Relational Models of Organizational Inequalities

Categorical Models: Tilly’s Durable Inequality and Beyond

Charles Tilly’s Durable Inequality (1998; hereafter, DI) represents a remarkable scholarly achievement in at least three respects. First, it addresses a goal that is of abiding significance for the discipline as a whole: that of explaining how, why, and when social inequalities acquire persistent, enduringly institutionalized forms. Second, it weaves together intellectual insights and genres that have only rarely been conjoined, such as Weberian conceptions of social closure, Marxist views of the extraction of surplus value, neoinstitutionalist arguments about organizational isomorphism, and the emphasis on the structure of social ties found within network analysis. Third, and most relevant here, is Tilly’s rejection of the analytic habits, steeped in methodological individualism, that have so often informed research on stratification and inequality throughout the social and behavioral sciences.

His argument rests on several core assumptions. First, the elements on which his analysis is based are not atomized individuals but instead structural entities, such as dyads, networks, and hierarchies. Second, Tilly views social inequality as emanating from two fundamental features of contemporary capitalist societies: exploitation and opportunity hoarding. By exploitation Tilly means hierarchical relationships that prevent subordinate groups from sharing in the revenues they produce for the firm. By opportunity hoarding, he has in mind the institutional processes through which social groups and classes try to limit competition for the privileges they themselves enjoy. Third, and most crucially, Tilly argues that the persistence of these features of social structure typically rests on the importation of significant noneconomic relations—for example, categories rooted in gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion—into economic hierarchies.

Key to Tilly’s framework is his insight that social inequalities endure, or gain solidity, when categorical distinctions—such binaries as male/female, White/Black, citizen/foreigner, and Protestant/Catholic—are “mapped onto” the internal boundaries of organizations and social networks. Obvious examples are when low-paid jobs that entail care work become highly feminized, or when undesirable or dirty jobs come to filled by members of racial or ethnic minority groups. Such patterns act to solidify the hold of dominant groups on economic advantage, if only by constituting the unity of the dominant group and enabling claims regarding the distinctive value of its members’ contributions. When such “exterior” categories are imported into the boundaries that exist within work organizations, the result lends a “hard, durable, even genetic reality to the categories” inscribed within the firm (DI, p. 71).

Tilly identifies two additional processes as reinforcing or reproducing inequalities generated by exploitation and opportunity hoarding. The first of these processes—emulation—is familiar to neo-institutional theorists of various stripes. What Tilly has in mind are the mimetic tendencies, stressed by the DiMaggio and Powell (1983) formulation, that lead firms to conform to (or become isomorphic with) their institutional environments. In Tilly’s account, however, emulation is not driven by the quest for legitimacy, occupationally driven norms, or contractual imperatives (the factors that institutionalists usually stress). Rather, it reflects the organizational interest in minimizing transaction costs. By adopting widely established models of organization, in other words, firms can avoid the need to devote scarce resources to organizational design, job training, and coordination with outside constituencies. As Tilly puts it, “Familiar forms transfer more cheaply than unfamiliar forms and ease the process of articulation with other familiar organizational forms such as educational institutions and state bureaucracies” (DI, p. 96). Hence, “lower transaction costs favor the reproduction of existing organizational models, whatever their origins” (DI, p. 96).

A final process Tilly identifies—adaptation—acts to further solidify the presence of social inequalities. Here, Tilly has in mind the survival strategies and coping practices of subordinate groups, which may inadvertently contribute to the persistence of social and economic inequalities. Whether because their leaders become invested in the status quo, or because their own coping mechanisms encourage the reification of inequality, adaptation encourages actors in subordinate positions to tolerate and even embrace existing inequalities, while periodically finding ways to gain advantage within its coordinates. Tilly cites as an example Burawoy’s (1979) influential Manufacturing Consent, in which workers’ efforts to cope with their own subordination led them to become accomplices in their own exploitation. In sum, once exterior categories are mapped onto the structure of exploitation and opportunity, the twin processes of emulation and adaption lend the resulting inequalities a solidity they would otherwise lack.

