender Exploring the importance of external activities A note on the ideal type: authority, expertise, and influence Summary

27 29

3 Access to the formal authority structure Stage 1: simple comparisons and overall regression analyses Stage 2: separate analyses for men and women, whites and nonwhites Stage 3: the simultaneous effects of race and gender Summary

61 62

32 38 42 56 59

66 69 78 vii

viii

Contents

4 Conclusions Summary of the findings: four modes of accommodation Conclusions and implications Notes References Index

83 85 97 100 107 113

Preface

My ambition in this work has been to give some preliminary but suggestive answers to the problem of internal organizational stratification. The questions that I have raised about race and gender differentiation and the tentative answers that I have offered should ramify in interesting directions; obviously, however, no single study can claim to resolve such a complex problem. In the analysis, I have concentrated most of my attention on the statistically detectable traces of organizational stratification. The measurement decisions that I have made, if not always optimal, are fairly straightforward; as a consequence, the results should be easily replicated. At the same time, I am very much aware that what people do with, to, and in spite of each other in organizations and how all of this relates to ascribed status differences must at some point be examined interpretively in order to place it in the context of a system of emergent intersubjective meaning. My hope is that the findings that I offer, and especially the gaps and uncertainties in the findings, will point to the kinds of questions that need to be asked in more fine-grained, qualitative studies in the future. On a more macro level, I have also been attentive to the community ties of the organizations and respondents in the study, and I have taken into account the broader features of the external labor market. In fact, such considerations provide the theoretical leverage for some of the interpretations that I have advanced. However, I have not directly addressed in any comprehensive way either the origins of human service organizations or the functions they serve for the larger structures in which they are embedded. Again, my hope is that what the findings show as well as what they are unable to show will provide some direction for other investigators. What is clearly needed is to connect the dynamics of internal stratification more systematically than I have been able to do to the larger political-economic realities in which organizations are embedded. In short, because of its objectives and its particular focus, this study should be seen as one that, more than anything else, calls for comparison, correcix

x

Preface

tion, and extension, both downward to the level of intersubjectivity and upward and outward to larger institutional structures. Two comments that reveal my personal biases are also in order in these opening remarks. First, I am concerned with the practical message, if any, that is taken from the results of this study. One important finding that I report is that access to a variety of interpersonal, informal network resources was roughly equal for white men, white women, nonwhite men, and nonwhite women, but that quite distinct pathways provided this access. It involves a judgment call that goes beyond what the data directly show, but my assessment is that such findings, and the explanations of them that I offer, reveal some of the things that traditionally excluded groups are able to do, or must do, in order to deal with the institutional obstacles they face in the world of work. The message is not that informal organizational mechanisms compensate for or neutralize these institutional limitations. Rather, I take the data as indicating that every category of organizational participants has a range of strategic options, including the use they make of their external attachments, with which to confront the internal system of reward and resource allocation. How rationally or equitably the organization behaves is in large part determined by where the organizational member is located in the larger ascribed social system outside the organization. Put simply, the more favorably the individual is placed externally, the stronger is his or her internal claim to rational or equitable treatment. Second, because of the topic I chose to address in this monograph, I have said next to nothing substantive about the clients who were "served" or "processed" or "treated" (the agency term is "deinstitutionalized") by the human service organizations in the survey. I am, in fact, acutely aware that many middle-class professionals - sometimes including social researchers - owe their employment and a large part of their occupational privileges to what society elects to do with various stigmatized groups. To me it is axiomatic that what happens to the people in people-processing organizations is of first importance, and this research should not be seen as elevating the problems of human service practitioners to a status above the problems of clients. Los Angeles

Jon Miller

Acknowledgments

James Lincoln and Jon Olson joined me in a very productive scholarly partnership in the early stages of this project, and they deserve a share of the credit for whatever I have accomplished here. The project has grown and changed enough since we worked together that they also deserve exemption from any problems or oversights that have survived the long process of review and revision. Peter Blau, Kurt Tausky, and several anonymous referees read earlier versions of the manuscript and oflFered a number of comments that have helped to shape and improve this final version. Malcolm Klein, Solomon Kobrin, and Elaine Corry provided the initial opportunity, the facilities, and the material resources to conduct the survey, and I am grateful to my research assistants, Margo Gordon, Larry Heck, and Sonya Miller, for their cheerful submission to that form of exploitation that we are fond of calling "learning from experience." Financial support for the analysis presented here was supplied by the U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute for Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, grants 78NIAX-0135 and 80IJCX-0089, awarded to the Laboratory for Organizational Research, Department of Sociology, University of Southern California. The ideas and opinions expressed by me are entirely my own and in no way reflect or represent the official position or policies of that agency. Now I claim the pleasant privilege of expressing gratitude to my colleagues Herman Turk, Parvin Kassaie, Edward Ransford, Jennifer Glass, Robert W. Hodge and Barbara Laslett for being around, reading drafts, listening to arguments, or offering invaluable technical and conceptual advice (or all of these) throughout the evolution of the monograph. J. M.

XI

Introduction

The work experiences of men and women, whites and nonwhites, differ. On this much the evidence is clear. Whether these differences resolve into unmistakable patterns of privilege and deprivation involves harder questions, and here the answers are not as clear. The effects of gender and race have been investigated in some detail in labor market studies and surveys of occupational attainment and mobility; as a result, differences in such matters as average pay and aggregate career prospects that are justifiably called inequitable are well documented. But except for a handful of notable studies that I will discuss later, comparatively less systematic attention has been given to differences in experiences at the level of daily work activities. It remains to be seen whether the patterns that exist at this level parallel those that have been documented at higher levels of aggregation. Do levels and means of access to networks of organizational influence and communication differ predictably by race and gender? Are there systematic differences in access to the authority structure? Do the differences that emerge suggest that one group is consistently favored over others? What are the implications of such inquiries for traditional theories of organization? These questions are at the center of my concern here. It is in the immediate work arena that the impersonal forces of the occupational marketplace intersect with the structure of an organization. These two sets of elements, then, provide the backdrop for the personal encounters among individuals who are, in varying degrees, active participants in the construction of their own work realities, and who are in fact likely to use whatever resources are available to them to protect or further their own occupational interests. The social relationships in which different categories of participants find themselves involved are the end products of all of these forces, and they all deserve careful investigation. Evidence on these matters will be offered from just one kind of organizational setting. I studied six interorganizational human service networks made up of agencies that employed professional and semiprofessional practitioners such as clinical psychologists, youth counselors, and social workers. In the 1

2

Pathways in the workplace

delivery of social services, such coordinated arrangements are increasingly common. But this is not a setting that is representative of the work world in general. Moreover, the numbers involved are not large. The 256 respondents include 128 white women, 71 white men, 29 nonwhite women, and 28 nonwhite men. The claims and intentions of the study are shaped to fit these limitations. The value of the results lies in what they suggest about the range of patterns that are possible and likely when different interest groups work together in organizations, and what they suggest about the types of questions that need to be asked about the causal mechanisms that create differentiation among these groups. My primary theoretical concern has been to determine how closely the work experiences of white men, white women, non white men, and nonwhite women approximate the classical rational model of organizational participation. This model is the organizational counterpart of the human capital theory of work-force participation. It posits a consistent, direct relationship between individuals' investments of time, energy, training, and talent on the one hand and the formal and informal organizational rewards they enjoy on the other. The rationalism at the center of the model characterizes both the assumed frame of mind, or motivation, with which individuals approach the workplace and the procedures by which organizations distinguish among their members. I did not take this broad paradigm as my point of departure because I approached the study with a rationalistic bias or because I thought it generated hypotheses with a very high probability of confirmation. In fact, I began and finished the study convinced that the useful limits of such rationalistic theories are quickly reached. However, straw figures can be useful. On some crucial points, the rationalistic paradigm does offer a clear-cut set of definitions and predictions, and thus provides a kind of theoretical baseline against which empirical observations can be compared. The same cannot always be said about most other models of organizational activity, including those that I personally find more persuasive. For this reason, the idea of rationality is a pivotal concept and is given a prominent place in the discussions that follow. Note also that it is the simultaneous effect of race and gender that are of interest, not their effects taken separately or additively. Both the logic of my arguments and the findings I present converge on one perfectly simple point: Race makes a difference for both males and females, and gender matters a great deal for both whites and non whites. This truism has to be stressed repeatedly because the more usual approach has been to focus on either gender or race or to add the two variables separately (usually as controls or