Tilly’s theory takes particular aim at human capital approaches toward racial and gender discrimination. In the view of Becker and other human capital theorists, discrimination introduces irrational influences into economic transactions—irrational influences that inevitable stand at odds with efficient business operations. From this point of view, discrimination should decline in direct proportion to the intensity of economic competition. By contrast, Tilly expects categorical inequalities based on gender or race to persist (or even to expand) in spite of economic competition, precisely because firms and managers rely on them to facilitate the continued operation of exploitation and opportunity hoarding. According to Tilly,

[C]ategorical inequality persists for two main reasons: first, under a wide range of circumstances, it does in fact facilitate exploitation and opportunity hoarding by more favored members of a given organization, who have the means of maintaining their advantage even at the expense of overall efficiency; and second, the transaction costs of changing the current circumstances, compounded by the effects of adaptation, pose serious barriers to the deliberate adoption of new organizational models. (DI, pp. 81-82)

Once categorical inequalities are established within a given organizational field, firms have little reason (save movement-driven legal interventions) to adopt alternative forms of organization. Indeed, by proactively adopting organizational practices of their own making, firms can shape judicial rulings and regulatory practices, placing limits on the changes they might otherwise need to make (Dobbin, 2009; Edelman, Fuller, & Mara-Drita, 2001).

Although there are moments when Tilly’s analysis seems tinged with an implicitly functionalist logic, his theoretical framework makes several important contributions. First, as noted, it constitutes an ambitious effort to bring together several theoretical traditions—that is, Marxist theories of class, Weberian approaches toward social closure, institutionalist arguments on work organizations, and social network analysis—that otherwise developed along separate lines. Second, it provides a conceptual foundation for research on organizational inequalities that has begun to inspire new and highly promising empirical directions. Third and most important, it challenges stratification researchers to incorporate relational dynamics into their analyses and indeed get a better grasp on the very processes that reproduce the boundaries of social inequality.

Evidence attesting to the empirical value of Tilly’s framework can be found in numerous domains, but the most pertinent is surely the work of Tomaskovic-Devey and his colleagues (Avent-Holt & Tomaskovic-Devey, 2010; Light et al., 2011; Tomaskovic-Devey et al., 2009), who have explicitly utilized Tilly’s model as a means of furthering relational analysis of economic inequality. ² This genre of work was initially driven by the effort to explore the link between the distribution of job rewards (most often, wages) and the dynamics of occupational segregation by race and gender. Much of the early literature in this genre sought to determine whether the demographic composition of given occupations exerts a causal impact on levels of the employee compensation, net of skill requirements and industry conditions (Catanzarite, 2003; Cohen & Huffman, 2003; England, Allison, & Wu, 2007; Levanon, England, & Allison, 2009; Tomaskovic-Devey, 1993). What remained unclear, however, was precisely why such effects occur. Advocates of social psychological models argue that such demographically driven wage inequalities reflect cultural or cognitive biases that distort the evaluation of the jobs performed by women and minority workers (Baron & Pfeffer, 1994; Reskin, 2000). The work of Tomaskovic-Devey suggests an alternative view, based on Tilly’s relational thinking.

Two recent studies in this genre warrant particular attention (Avent-Holt & Tomaskovic-Devey, 2010; Tomaskovic-Devey et al., 2009). In the first, the authors use data on 600 Australian work establishments to examine the effects of categorical distinctions on the distribution of wages among work groups at the establishment level of analysis. Their results indicate that categorical differences between the managers and workers at particular establishments do indeed have pronounced effects on wage inequalities, even after controlling for skill requirements, industry characteristics, and a host of other variables. Moreover, levels of market competition do little to reduce the salience of such inequalities, which acquire an enduring presence, much as Tilly would predict. In the second study, the authors use establishment-level data on wage inequality within the United States and Australia, and find largely consonant results. In both national contexts, between-class wage inequalities grow more pronounced in direct proportion to the salience of categorical distinctions such as gender, ethnicity, and race. Educational credentialing seems to exacerbate income inequalities, by legitimating the claims-making efforts of privileged groups even in the absence of labor market competition. The authors view these data as confirming the thrust of relational models of economic inequality, in so much as categorical distinctions “operate through a process of claims-making,” in which privileged groups “construct discursive reasons with which to capture and control resources such as jobs, wages, and promotions” (Avent-Holt & Tomaskovic-Devey, 2010, p. 164).