Introduction

3

suspected "contaminants") to a statistical analysis. Both of these strategies force an artificial separation between two attributes that in fact always operate conjointly. Little progress can be expected toward understanding the impact of ascription on the workplace until the intersection of race and gender is routinely accommodated by the research designs of organizational studies. The participants in the study supplied a wealth of information about their relationships to the unofficial structures of communication, influence, and mutual assistance that tied together the interorganizational networks of which their agencies were a part. The nature of the work undertaken by these agencies required the members to supplement their intraagency, or local, colleague ties with professional linkages that crossed agency boundaries. Practitioners concerned about their work performance could not afford to take these contacts lightly. The ways they found to gain access to these informal interagency networks are the primary focus of this study. Similar information was also collected on the participants' relationships to the formal authority structure, so that patterns of access to the formal and the unofficial could be compared. After a theoretical discussion in Chapter 1, the presentation of these data proceeds in the following way. First, I present a sociometric analysis of the patterns of access to the informal colleague networks (Chapter 2). Five different dimensions of interaction and consultation are examined: 1. work contacts (patterns of day-to-day interaction) 2. influence (networks of informal decision making) 3. respect (hierarchies of professional esteem) 4. support (networks of trust) 5. assistance (networks of professional cooperation) Two broad questions guided this part of the investigation: 1. Did the levels of access to these informal networks differ markedly among the various race, gender, and race-gender categories? That is, did one category dominate these unofficial exchange structures to the exclusion of others? 2. Were the means of gaining access to central positions in these networks the same for each race-gender category? Here the intention was to determine the combination of variables for each category that provides the best understanding of how they found their way into the informal networks. The list of possible explanatory variables includes training, occupational identification, work assignment, experience, rank, age, and ties to the external community surrounding the workplace. After this sociometric analysis, Chapter 3 addresses a parallel set of questions about differences in access to the formal decision-making structure, this time concentrating on reports of the nature and frequency of contact with

4

Pathways in the workplace

supervisors and the extent of participation in the official decision-making process. Research setting A detailed description of the programs that provided the data for this study is given in Chapter 1; only a brief overview will be given here. The six service delivery systems included in the study were part of a national program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice, that was designed to provide community-based treatment resources for juvenile offenders. Each of the systems was a clearly bounded network of cooperating agencies brought together to serve a single community or geographic region. The guiding assumption of the overall program was that such collections of agencies with their varying perspectives, skills, and resources would allow a more flexible response to the problems of troublesome young people than either the official justice system or isolated single agencies could provide.1 The separate agencies that were brought into a given network were bound to each other in some fairly specific ways by formal contractual arrangements; but, more importantly for their day-to-day activities, they were linked together functionally by the interpersonal ties among their members that developed across agency boundaries. Webs of professional interaction evolved around the exchanges of influence, information, professional respect, and assistance, and these emergent networks provided the mechanisms by means of which the activities of the systems were carried out. In the sociometric analysis in Chapter 2, these systems of interpersonal exchange are treated as if they were informal hierarchies, with organization members arrayed in positions from high to low according to their degree of network centrality. For an individual, a more strategic position in one of these interagency networks meant greater access to a range of professionally important and visible interpersonal resources. Because so much of the work with clients required the attention of personnel from different agencies, the jobs of very few individuals could be performed successfully in isolation from the larger interagency system. The division of labor among agencies and occupations placed loose constraints on the kinds of interpersonal ties that evolved, but these networks are still properly called "informal" because the precise nature of the linkages that developed was not officially prescribed in any detail. 2 There was leeway for both contention and cooperation among individuals in gaining strategic network positions for themselves. The examination in Chapter 3 of differences in relationships to the formal authority structure focuses on the ability of individuals to participate in the

Introduction

5

decision-making process and to interact to their benefit with their immediate supervisors. From the point of view of fulfilling work-role obligations, a favorable relationship to official superiors can be a significant instrumental resource, whereas isolation from this formal system of decision making can be a severe handicap for an individual. Together, these parallel investigations of informal and formal activities give a more complete picture of how ascribed status affects internal organizational differentiation. This approach also provides an idea of the degree of "coupling" of the formal and informal structures. This is assessed by determining whether access to the informal sociometric structure responds to the same or different sets of variables as access to the formal decision-making structure, and whether the extent and manner of the coupling vary from one member group, or race-gender category, to another. Predictions about the tightness of coupling vary depending on which of three possibilities is considered most likely: 1. 2. 3.

that formal and informal activities are different but complementary facets of a single overall complex of organizational activity; that the informal structure evolves as a reaction against the formal structure; that the informal structure is the actual structure, whereas the formal apparatus is largely irrelevant or epiphenomenal.

How vulnerability to formal and informal isolation differs by race and gender is an issue on which several theoretical perspectives converge. Such differences are a matter of interest for conceptions of social stratification, theories of labor market participation, and, more directly of concern here, models of organizational activity. Investigating the simultaneous impact of race and gender - as opposed to examining only one of the two or treating both simply as potential contaminants to be statistically controlled - has been largely ignored in all three of these areas. In the case of organizational theory, the oversight is especially troublesome. To be sure, not all organizations are characterized by pronounced racial or sexual differentiation. However, examining internal differentiation along race and gender lines promises to provide a better understanding of how members of different demographic categories make their way in organizations; conversely, it should also help to clarify how organizations deal with social and demographic cleavages among their work forces. Insights from the study of race and gender may suggest what to expect for other divisions such as age, nationality, ethnicity, family background, and the like. These are factors that vary greatly in the direct instrumental relationship they bear to the tasks an organization is attempting to accomplish. Yet they make a great deal of difference in the lives of the members in the larger world outside the organization, and they may break

6

Pathways in the workplace

through organizational boundaries to influence internal dynamics in profound ways. Preview of the findings The data in Chapter 2 show that no ascribed status group clearly dominated any of the five informal dimensions of activity. Mean levels of informal centrality in the interagency networks were remarkably constant across race and gender categories. However, when it came to a comparison of ways of gaining access to these informal networks, some striking differences were apparent. It was only for white males that avenues of access closely resembled the classical rationalistic bureaucratic conception. With some exceptions, the informal organizational advantages they came to enjoy were a function of their bureaucratic investments, their hierarchical positions, and their work-related resources. The same could not be said for white women, nonwhite women, or non white men. The experiences of the latter three groups were more likely to be linked to the nature of the clients they handled, their special ties to the surrounding community outside their programs, or their own personal, nonbureaucratic characteristics - age in particular. What these findings indicate is that social service organizations, like others, are characterized by a complicated process of negotiation for informal work-related advantages. To use as currency in these exchanges, participants had both internal bureaucratic resources and external ties to the larger community, and quite different combinations of these internal and external investments and contributions were brought into play by white men, white women, non white men, and non white women. When relationships to the formal structure are examined in Chapter 3, the pattern of equal levels of subgroup access that characterizes the informal structure is not apparent. Instead, the predominant finding is that non whites, especially nonwhite men, had closer relationships with the formal structure of authority than white men and white women did. Part of the explanation seems to lie in their superior ability to take advantage of their ties to the community outside the workplace. In addition to this surprising finding concerning race, the analysis revealed that the factors that seemed to work well for one group in the informal structure often turned out to be an advantage for another group in the formal structure. The indication is that tight informal-formal coupling was not characteristic of the organizations in the study. Given their level of professionalism, this may also be surprising, since professionalism can be seen as producing a comingling, or tight linkage, of informal and formal decision-making practices. To complicate the matter