A number of critical, cautionary points emerge at this point in our discussion. The first centers on the economistic tendencies that are evident in much of the foregoing review. In Tilly’s work especially, one finds a strong emphasis on structurally based inequalities (exploitation and opportunity hoarding) and the material interests which they entail. What results, however, is an overriding tendency to neglect the specifically normative or cultural factors that have their own specific effects on the claims-making process. This is a matter not of an undue reliance on economic metaphors, but of an overly narrow materialist emphasis that leads Tilly to neglect the role played by the specifically cultural resources that elite and nonelite groups often wield and the symbolic economy that comes to characterize particular organizations and whole institutional fields (Mears, 2011).

Tomaskovic-Devey and his colleagues seem aware of this issue, and in their applications of Tilly’s framework, they take care to note the importance of meanings and symbolic constructs. Thus, these authors are careful to observe that it “is through interactions in social relations, where actors construct and reproduce meanings [italics added] around categorical distinctions, that exploitation and opportunity hoarding emerge and are legitimated” (Avent-Holt & Tomaskovic-Devey, 2010, p. 165). Or again, more emphatically, they note that the “central processual element of the model is the construction and employment of meanings [italics added] around conceptual distinctions that enable exploitation and opportunity hoarding” (Avent-Holt & Tomaskovic-Devey, 2010, p. 166). Here the authors acknowledge the centrality of symbolic representations in the staking out of claims to organizational resources. An economistic bias nevertheless makes itself felt within the analyses offered, which lack any direct measures of the discursive constructs or meanings that privileged groups use in the claims-making process. Much as Reskin (2003) laments, we can still only indirectly infer the mechanisms and processes that might underlie the construction of ascriptive inequalities or gender and racial hierarchies at work.

There have recently emerged highly inventive efforts to transcend this limitation, but with results that have shown uneven progress. Especially notable here is the work of Roscigno and his colleagues (Light et al., 2011; Roscigno, in press; Roscigno, Garcia, & Bobbitt-Zeher, 2007), which draws on novel qualitative data to reconstruct the relational dynamics that underlie racial and gender discrimination: data gathered by the Ohio Civil Rights Commission in connection with antidiscrimination lawsuits. Immersing themselves in those cases judged to provide “probable cause” for legal intervention, Roscigno et al. scrutinize the case materials in an effort to characterize the discursive constructs that privileged groups used in their effort to exclude women and racial minorities from opportunities of varying sorts. Roscigno et al. (2007) find a pervasive pattern in which members of the dominant group construct essentialized notions of women and minorities—a process Roscigno (in press) elsewhere dubs “symbolic vilification”—seeking thereby to discredit or exclude would-be competitors. ³ In a subsequent article, Light et al. (2011) focus on the dyadic relation between the charging party and the defendant, in an effort to capture the behavioral and discursive dynamics that underlie violations of equal employment opportunity law.

In our view, this latter work has many virtues. One is its sensitizing value, in that it reminds us of the unfair and illegal treatment that women and minorities continue to receive at the hands of many employers (and coworkers). Even more important is the effort to capture the symbolic representations that are too often missing in this genre of inequality research. Yet alongside these virtues we see two major limitations that carry at least equal weight. The first concerns a potential limitation within the research strategy: Since the data depend on the judicial system as the source of these accounts, they allow us to view only the most actionable or egregious instances of categorical distinction. The more subtle and mundane forms that categorical distinctions assume (i.e., those that are entirely within the letter of the law or that subordinates themselves may not even be aware of) vanish from our purview. A second limitation stems from the gulf between the discursive practices Roscigno et al. identify and the organizational contexts that underlie them. This gulf, in fact, pervades much of this genre of relational thinking in general, and reflects a more general difficulty in disentangling the complex connections that exist between structures and meanings. What are the organizational conditions under which particular symbolic representations of women or minority workers arise? Under what conditions are such symbolic representations likely to take their revenge on the wages and promotion prospects of historically excluded groups? Here we see a gap between two species of relational analysis: the national-level, quantitative analyses conducted by Tomaskovic-Devey and his colleagues (which lack data on the discursive constructs that shape the emergence of categorical inequalities) and the more micro-oriented, qualitative analyses developed by Roscigno (which have unearthed a rich vein of data on meanings and representations, but without linking them to the organizational or institutional structures in which they arise). The question, which we take up next, is how to reconnect categorical distinctions, organizational structures, and symbolic representations, the better to understand the process and outcomes that accompany claims-making behavior generally.