Introduction

7

even further, in some cases factors that functioned as advantages for a group in the formal structure actually appeared as disadvantages for that same group in the informal structure. The presence of such trade-offs suggests that the organizations were "inversely coupled" rather than simply "decoupled." The implications that these results have for the classical stream of organizational theory are important. Narrowly conceived, the rationality principle at the heart of this body of theory suggests that the same reward allocation rules will function for all participants, and that where organizational exigencies alone are operating, ascribed factors such as race and gender will have a minimal impact on organizational functioning. The findings generally have a poor fit to this principle. The visible trappings of bureaucratic rationalism were certainly present in the organizations in the study, but patterns of daily formal and informal social relationships that actually conformed to the model were the exception and departures from the model were the rule. It is equally important to note, however, that the results are not very handily accommodated by any one of several theoretical alternatives to the rationalistic approach. The problem is that no theory has yet incorporated a very precise or comprehensive argument about how racial and sexual differentiation - or ascription in general - affects internal organizational arrangements. The findings previously summarized illustrate what this means. Some of the patterns follow the outlines suggested by a simple model of discrimination based on differences in power, but at the same time other findings suggest that persons with supposedly disadvantageous race-gender profiles could turn their ascribed identities to good interpersonal and instrumental advantage. The results of this analysis sometimes ran directly counter to what a simple discrimination hypothesis would suggest. In the face of such contrasts, I have been very selective in the use of the words "inequity" and "discrimination" to describe the findings. Parsimony in this area of investigation is difficult, and in the present analysis it takes a combination of insights gleaned from several perspectives to make sense of the findings. At the present level of theoretical development, this is a result that may well be typical of studies that try to deal in any systematic way with the effects of race and gender - or other kinds of internal divisions - upon organizational relations.

1. Rationality and equity in professional networks

Few would doubt that race and gender have an influence on patterns of interaction in the workplace; but, as the discussion in this chapter will show, consensus has not been reached on just how such ascribed factors affect organizational activities. Some argue that organizations are essentially evenhanded in their treatment of different categories of personnel and that they do not add to the disadvantages that certain groups bear because of their location in systems of privilege and deprivation outside the organization. Others maintain that organizations duplicate and even intensify the patterns of advantage and disadvantage that exist externally. In the present investigation, the picture is further complicated because the organizations had some features that clearly worked against pronounced race and gender differences in work experiences, but other features that suggested that the competition for professional advantages and personal rewards was intense as well as uneven. I will review some of the important studies that deal with ascription in the area of work and then turn to a description of the rationalistic and nonrationalistic characteristics of the programs in the present study. The chapter concludes with an explanation of the measurement techniques and analytic strategies that were used. Gender and race as factors in organizational stratification The concept of rationality comes to us from Weber in several variations. It captures the shift from ascription to achievement in the allocation of positions and resources and from particularism to universalism in the evaluation of performance [cf. Parsons (1950,1966); Kalberg (1980)]. Through this set of meanings, the term "rationality" is closely identified, historically and theoretically, with the increasing reliance on complex, bureaucratized forms of organization. For Weber (1978), bureaucratic rationality was indexed by the ways in which access to formal positions and other resources were linked to expertise and by the presence of performance criteria based on the achievement of technical role obligations. From this principle of rationality, he de-

Rationality and equity in professional networks

9

duced that organizational practices would have a leveling effect on differences ascribed in the external society. This would be a natural consequence of the attempt to eliminate irrelevant or counterproductive considerations from the search for and utilization of talent (Gerth and Mills 1946:224ff; Weber 1978:225). Questions about the accuracy and generalizability of this rationalist argument run throughout the organizational literature.1 However, the idea that organizations are in principle universalistic and achievement oriented - or "intendedly rational," to borrow the language of March and Simon (1958: 169ff) - is still a common assumption in theoretical discussions and is certainly part of the normative view of themselves that most organizations encourage, however vigorously they may reject the bureaucratic label. In fact, the basic elements of this thinking are not confined to discussions of business, government, and political organizations (with which classical theories were most directly concerned). They have also come to represent important questions in a wide range of other types of organizations, as elements of the bureaucratic way of doing things have found their way into more and more areas of collective activity. In stating this, I am not overlooking the large literature on "bureaucratic" versus "professional" organizations [two particularly relevant sources are Bucher and Stelling (1969) and Lawler and Hage (1973)]. The point debated in much of this literature is whether the self-directed behavior of professionals or semiprofessionals (the latter being predominant in the present research) is compatible with the formal, rule-oriented nature of bureaucracy. Bureaucratic principles, it is insisted, do not apply where professionals are responsible for the organization's central activities. This debate is not directly relevant in this study. "Bureaucracy" and "bureaucratic rationality" are not used here as synonyms for rigid formalization or strict centralization and discipline, but rather in the simpler (and what I take to be the more Weberian) sense of the coupling of rewards and advantages to expertise and performance. Defined in this special way, "bureaucracy" or "rationality" can be said to be the centerpiece in the image of themselves that professional organizations like to project.2 In this image, the positions individuals attain and the rewards and advantages they enjoy are directly traceable to the skills, experience, and energy they bring to their work. Questions concerning the limits of these ideal principles are as relevant in professional and semiprofessional organizations as in any others. The relationships involving gender and race under investigation here provide one way of assessing the extent to which such rationalistic claims and intentions are actually applied in practice. In a narrow reading of Weber,

10

Pathways in the workplace

wherever rational mechanisms are fully operational, differences by race and gender in gaining access to professional and interpersonal rewards ought to be minimized. It is where rationality breaks down that particularistic and ascribed elements will find a point of entry.3 Considering the importance of this issue for organizational theory, curiously little of the existing literature has directly scrutinized the effects of ascribed characteristics on the internal allocation of system resources, rewards, and advantages. To be sure, there is ample evidence that women and nonwhites are at a disadvantage in finding their way into organizations and that they are disproportionately found in lower-level occupations and in positions that convey fewer rewards and less chance for individual progress (Siegel 1965; Rossi 1965; Treiman and Terrell 1975; Kluegel 1978; Treas 1978; Wolf and Fligstein 1979a). In fact, much of the research on labor market mechanisms is quite explicit about the existence of discrimination [for an excellent review of this work, see Martin (1980)]. However, what is unresolved is whether the work experiences of women and nonwhites parallel those of their male and white counterparts within a given organizational position or at a given level of skill - in other words, once the entry-level barriers are passed. Some labor market studies have made use of organizational variables in attempting to explain race and gender differences in income and to account for differential access to decision-making authority (Kluegel 1978; Wolf and Fligstein 1979a,b; Halaby 1979; Grandjean 1979). These studies offer useful macroscopic generalities but little specific guidance for my purposes because they are not actually conducted in organizations. Typically, they rely on a small number of items of organizational information gathered in a sample survey [see, e.g., Wolf and Fligstein (1979a,b)], and they are unable to specify in any detail what the actual organizational practices are that would account for their findings. What is needed is a more direct look inside the organizational "black box" at the mechanisms by which individual attributes and resources, or investments, are actually translated into the daily work experiences of respondents. Considering these mechanisms, a compelling argument is that in a culture characterized by sexism and racism, discriminatory practices must penetrate the boundaries of organizations; must, like a genetic code, be present in every part of the overall structure; and must operate even after differences in skill and credentials are taken into account. In order for this not to be true, there would have to be a marked disparity between the race and gender practices of organizations and what we know about patterns of ascription in the surrounding culture upon which, after all, they have to rely for their support. However, a parallel argument can be constructed that disputes the discrimi-