Social Inequality and Symbolic Boundaries

A second form of relational analysis that has emerged in recent years is based on the work of Bourdieu (1977, 1984), and on kindred efforts to capture the nature and consequences of the symbolic boundaries that are drawn at work. Appropriating Weber’s emphasis on the autonomous effects of status as well as Durkheim’s stress on systems of classification, boundary theorists view social inequality as hinging, in subtle yet important ways, on the categories actors use to “classify” those around them (Bourdieu, 1977, 1984). Theorists in this vein have sought to understand the ways in which symbolic distinctions, classification systems, and cultural markers all contribute to the articulation of structural divisions among social groups (Kefalas, 2003; Lamont & Molnar, 2002; Wacquant, 2009). The presumption here is that symbolic boundaries play a furtive yet powerful role, shaping the social positions and material resources that actors come to enjoy within work organizations, among other domains.

Bourdieu’s own writing placed the bulk of its emphasis on the significance of cultural capital in the crystallization of class inequalities (Lamont & Lareau, 1988). Because sophisticated and refined interpretive schemes require considerable time and “distance from necessity” to acquire, and because seemingly neutral institutions such as schools and universities implicitly invoke the cultural attributes of privileged groups as the standard by which learning and social worth must be judged (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; DiMaggio, 1982), actors who possess such attributes “naturally” enjoy marked advantages over groups whose knowledge or dispositions reflects more “common” or undistinguished practices and tastes (Lareau & Weininger, 2003). In this view, cultural practices are implicated (however furtively) in an ongoing “classification struggle” that has material consequences at multiple levels of analysis. At the interpersonal level, actors who wield significant stores of cultural capital can expect to enjoy greater chances of success within interpersonal status markets—social clubs, professional associations, friendship circles, voluntary associations, and mate selection networks, for example—enjoying greater prospects of inclusion precisely because of the cultural resources they wield, which distinguish them from “others” who are deemed less worthy. Equally important are relational processes at a more macro-structural level, through which dominant classes and groups seek to reaffirm the value of their cultural practices, often through public expressions of disdain for practices they deem inferior (processes that Bourdieu variously termed “strategies of distinction” and “classification struggles”). ⁴

Although Bourdieu acknowledges the importance of actors with middle-brow and middle-class tastes, and allows for cultural competition among different fractions of intermediate strata (the “dominated fractions of the dominant class”), in his view the pivotal boundary within any social formation was one that distinguished between refined or cultivated tastes (the “aesthetic disposition”) on one hand, and more vulgar, “common” or parochial tastes (the “popular aesthetic”) on the other (Bourdieu, 1984). At times, dominated groups engage in the effort to emulate the tastes of their social betters, usurping styles of life that intrude on the cultural terrain that had been marked off by the dominant class. Involved here is what Bourdieu terms a “dialectic of pretension and distinction,” in which privileged groups are compelled to reassert their distinctive knowledge and tastes, giving rise to a restless process that underlies many of the cultural trends and fads that sweep across the social landscape.

In general, Bourdieu views the boundary work of privileged groups as constructing subordinate group knowledge and tastes “as a foil, a negative reference point” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 57; cf. p. 251) with which to secure the privileged place their own cultural practices “naturally” command. However abstract this reasoning may seem, it is not hard to find instances in recent decades of precisely these kinds of relational struggles, for example, in political and ideological debates over crime and incarceration, welfare reform, the underclass, and undocumented immigrants (Handler, 1995; Wacquant, 2009). Nor is it difficult to imagine analogous relational processes unfolding within work organizations in an era in which highly financialized conceptions of the firm have led to surges in downsizing, outsourcing, and efforts to redraw the internal boundaries of large corporations.

Bourdieu’s work has of course been subjected to much theoretical critique and empirical scrutiny, generating a controversy that has yet to subside. Perhaps the most influential line of analysis that has emerged from this controversy lies in the work of Lamont (1992, 2002), who has sought to systematize our understanding of symbolic boundaries by conducting rigorous cross-national comparative research. Thus, in Money, Morals, and Manners (1992), which examined the boundary work reported among White upper-middle-class respondents in the United States and France, Lamont’s findings called for major qualifications in Bourdieu’s theory. High status knowledge and legitimate tastes—in her terms, “cultural” boundaries—played only a minor role within the logic of distinction in the United States (cf. Halle, 1993). More salient, she found, were boundaries that emphasized either “moral” attributes (e.g., authenticity, trustworthiness, and a strong work ethic) or else sheer “socioeconomic” criteria (signs of worldly success in the marketplace). Hence, the forms that boundary work assumed were far more varied (and variable) than Bourdieu himself had assumed. Lamont also found sharp variations by region, occupation, and nation, and generally viewed the logic of distinction as a contingent phenomenon—that is, as a process whose form is likely to vary in accordance with the institutional context. Thus, she viewed the weakly defined nature of specifically “cultural” boundaries in the United States as stemming from the peripheral role of intellectuals in U.S. culture, the fragmented nature of American cultural institutions (e.g., schooling, media, and religious denominations), and the embryonic nature of the American welfare state, which leaves the market at the center of people’s lives.

Lamont’s second major study again constructed a cross-national (United States/France) comparative study, but in ways that indicate several important shifts in her thinking (for discussion see Choo & Ferree, 2010). Here, her empirical focus extends downward in the class structure, encompassing the boundary work performed by White working-class men in relation to the upper middle class “above” them and the minorities perceived to exist “below” them as well (Blacks in the United States, North Africans in France). Here, Lamont speaks of using a “cultural-materialist” perspective toward inequality—a perspective in which actors are expected to invoke distinctions, or to advocate social metrics, that privilege the very material and cultural resources that they themselves possess.

Thus, in the symbolic economy embraced by White workers in the United States, esteem belongs to those who exercise self-discipline, a strong work ethic, a willingness to sacrifice for others, and an unpretentious bearing. Such qualities can be used to both contest the status claims of the upper middle class, and to challenge the social worth and contribution of minorities. For their part, French workers invoke very different rhetorical distinctions; predictably, they are more collectivistic in their orientation, and use this claim of republican virtue both to challenge the ethical commitments of their middle-class superiors and the discipline and work ethic exercised by North African minorities as well. In both nation-states, however, the class and racial system works through the efforts of competing groups, each deploying its own moral code. As Lamont (2002) writes, “Morality is the structuring principle in the worldviews of American workers, black and white. Through it, they define who they are and, perhaps more important, who they are not” (p. 51). Equivalent points obtain regarding their French counterparts.

Through these comparative studies and in other theoretical work (Lamont & Fournier, 1992; Lamont & Molnar, 2002), Lamont and her colleagues have sought to “lay the foundation of a comparative sociology of group boundaries” (Lamont, 2002, p. 241). The virtues of her analysis are plainly apparent. She has expanded Bourdieu’s analytic framework beyond its narrow emphasis on high-status cultural signals (see Lamont & Molnar, 2002, pp. 171-174). She draws attention to the importance of the specifically moral distinctions used by groups and classes when making status claims, and linked these distinctions to the group and class interests that underlie them. And she has done this on the basis of rigorous comparative research that identified the unique effects attributable to regional, national, ethnic, and occupational influences as well.