Rationality and equity in professional networks

11

nation hypothesis. The clients of most people-processing organizations are differentiated by race and gender, as are many of the other important community actors with whom such organizations must deal. Because of this, the ascribed attributes of their members may be of great importance to organizations for instrumental reasons. An argument that I draw upon in this analysis, for example, is that there are task-related advantages to be gained when there is a correspondence between the race and gender of practitioners and those of their clients. Similar advantages are likely to be gained if the ascribed characteristics of practitioners parallel those of important decision makers in the surrounding community. When factors such as race and gender become directly involved in an organization's activities in these essentially technical ways, the strict leveling principle - which implies the eventual elimination of differentiation based on ascribed characteristics - may not be in evidence. But this may be for reasons that do not imply inequitable and illegitimate differentiation. The difficulty in separating out the effects of these two sets of processes, one discriminatory, the other far less clearly so, is what makes it problematic to use the language of inequity to describe all race and gender differences in organizations [for a similar argument, see Perrow (1979)]. The direction of the evidence from the few studies that have addressed such issues in a straightforward way is still unclear. To take one illustration, Kanter's thesis concerning gender differences (Kanter 1977a,b) is that differentiation is to an important extent a matter of minority-majority proportions. Many women in organizations have to function alone or in small, disconnected numbers surrounded by men. They have experiences that are different from, and less favorable than, those of women who are more able to form alliances with other women. The point is to escape becoming individually visible tokens. Kanter is certainly sensitive to the relative power of men and women as it derives from their placement in the larger social system and to related considerations concerning competing vested interests and direct discrimination. Nevertheless, it is interesting that her influential paper on this topic appears in condensation (Kanter 1979) with the subtitle "Tokenism, not sex discrimination."4 Other studies have reached conclusions that differ substantially from those of Kanter. For example, in an earlier investigation (Miller, Labovitz, and Fry 1975), I surveyed several small, highly professionalized bureaucracies in which the numbers of men and women were fairly evenly balanced. For men, a rational reward allocation pattern existed: The greater the individual's investment or contribution, the greater the subjective and social relational rewards (measured by job attitudes and sociometric status, respectively). For

12

Pathways in the workplace

women, on the other hand, the greater the investment, the greater was the disparity between their rewards and those of men. This finding was referred to as "compartmentalized rationality" to convey the image of a seemingly rational mechanism (for men) embedded in a larger nonrational structure. It provides a strong argument for the operation of differential reward allocation mechanisms in the internal workings of organizations, but the imputation of discrimination is still essentially speculative. Corroborating evidence for this pattern of differentiation is to be found in studies by Fox, by Halaby, and by Wolf and Fligstein. Fox (1981b) has shown that, in academic settings, achievement determines salary rewards, but that the rate of return to women is consistently lower than that to men. Halaby's evidence (Halaby 1979) indicates that male-female income differences are strongly influenced by the fact that the higher organizational levels are closed to women. Discrimination by employers in establishing different promotional structures is again the suggested explanation. Wolf and Fligstein (1979a; see also 1979b) offer similar evidence, suggesting that employers establish routes to positions of authority that are also differentiated by gender. None of these studies of gender differences actually demonstrates discrimination by offering direct observation of practices intended to preserve the advantages of men, but all of them argue strongly for its probable operation.5 A study that a colleague and I recently conducted (Olson and Miller 1983) failed to find a male advantage in moving into positions of authority, but in the same study we reported a very clear male advantage in converting authority into other work-related advantages, including centrality in informal influence structures. Turning to race, even less research has dealt directly with the experiences of nonwhites in organizations. It could be argued that one dimension of ascription will produce differences in advantages and disadvantages much like those of another dimension and that the mechanisms for race and gender differentiation will therefore be similar. For example, Epstein's (1970) study of black professional women suggests that Kanter's hypothesis about the relative numbers of men and women could be extended to cover racial proportions as well. An alternative approach closer to the hypothesis of discrimination is implicit in Blau and Duncan's (1967) study of differential attainment by race in the larger occupational structure. The racial differences they observed persisted when other achievement differences were statistically controlled [more recently, see Parcel (1979)]. Organizational variables did not enter directly into Blau and Duncan's analysis. Nevertheless, their findings on differences in occupational experiences were probably the product not just of external labor market mechanisms but also of systematic racial differentiation within the organizations to

Rationality

and equity in professional

networks

13

which those occupations were tied. The fact that the occupational deficits faced by nonwhites were greater the more they invested in education, for example, is very similar in form to the result I reported for women in the study referred to previously (Miller et al. 1975). In other words, the deficits observed by Blau and Duncan may well have been a reflection, in large part, of promotional practices at the level of the organization. Kluegel's (1978) research on inequitable black-white income differentials fits the same pattern and has the advantage of including some contextual information on the size and industrial category of the employing organization. Finally, Butler (1976) has brought this question of racial inequity even closer to the intraorganizational sphere in a study of differential promotion rates in the army. Independent of ability and training (as measured by the army), race was shown to have a direct effect on the difficulty of promotion, and the delays experienced by nonwhites were more pronounced in the higher than the lower levels of the enlisted structure. Except for the work of Kanter, all of the studies mentioned stress the discrimination hypothesis. At best, they argue, women and nonwhites receive proportionally less return on their investments in the workplace (measured by weaker correlations between investments on the one hand and income, authority, desirable social relationships, and career mobility on the other). At worst, they face a net loss in rewards and advantages when they raise the level of the contributions they make to the collective enterprise. These relative deficits can persist and, in some cases, can even be intensified by access to the resources that are thought to be the keys to success in the workplace. In short, even though many theoretically important details about the mechanisms remain unclear,6 it is possible to piece together an impression of ascription carried over from the larger society that contradicts the "leveling" argument and thereby directly challenges the principles of organizational rationality and equity.7 Put another way, the segmentation that characterizes the labor market (Edwards, Reich, and Gordon 1975) finds direct parallels at the level of organizational structure, with favored groups in the rational core of the structure and other groups relegated to the less predictable and less equitable, therefore less rational, periphery of the organization. When apparently inequitable processes do occur, the explanation most often advanced is one involving disparities in power. Being a member of a race or gender category with greater control in the society at large is an advantage in virtually every area of social activity, and if the supposedly blind rationality and equity of bureaucratic procedure are to be deflected or compromised in any specific instance, power in the defense of vested interests is the variable most likely to be proposed as the cause. However, a counterargument is sometimes advanced that the work experiences of women

14

Pathways in the workplace

follow a different logic from that of men. Women approach work in a different frame of mind, so the argument goes, and therefore behave differently in work-related matters. They expect different levels and kinds of payoffs and, as a consequence, their job rewards, especially nonmaterial ones, are not responsive to utilitarian investments in the same way as those of men are. However, the argument continues, this is not, strictly speaking, a matter of inequity. Rather, it is the reflection of contrasting sets of job expectancies. A strong critique of this presumption is offered by Grandjean and Bernal (1979), who argue that no evidence for such motivational differences exists. The argument that I advanced earlier (Miller et al. 1975) also disputes the notion that the work motives of women are fundamentally different from those of men, a critical position that can also be inferred from the findings reported by Wolf and Fligstein (1979a,b), Feldberg and Glenn (1979), Brief and Aldag (1975), Brager and Michael (1969), and Alves and Rossi (1979). Whatever the weaknesses of the motivational argument, however, caution is still advisable in advancing an argument predicated solely on gender and race differences in power. It can easily be shown that when the power argument is stated in very broad terms, it is not especially useful for explaining the daily reality of the workplace. The difficulty comes in specifying which race and gender categories are dominant across a variety of societal and organizational circumstances. That men and whites are dominant in general, whereas nonwhites and women are subordinate, of course, comes almost reflexively to mind, but whether these patterns actually hold in all work settings is not as obvious as it may seem. In the present study, for example, it is significant that the human service agencies were staffed by representatives of the helping professions such as social work, counseling, and the like. Some have argued that these are female-dominated occupations, whereas others have noted that they are staffed predominantly by women but often controlled predominantly by men [see Montagna (1977) and Wolf and Fligstein (1979a)]. Similar considerations could be raised about race. In community-based treatment programs that deal with juvenile offenders, the surrounding community is often disproportionately minority, and even where this is not the case, nonwhites are usually well represented both among clients and among the actors in the community with whom members of the treatment agencies must deal. As was pointed out earlier, certain categories of organizational members can be brought to the fore simply by the demographics of the surrounding situation, and the fact that their prominence is directly tied to their race is not by itself evidence of nonrationality in the reward allocation process. What appears particularistic may simply reflect the fact that racial identity can be an important technical resource in some circumstances. In fact, I

Rationality and equity in professional networks

15

will offer evidence that this demographic contingency can produce differentiation by race, but of a sort that departs radically from the configuration of racial-ethnic domination that is characteristic of the society as a whole. As a result, the balance of power between majority and minority racial factions within a program may be such that a quick and sure answer to the question "Who dominates?" is simply not possible. This issue becomes even more complicated when race and gender are taken together. It is curious that, with very few exceptions (Treas 1978; Hogan and Pazul 1981), race and gender are not dealt with simultaneously in studies of work. Yet their intersection creates four unique race-gender categories, the experiences of which can only be obscured by separating the effects of race and gender or by combining them in an additive fashion for purposes of statistical analysis. [For a general discussion of the intersection of ascribed attributes, see Jeffries and Ransford (1980).] Beyond the easy impulse to rank white men first (which itself may be a serious substantive mistake in some situations), a little reflection shows that the ordering among the remaining three categories is very uncertain. Do white women rank more or less favorably than nonwhite men? And what of nonwhite women, whose status could be seen as the superimposition of one form of subordination upon another (Dahrendorf 1959), but who by other accounts are sometimes better integrated into the work force than are nonwhite men (Ransford and Miller 1983)? When to this is added the fact that clients and community actors, like program practitioners, are also subdivided into the same four race-gender categories, the result is a very complicated power equation, one that cannot easily be portrayed in terms of simple dichotomies. Previous labor market studies and organizational research are almost completely silent on this matter. With these cautions in mind, I approached this investigation as a series of strategic questions rather than a set of clear-cut, formal predictions. The basic task was to determine the importance of race and gender in shaping access to the informal and formal structures of the organizational systems included in the survey, and to use this as a way of probing (to the extent possible with one study) the limits of the rationalist perspective as a model for accounting for day-to-day organizational processes. Description of the organizations and specific research objectives To repeat a point made earlier, the programs in the survey were complicated interorganizational structures. They evolved as part of a national effort to provide noninstitutional service and treatment facilities for juvenile offend-

16

Pathways in the workplace

ers. These were young people, technically called "status oflFenders," whose offenses (running away, truancy, and the like) are troublesome for parents and authorities but would not usually be illegal for adults. Status oflFenders are often handled, along with delinquents, by the official juvenile justice system, but recent legislation has called for community-based alternatives to this practice. Beginning in 1976, the U.S. Department of Justice funded a national pilot project to develop such alternatives, and this survey was part of the evaluation of that project. The six programs covered by the survey8 ranged in size from 20 to 90 members and from 7 to 25 participating agencies. During the period covered by the evaluation (mid-1976 through 1978), nearly 5,000 juvenile cases were processed. The programs were widely dispersed geographically, so that every major region of the country was represented. Of the 358 practitioners employed in the programs, 261 (73%) were included in the survey. Of these, 199 (77%) were white, with a range among the programs from 60 to 100%. Such a pronounced imbalance did not occur for gender. Overall, 60% of the practitioners were female, with a range among the programs from 48 to 70%. The most characteristic occupations were social worker and youth counselor, categories that are certainly not the privileged preserve of men. Nor was the frequent observation that most supervisors in these kinds of occupations are men (Montagna 1977:280) borne out. Eighty-five of the respondents reported having some supervisory responsibilities. This proportion (about one-third) did not vary greatly in the breakdowns for men (37%) and women (31%), whites (34%), and nonwhites (30%). 9 It is clear from these breakdowns that white male dominance is not to be taken for granted in these programs. Rationalistic features of the program The organizational guidelines provided for these programs by the Justice Department were neither detailed nor restrictive. However, there was a clear mandate to enlist and coordinate the efforts of previously separate community agencies as a step toward moving the treatment of status oflFenders out of the juvenile justice system and into the community. To accomplish this objective, each program was structured as a network of interacting but formally independent agencies. All status oflFenders in the surrounding area were then to be remanded to this interagency network. The planners of this interorganizational strategy presumed that a practitioner in one of the agencies in such a network would not only be able to draw on his or her own expertise but could also call on the resources of colleagues in the same agency and members of the other agencies in the network as a reservoir of helpful contacts,

Rationality and equity in professional networks

17

information, and assistance. As a result, a well-connected practitioner should have had professional advantages that would be denied to an individual who was isolated or poorly placed within this network,10 and the quality of service delivered to the client was expected to be demonstrably superior to what could be offered by the juvenile justice system or by independent practitioners or isolated agencies. In each of the programs, one agency was the official recipient of the Justice Department grant. It became the fiscal and administrative center, with the responsibility for establishing and overseeing the interagency service delivery network. The agencies that were brought into these networks had to agree contractually to function as part of such an effort in order to receive their share of the grant funds. Of the six programs covered in this study, one relied almost exclusively on private agencies, two relied primarily on established and newly created linkages among public agencies, and the other four brought together a mixture of public and private agencies. A roster of participating organizations and their members specified the boundaries of each of the networks. Within these boundaries, the agencies in a program shared a common source of funding, a common set of official reporting requirements, a common client pool, and a common relationship to the organization occupying the recognized fiscal and administrative center of the program. The agencies were not all expected to deliver the same services. Some were involved primarily in diagnosis and classification, others provided residential services, and still others concentrated on various kinds of treatment. The agencies included in a network therefore occupied complementary positions in an interagency division of labor. As a result, they were bound together to some extent by the reciprocal obligations that this functional interdependence implied. Some of the features of these programs clearly represented bureaucratic responses, in the sense in which I have used this word, to the problem of administrative coordination. In part because of their federal government sponsorship, they recruited individual practitioners and agencies according to publicly stated criteria of expertise; they had intricate record-keeping systems and routing procedures; they had official intra- and interagency hierarchies of authority that were not elaborate but were clearly articulated; and, although there were profound disagreements over the particulars of proper treatment practice, there was general acceptance of the overall goal of helping status offenders in whatever way possible. Finally, not the least important feature of these programs was their visibility. They were publicly chartered and funded; they had responsibility for dealing with a visible social problem; and their members were publicly committed to social justice and profession-

18

Pathways in the workplace

alism in the delivery of services. An agency representative would be unlikely to use the word "bureaucracy" in describing his or her program's activities, but this same person would be very likely to embrace the ideal principles that I have specified as the conceptual core of that term. In particular, the emphasis on expertise and universalistic reward allocation rules are strong elements in the legitimating symbolism used by systems such as these (see Meyer and Rowan 1977). Without adding to the description given so far, it could be argued that the rationalist model should be a relatively accurate guide to the activities and relationships that took place within these social service delivery systems. Certainly if the legitimating symbolism is taken at face value, radically different kinds of experiences for the different race and gender categories should be rare. But the accuracy of the legitimating symbolism is precisely the issue. These public features of the programs must not be allowed to screen out an equally compelling list of characteristics that would tend to pull them in other directions. To these I now turn. Divisive features of the program A perplexing difficulty faced by organizations that must try to alter human behavior is the impossibility of establishing unequivocal standards of professional performance for practitioners. Dealing with status offenders is a good illustration. There is little consensus on how to define and characterize status offenders, and distinctions that make good theoretical sense break down in practice. Status offenses, by definition, are not the same as delinquent offenses, but youngsters persist in mixing the two. The point at which a status offender becomes a delinquent is virtually impossible to specify, yet millions of dollars are spent on programs that assume that the differences are clear. There is still less agreement on what causes the troublesome behavior of offenders. (The same could be said for adult criminality, alcoholism, mental illness, or almost any other problem behavior.) Consequently, practitioners and researchers alike know that conflicts among individuals and between agencies over incompatible treatment philosophies and strategies are common, although they are seldom documented in the literature. In the best of circumstances, the criteria used to move a case through a course of treatment are ill-defined, and what constitutes a success is by no means straightforward. This problem is essentially technological in the sense that Perrow (1967) uses this term. The raw material is variable, unstable, and ill-understood; exceptional cases are frequent, and solutions to their special problems are