As is true of the tradition that Charles Tilly and his followers have proposed, Lamont’s framework nevertheless seems incomplete. Lamont has placed cultural meanings at the very center of the analysis, thus filling a void that limits analyses rooted purely in structural or material conditions. The discursive representations that emerge in her studies are certainly revealing of cross-national, regional and ethno-racial differences; as such, they capture important features of the competitive games and contests in which ethnic groups and social classes engage. The boundaries that Lamont identifies, however, seem suspended in thin cultural air, divorced from the organizational and institutional contexts within which boundary work is likely to be most consequential. ⁵ This issue may reflect a gulf between theory and method. Relying on interviews with individuals who represent given class and racial categories allows Lamont to detect salient differences in boundary work across national, racial, and class lines. But because this approach limits the analysis to the aggregation of data drawn from randomly sampled individuals, it becomes all but impossible to capture the very relational processes with which boundary theory ought to be most concerned.

Partly aided by Lamont’s efforts, there has occurred a veritable “boom in boundary studies” (Wimmer, cited in Bail, 2008, p. 38). Yet this literature has developed unevenly: While there has been a surge of interest in ethno-racial boundaries and identities, most often in European or North American contexts (Alba, 2005; Wimmer, 2008; Zolberg & Long, 1999), the literature on symbolic boundaries within and between work organizations has remained relatively undeveloped. What literature has emerged has focused on either class divisions (especially on the boundary between professional and noncredentialed employees) or gender divisions at work, with less attention to race.

The division between professional and “other” employees was of course the point of departure of Gieryn’s (1983) influential study of the “boundary work” in which scientists engaged as they policed the distinction between their knowledge and methods and those used by nonscientists. More recently, studies have fastened on the actions of elite professional such as physicians, often viewed in relation to nurses, radiological technicians, and clinical pharmacists (Allen, 2001; Halpern, 1992; Hughes, 1988; Messler, 1991). There is also research on the authority contests between professional engineers and less credentialed workers (craft workers and technicians) in various industrial settings (Vallas, 2001, 2006; Whalley, 1985). The virtue of this literature is that it views the demarcation between professional and nonprofessional tasks as arbitrary and ambiguous, identifies the symbolic representations that groups invoke in their effort to establish or police occupational boundaries, and notes that employees lacking professional credentials not only can challenge the boundaries imposed on their positions, but at times act to usurp the occupational jurisdictions that professionals have sought to claim (Vallas, 2001, 2006).

A parallel, larger literature has centered on the ways in which gender distinctions are drawn within work organizations. The most obvious concern here is with the culturally exclusive practices invoked by men in managerial and professional positions. This was of course the object of Kanter’s (1977) early analysis of the boundary-heightening conditions that existed in a corporate headquarters, and of the images of women workers (the iron maiden, the pet, the seductress) these conditions fostered. This concern for gendered forms of cultural exclusion at work has prompted a large number of case studies of manual, professional, and managerial occupations (e.g., Blair-Loy, 2001; Cockburn, 1983; McIlwee & Robinson, 1992). The study by Blair-Loy, on women in financial analysis, found similar images of women workers at Kanter had found, and confirmed that the survival strategies adopted by subordinates have often inadvertently reproduced the very boundaries women confront at work. Blair-Loy found one significant difference that had occurred since Kanter wrote, in that women found it increasingly possible to explore new responses to the roles imposed on them from above, drawing on multiple conceptions of gender in ways that expanded their cultural space.

Some studies have explored the ways in which cultural exclusivism can operate from below, as when women invoke gender boundaries as a means of protecting themselves from their male overseers. Studies of female factory workers by Lamphere (1985) and Westwood (1984) both reported cases in which working-class women used highly gendered rituals (sharing of family photographs, wedding albums, baby showers) to fashion a culture that not only provided mutual support but also shielded women against the intrusions of male managers. Bettie (2003) found that working-class Latinas often adopted stylized forms of feminine dress and demeanor as a means of undermining the authority of their superiors. Studying a Caribbean informatics plant, Freeman (2001) found that Barbadian women invoked class-specific forms of femininity, which they used to distance themselves from their female coworkers performing manual work. In all these cases, women “did” gender in highly class-specific ways, and with effects that had clear class consequences (cf. Kefalas, 2003).