Rationality and equity in professional networks

19

elusive. In the language of "garbage can" theory (Cohen, March, and Olsen 1972), what is to be done, how, and by whom is always uncertain, and this has profound behavioral consequences for an organization. One crucial consequence is ambiguity in what expertise means, and expertise is a factor of central importance in classical bureaucratic theory. Educational levels, credentials, and certification requirements can be established as initial screening devices. However, given the level of technical uncertainty just described, it is difficult to evaluate the practical, daily expertise that Weber (1947:339) placed alongside training and credentials as an important rational bureaucratic element. These problems are characteristic of people-processing organizations in general, but there were several other features of the programs that exacerbated them. No agency was compelled to join any of the six programs, and the central coordinating agency in each program attempted to recruit organizations that were philosophically and technically compatible. Nevertheless, funding for small, community-based treatment agencies, especially private ones, is always problematic, and agencies were frequently willing to suppress differences of philosophy and technique in order to be able to tap into the source of reliable federal funds that participation in the program promised. To illustrate, some agencies defined status offenders as victims of their families and other social institutions, and therefore saw them as in need of protective advocacy. Yet they participated in programs dominated by strategies that stressed adjustment and therefore concentrated on individual psychological counseling. The reverse kind of compromise also occurred. Practitioners who held juveniles responsible for most of their own problems or who saw behavioral problems in clinical, psychogenic terms sometimes found themselves in programs publicly committed to advocacy or to structural or institutional solutions. As a result, interagency systems that looked (on paper) like consensual unions based on common definitions of problems were frequently characterized by contention and profound differences of philosophy. In this regard, the programs resembled what Benson (1975) has called "political economies," where the emphasis is on competition for influence, definitions of legitimacy, and money. Finally, perhaps the most critical problem that these programs had to deal with was the very high probability of program failure. On one level, they were defined as successful if they simply mounted a treatment alternative that caused status oflFenders to be moved out of the official juvenile justice system and into community-based facilities. On a deeper level, there were always implicit claims by the programs that the particular treatment strategy they had chosen would be effective in reducing the level of problem behavior

20

Pathways in the workplace

among the clients served. If aggregate recidivism among clients is taken as the criterion, then programs such as these rarely succeed11 and most of those who are direct participants in them - or evaluators of them - know that this is the case. From the point of view of the organization, this is a drastic and melancholy condition, for it means that a major program goal toward which activity ought to be directed is, for all realistic purposes, unattainable. Because of this, and despite the energy expended to create the contrary public impression, there is reason to argue that the programs were not "about" resocializing, saving, reintegrating, or curing clients any more than prisons are "about" rehabilitation. The survival of human service organizations, however, need not be predicated on the attainment of their publicly stated goals (Fry and Miller 1975; Rooney 1980). Because of this, on a dayto-day basis, they can come to be "about" something other than program success. In an earlier study of service delivery agencies (Fry and Miller 1974), a colleague and I described a situation in which the sorting out of interpersonal relationships among the practitioners came to take precedence over interaction with clients. Taken to the extreme, this would represent the final decoupling of organizational action from organizational goals. How race and gender differences figure into the final equation in such circumstances, which already involve several overlapping layers of potential conflict, would be doubly interesting to determine. Potentially divisive factors such as these are not aberrations unique to the programs I studied; many of them are endemic to interorganizational arrangements (Turk 1973). In social service delivery systems, they are especially common (Hasenfeld 1972). It would be shortsighted to expect the public insignia of expertise, the public symbols of professionalism, and the publicly visible formal system of authority to account fully for what actually went on in these programs. The drawing of neat causal arrows from expertise to performance to goal attainment or, more importantly for our purpose here, from expertise to performance to favorable job evaluation to individual rewards may not be possible - either for the observer or, more critically, for any category of participants. In such circumstances, it is unlikely that any potential resources that participants command, including those that are associated with status in the system external to the workplace, would be kept out of their attempts to structure acceptable work situations for themselves. In developing the "coalition view" of organizations, Pfeflfer (1981:235) puts the issue this way: ". . . when consensually agreed upon, objective standards are missing from the situation, social power and influence affect the outcome of decisions." To this I would add that the specific forms of power and influence that may come

Rationality and equity in professional networks

21

into the balance may be externally derived and not confined to those predicated upon the resources of the organization. This, in turn, provides an opening for the intrusion of nontechnical, possibly nonrational factors into the daily round of interpersonal relations. It is virtually assured that race and gender would be among those factors. Finally, the demographic composition of the programs studied requires a further comment. In most workplaces, the likelihood of white male domination is increased because traditional patterns of control as well as sexually and racially imbalanced labor force demographics have favored it. It may still be useful to regard such settings as competitive arenas, but the ultimate outcome of the struggles between the races and genders is not often in doubt. White males dominate and gain more substantial returns on their investments, just as they do in the society at large. The organizations I studied are different in this regard. The delivery of social services to juveniles is not a major area of traditional white male domination (it is not part of the economic core of the labor market), nor did the demographics of race and gender favor them, since white males made up less than a third of the work force of the programs. The result is that contests were possible in which women and racial minorities were not irretrievably on the defensive. In other words, the power imbalance at the outset was not so great as to predetermine the final result. In such a setting, it may be possible to learn more about the factors that the participants use to structure their work to their satisfaction than could be learned in more grossly imbalanced situations. To summarize, the organizations in this study provided both protections and restraints to the white and nonwhite men and women who were the respondents. No group could prevail by sheer weight of numbers, and the bureaucratic and quasi-bureaucratic principles that were endorsed by the programs, if they had been truly operative, would have lent a leveling impartiality to the social relations that evolved among their members. Moreover, the helping professions that were represented in the programs have an ideological commitment to equity and a generally liberal public image. Both of these factors should have worked against polarization and inequality in access to resources and rewards. On the other side of the balance must be counted certain features of the larger environment in which the programs existed. Whites and nonwhites, men and women, contend for advantages and rewards in most social arenas, and there is a persistent level of intergroup distrust. Against this backdrop, it must be added that in social service delivery systems, monetary and professional rewards are generally in short supply. The scarcity of professional rewards is even further aggravated if there is a low probability of program success and if there is, in addition, a lack of

22

Pathways in the workplace

career opportunities for the participants. Contention may be especially intense where the stakes are small and the rewards are most elusive. Methods and measures Dependent variables: informal centrality and access to authority There are two categories of dependent variables in this analysis: 1. Centrality in the networks of professional interaction is a measure of integration into the nonformal dimension of work-related activities. 2. Relationships with people in the hierarchy of official authority represent access to the formal decision-making structure. Network centrality will be explored first and will occupy the largest share of our attention. It is important to explain this measure in detail. Network centrality: Each system in the survey was characterized by a network of professional ties linking together the members of its separate constituent agencies. These ties were charted using sociometric measures of the participants' work contacts and the patterns of influence, respect, support, and professional assistance that had evolved among them. My purpose is to try to expose the mechanisms that individuals could use to gain central positions in these interorganizational networks. In order to do this, my primary strategy is to compare the effects of race and gender with the effects of several indicators of professional and bureaucratic achievement, including education, experience, organizational rank, and occupation. Then, other variables are brought into the analysis in an exploratory way for purposes of clarification. In this way, the list of independent variables is eventually expanded to include measures of the practitioners' community ties and the characteristics of the client population. Integration into the structures of interaction and professional exchange was crucial to the participants' work-role performance. The pool of resources available for dealing with a client's problems was significantly expanded for the practitioner who was able to rely not only on his or her own skills and those of colleagues in the same agency, but who was also strategically placed in these interagency networks [see Miller (1980) for a corroboration of this]. Defined in this way, centrality in a network is not a return on investment of the same type as more familiar job rewards such as income, rank, or occupational mobility. In particular, it does not share their more easily recorded, quasi-contractual status, and it has not appeared among the dependent variables included in labor market and status attainment studies.

Rationality and equity in professional networks

23

Nevertheless, there is a wide scholarly consensus that centrality in either intra- or interorganizational networks is a valuable generalized resource that can be converted readily into an array of other concrete advantages and rewards (Benson 1975; Aldrich 1976; Galaskiewicz 1979). Furthermore, taking network integration as a dependent variable is consistent with a focus on organization-level processes, for although it conveys advantages to individuals, the overall distribution of centrality becomes a structural property, one that rationalist theories would claim should be responsive primarily to the achievement-based attributes of organizational members. That is, directing communication channels through persons with high training and experience is ostensibly conducive to the achievement of organizational goals, whereas assigning persons to central network positions on the basis of ascriptive traits is likely to impair goal attainment. The consideration of network centrality, then, has implications both for processes of resource competition among individuals and for theories of organizational structure. The interpersonal connections that linked together the agencies in each program were plotted from participants' reports of their closest work contacts and four other sociometric dimensions, including influence (who determined how the work of the respondents was done on a day-to-day basis), respect (whose professional opinion was most highly regarded), informal support (who was considered supportive in times of contention), and assistance (who was a good source of professional advice).12 Respondents were asked to include in their reports ties with others throughout the overall interagency program, rather than to confine their choices to the members of their own agency. The nominations that were in fact interagency as opposed to intraagency ranged from 36 to 60% on the work contacts question, with similar proportions on the other four sociometric items. "Centrality" is the graph-theoretic measure of network location proposed by Harary, Norman, and Cartwright (1965:188).13 Consider a sociometric matrix P, any element ptj of which is the smallest path distance (i.e., the smallest number of links in the chain) from actor / to actor j in the network of a given type of tie in a program. The centrality measure C is then defined as follows:

c= where / =f=j and TV is the total number of actors in the network. In other words, all the distances in the graph are summed and then divided by the sum of

24

Pathways in the workplace

distances to a particular individual, j . Centrality in this sense is often interpreted as the access by an actor to information and resource flows from other actors, since high centrality implies short communication channels converging on j (Lin 1976:345). This interpretation is appropriate in view of the conceptualization of centrality itself as a generalized network resource. The data from the six programs were pooled for the purpose of the regression analyses. For this reason, centrality measures were standardized by calculating each person's score as a proportion of the highest score achieved in the program in which he or she participated (individual centrality + maximum centrality). Thus, the unstandardized regression coefficients that are reported have a direct interpretation as percentage increments toward the highest centrality score in the individual's program.

Access to the hierarchy of authority: By definition, supervisors are expected to control important organizational resources at the same time that they oversee the processes of performance evaluation and reward allocation. The ability to interact on favorable terms with official decision makers, then, can clearly be an advantage and exclusion a handicap. The key here is the phrase "on favorable terms." In professional and semiprofessional organizations especially, there is an important distinction to be made between having access to a supervisor, which I take to be a valuable advantage, and domination by a supervisor. Both access and domination may result in frequent supervisorsubordinate contact, but the underlying implied continua are quite diiferent: Access is the opposite of isolation, and domination is in contrast to autonomy. A simple measure of the frequency of contact, used by itself, would lead inescapably to ambiguous findings. With this in mind, two questions were used to assess superior-subordinate contact. The first recorded the subjects' frequency of interaction with their immediate supervisors: "How often in the course of your work . . . do you have contact with the person who supervises the work you do for the program?" Replies were recorded on a six-point scale ranging from "less than once a week" to "almost constantly." The second question asked: "How would you describe the time you spent with the person who supervises your work on the . . . program?" Replies ranged from a nine-point scale from "almost never helpful" to "almost always helpful." A third item [adapted from George Miller (1967)] provided more information on the style of authority relations: Which of the following statements best describes your relationship with the person who supervises the work you do . . . ?

Rationality and equity in professional networks 1.

25

We discuss things a great deal and come to a mutual decision about the task at hand. 2. We discuss things a great deal and the supervisor's decisions are usually adopted. 3. We discuss things a great deal and my decisions are usually adopted. 4. We don't discuss things very much but usually come to a mutual decision. 5. We don't discuss things very much and the supervisor's decisions are usually adopted. 6. We don't discuss things very much and my decisions are usually adopted. Among several possibilities, three dummy codes for this item were considered. One of these (1 = 1; others = 0) separates participation, in the sense of discussion and mutual decision making, from nonparticipation; a second makes a similar but less restrictive distinction ( 1 , 4 = 1; others = 0); and the third (1, 2, 3 = 1; others = 0) separates much discussion from little discussion between supervisors and subordinates. For convenience, I have labeled these three measures "participation," "involvement," and "discussion," respectively. A case could be made for using any one of the three as a measure of individuals' relationships to the decision-making process, but of the three I would argue that the first, participation, presents the strongest evidence of meaningful sharing of decision making, since it requires both consultation and mutual decisions. This is a restrictive criterion for participation because it does not call participatory the pattern (number 4) that involves mutual decision making without much discussion. However, it seems to me that this pattern of decision making is more clearly a workplace advantage than either of the other patterns. Another more technical consideration that also influenced my decision is that participation is the only one of the three measures that produced an acceptable marginal distribution (no more skewed than about 75%/25%) for all categories of participants. Each of the other two was too skewed for at least one of the different race and gender categories. Therefore, only participation was subjected to the multivariate analyses in the following chapters, although descriptive data are presented for all three measures. The questions that I asked about the frequency and quality of contact with supervisors are parallel to those asked about network centrality: Are gender and race major determinants of these dimensions of activity, or do achieved qualifications and more obviously technical considerations predominate? Does access to hierarchical superiors vary according to individuals' extraorganizational resources and ties, and, if so, do the patterns appear the same for the different race-gender categories?

26

Pathways in the

workplace

Independent variables: measures of achieved status In this category of variables, "education" refers to the number of years of formal schooling; professional "experience" records the number of years the individual had worked at his or her occupation by the time of the survey; and formal "rank" (also referred to as "authority") was measured by a dummy variable based on whether the respondent was in a position with official supervisory responsibility.14 A measure called "workplace," also a dummy, reflects whether the respondent's own employing agency was or was not the grantee agency, that is, the one with responsibility for the overall coordination of the program. Almost by definition, members of these administrative centers were likely to have greater centrality in the networks of interaction,15 and it was necessary to allow for this in the analysis. In addition to social workers and counselors, these programs included court personnel (primarily probation officers), staff and technical consultants (testing experts, psychologists, statisticians, etc.), individuals with administrative but not client-contact responsibilities, and clerical personnel. For purposes of the regression analyses, a dummy variable called "job type" was created that regroups the occupational variables according to amount of client contact. Social workers, counselors, and probation officers who worked directly with clients were coded 1 and other occupations that were more peripheral to client treatment (clerical, administrative and consultant positions) were coded 0. It is appropriate to note here that, based on the results of a preliminary analysis (Miller, Lincoln, and Olson 1981), professional experience (or, more precisely, its inverse, inexperience) will actually be interpreted as "recency of acquiring professional skills." This is an important consideration, given the emphasis in the programs on young practitioners collaborating to deal with youthful clients. This is the interpretation that I have stressed throughout the analysis. This emphasis on recent training, in turn, suggested that the age of practitioners might also be important, and it, too, was included in the analyses as a control variable.

2. Ascription, achievement, and network centrality

There are three stages in the analysis of network centrality. 1. In the first stage, the effects of gender and race are compared with the effects of those variables that were used as indicators of achievement or formal organizational position, including formal training, professional experience, occupation, workplace location, and formal authority, or rank. The effects of age are also taken into account. The hypothetical, ideal-typical reference point here is simply stated: In a purely rational situation, the advantages of the work setting would not be allocated differentially along the lines of gender and race, but rather according to objective professional investments and contributions to the system's activities. Therefore, the effects of achievement-related variables such as those I have included ought to outweigh by far the effects of ascription. A comparison of mean network centrality across race and gender categories, together with a simple regression of centrality on race, gender, and the various indicators of objective achievement, addresses this proposition. 2. By itself, this first step in the analysis is insufficient. Simply indicating whether women or men, whites or nonwhites have greater network access does not rule out the possibility that different mechanisms for achieving centrality are in operation for different categories of participants. Regardless of whether a woman has more or less access to informal channels, what she has to do to gain that access may be very different from what a man does; similarly, whites may draw upon strategies that are quite different from those available to non whites. In other words, ascribed attributes may condition the effects that achieved characteristics have on determining the advantages gained by individuals. Such a possibility is the subject of the second stage of the investigation, which compares the configurations of findings from regression analyses performed separately, first for men versus women and then for whites versus non whites. 3. A third concern involves differences among the four ascribed categories that are formed by the intersection of gender and race. Any racial differences in the effects of the achievement variables that are observed in the second 27

28

Pathways in the workplace

stage of the analysis could be complicated further when gender is taken into account; conversely, gender differences could be complicated in additional ways when whites are separated from nonwhites within each gender category. Here again, the results of four regression analyses are presented, but in this case they were performed separately for the naturally occurring categories of white men, white women, nonwhite men, and nonwhite women. This final breakdown produces subgroup sizes that are uncomfortably small for the nonwhites. The need for replication of the findings I report for them is therefore especially urgent. From one perspective, this third stage of the analysis is the decisive one, and it could be seen as superseding the other two. Although it violates parsimony, all three levels of analysis are reported to provide a direct illustration of the consequences of either ignoring or oversimplifying the effects of ascribed factors on organizational behavior. Each successive stage or layer clarifies, extends, or further complicates the issues raised in the preceding ones. A brief preview of the findings from each level will facilitate the discussions that follow. The first stage indicated that informal network centrality was distributed with surprising equality across race and gender categories. No group dominated the center of the networks, and none was consistently excluded from favorable positions. The second stage, however, revealed that the experiences of women in gaining network access differed significantly from those of men, and the experiences of whites departed substantially from those of nonwhites. The argument that the basic pathways to success are the same for all is simply not borne out. However, the differences discovered to exist between the races and between the genders do not reveal a clear-cut, segmented system of privilege/deprivation, because both handicaps and advantages were revealed for each of the categories of men, women, whites, and nonwhites. The third stage offered some clarification of these patterns but raised still another set of questions. The racial differences revealed in the second stage were complicated further by gender, and the gender differences were complicated further by race. What I have called rationalistic resource allocation mechanisms seemed to work reasonably well for white men, less well for white women and non white women, and least well for non white men. In exploring these differences further, data on participants' frequency of contact with outside organizations, their community activism, and the characteristics of their clients were brought into the analysis. Thefindingsindicate that such factors did sometimes function as professional assets in the internal networks, but that the specific ways in which they entered the picture also varied from one race-gender category to another. Clearly, the boundaries of these

Ascription, achievement, and network centrality

29

organizational systems were penetrated and their internal practices altered in several ways by the manner in which their members were tied into the surrounding community. Finally, at the end of the chapter, I will take a close look at a supplementary part of the analysis that dealt with the connections among just three variables - authority, sociometric influence, and expertise - for each of the four race-gender categories. I will argue that these three variables and their interrelations comprise the conceptual core of the rationalistic model. Although it represents something of a digression from my central theme, the same rationale that led me to ask about race-gender differences in network access aroused my curiosity about this issue as well.1 Stated simply, the rationalistic conception stipulates that the connections among authority, expertise, and influence should be close and consistent across diflFerent groups in an organization. In the present case, this means that those who had authority ought to have been individuals with superior expertise who were also recognized by others as influential in the daily affairs of the programs. The findings failed to confirm this ideal-typical formulation for any of the four racegender categories, but in the process of discovering this result, some important additional insights into the experiences of the white men in the study became apparent. I think this result justifies the space given to this discussion. Stage 1: comparison of means and overall regression analyses No category of individuals controlled the center of the professional networks and no group was consistently relegated to the periphery. Mean centrality on the five network dimensions varied little from one category to another (Table 2.1), and neither race nor gender was a significant factor in explaining the variance in centrality (Table 2.2).2 Much of the variance in centrality was traceable to authority (rank) and, as expected, to central workplace location (i.e., being a member of the grantee agency). In addition, a pattern of greater network integration on the dimensions of respect and assistance appeared for those in the high client-contact occupational category (that is, those who were scored 1 on the variable job type). Relative isolation on the support and assistance measures characterized practitioners with greater experience, afindingthat might seem paradoxical but, as was indicated previously, is consistent with the fact that such programs rely upon the collaboration of newly trained practitioners to carry out their client-related activities. The statistically significant inverse relation

Table 2.1. Means and standard deviations for the variables used in the analysis B. Breakdowns by race- gender

A. Breakdowns by race and gender separately

White

Gender* Color* Experience Education Rank* Age Workplace* Social work* Counselor* Court work* Staff/consulting* Administration0 Other occ* Work contacts Influence Respect Support Assistance

Women (#=159)

Nonwhites (# = 57)

Men (# = 71)

s.d.

Mean

s.d.

Mean

s.d.

Mean

s.d.

Mean

s.d.

Mean

s.d.

.48 — 5.43 2.09 .48 8.90 .45 .46 .39 .25 .24 .41 .35 .14 .13 .13 .15 .12

.49 — 5.23 15.88 .30 31.11 .18 .46 .14 .05 .04 .11 .16 .74 .74 .74 .78 .77

.50 — 4.18 2.90 .46 8.49 .38 .50 .35 .23 .19 .31 .37 .16 .16 .16 .19 .15

6.71 17.30 .38 32.77 .25 .25 .24 .07 .07 .23 .10 .73 .76 .77 .78 .79

6.58 2.04 .49 8.07 .44 .44 .43 .26 .26 .42 .30 .15 .13 .13 .16 .13

5.16 16.32 .32 31.05 .30 .32 .16 .06 .05 .20 .17 .73 .75 .76 .78 .80

4.60 2.03 .47 9.31 .46 .47 .37 .24 .23 .40 .38 .14 .13 .13 .14 .11

4.48 16.25 .36 29.36 .25 .39 .14 .11 .07 .11 .14 .75 .75 .75 .79 .77

3.00 3.24 .49 4.96 .44 .50 .36 .32 .26 .32 .36 .16 .17 .16 .19 .16

5.96 15.52 .24 32.79 .10 .52 .14 .00 .00 .10 .17 .73 .73 .73 .77 .76

5.02 2.54 .44 10.69 .31 .51 .35 .00 .00 .31 .38 .16 .16 .16 .19 .15

Whites (#=199)

All (# = 261)"

Men (#=100)

Mean

s .d.

Mean

s.d.

Mean

s .d.

Mean

.39 .78 5.58 16.49 .33 31.57 .26 .33 .18 .06 .05 .19 .15 .73 .75 .76 .78 .79

.49 .42 5 .15 2 .29 .47 8 .81 .44 .47 .38 .24 .23 .39 .36 .15 .14 .14 .16 .13

_ .72 6.08 16.99 .37 31.81 .25 .29 .21 .08 .07 .19 .11 .73 .75 .76 .78 .79

.45 5.87 2.46 .49 7.42 .44 .46 .41 .27 .26 .39 .31 .15 .14 .14 .17 .14

.82 5.29 16.16 .31 31.42 .27 .35 .16 .05 .04 .19 .18 .73 .74 .75 .77 .79

.39 4 .65 2 .14 .46 9 .59 .45 .48 .37 .22 .21 .39 .38 .15 .13 .14 .15 .12

.36 — 5.71 16.67 .34 31.66 .28 .30 .19 .07 .06 .21 .15 .73 .75 .76 .78 .79

Nonwhite Women (#=128)

Men (#=28;)

Women (# = 29)

"Small discrepancies in #'s are due to missing values on gender and color. These are dummy variables, where male, white, supervisor, and member of the agency charged with overall coordination were coded 1; for the occupational variables, membership in the category was coded 1.

Table 2.2. Regression of five measures of network centrality on eight indicators of ascription and achievement Work contacts*

Color* Gender* Experience Education Age

Rank* Workplace* Job type* R2 (R2)

Intercept

Support

Respect

Influence

Assistance

b

seZ?

b

seZ?

b

seZ?

b

seZ?

b

seZ?

-.015 .002 -.002 -.004 .003** 067*** .106*** .009

.021 .018 .002 .020 .001 .020 .020 .018

.010 .014 -.003 -.004 -.002 .058** 076*** .007

.020 .017

.017 .011 -.003 -.005 -.002 .078*** .084*** .037*

.020 .017 .002 .004

.000 .017 -.007 -.007 -.002 064*** 064*** .005

.023 .019 .002 .004 .001 .021 .021 .019

.026 .003 - .006*** -.001 .000 .050** .068*** .032*

.018 .016

.20 (.17) .866

14 (.11) .822

.002 .020 .001 .019 .019 .017

.17 (.15) .820

.001 .019 .018 .017

.14 (.12) .943

.002 .004 .001 .017 .017 .015

.16 (.14) .757

Note: */?