We contend that theory and research on symbolic boundaries have much to contribute to relational models of workplace inequality. Here can be found a rich conceptual vocabulary and robust theoretical framework with which to grasp precisely those cultural processes that have been absent from the above-discussed literature on categorical inequality. Yet this potential has yet to be fully realized, and has found only scattered application in studies of organizational inequality. Acknowledging the tasks that boundary theory must address, Lamont and Molnar (2002, pp. 186-187) sketched out several potential lines of analysis, focusing on the properties that symbolic boundaries exhibit (e.g., their salience of permeability), the mechanisms used in constructing or challenging them, and the processes through which conceptions of group membership are formed. We would extend these suggestions by posing a number of questions that prod the social scientist to consider more effectively the complex relations that are likely to exist between symbolic boundaries and the structure of work organizations. In what ways do status hierarchies not only affect the allocation of job rewards but also serve to shape the very contours of work organizations, for example by affecting the configurations of internal labor markets that firms do and do not adopt? Do definitions of “core” and “peripheral” workers, which leave some categories of workers especially vulnerable to downsizing or outsourcing, rest on the symbolic distinctions that arise informally across organizational terrain (Baron & Pfeffer, 1994, pp. 204-205; Vallas, 1999)? What social and organizational conditions (e.g., social capital, spatial dispersion, informal alliances, or the web of solidarity) affect the capacity of actors to construct, defend, or challenge the boundaries they encounter at work (Nelson & Bridges, 1999)? To what extent and in what ways might local normative or institutional contexts condition the efficacy of elite boundary work (e.g., Cohen & Huffman, 2003)? These are only some of the many questions that boundary theory begins to provoke.

Intersectionality Theory

The third strand of thinking that warrants attention here stems from feminist perspectives that incorporate an intersectional approach. The argument here is that factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality cannot be analyzed apart from one another, but instead should be viewed as interrelated dimensions that commonly coincide, often giving rise to deeply entrenched and mutually reinforcing systems of social inequality Early interventions made by Black feminist writers (i.e., Young, Crenshaw, Hill Collins) emphasized the limited perspectives implied within a White, middle-class feminism, which was often blind to the lived experiences of women of color. These early works made important political interventions and drew attention to the ways in which gender inequalities were complicated by racial and class divisions. Since then, intersectionality has enjoyed an explosive level of influence, to the point that some theorists have begun to speak of its devolution into a mere buzzword (Davis, 2008). In positive terms, a healthy series of debates has unfolded, with multiple challenges emerging that have yet to be resolved (Acker, 2006; Browne & Misra, 2003; Choo & Ferree, 2010; McCall, 2001, 2005).

Denis (2008) suggests that, though feminists have written extensively about the mutually reinforcing axes of race, class, and gender, relatively little attention has been paid to the concrete methodological strategies that empirical work might best pursue. Yuval-Davis (2006) suggests that much current work on intersectionality represents an “additive approach,” which does address multiple categories of inequality, yet without specifying the ways in which they mutually construct and reinforce each other (Butler, 1999; Choo & Ferree, 2010). Although many intersectional theorists acknowledge the interplay of various categories like race and gender, many insist on the primacy of one or another dimension of inequality, yet without articulating the conditions that determine why one or another axis of inequality is dominant in any given context. And while some intersectionality theorists have adopted a materialist focus on wages and job opportunities (Browne & Misra, 2003; McCall, 2001), others have foregrounded the ways in which the discrete categories of inequality are discursively encoded, often in ways that obscure the real inequalities at stake (Bettie, 2003).

In a recent article, Jennifer Nash (2008, p. 1) exposes what she views as four internal paradoxes and unresolved issues or limitations that afflict scholarship within the intersectionality genre: (a) a lack of clear methodological direction, (b) the tendency to view Black women as the prototypical subjects of intersectional analysis, (c) ambiguities around the definition of intersectionality, and (d) a disjuncture between intersectionality and the lived realities of multiple identities. Especially important is the tendency to view some dimensions of inequality as “unmarked” categories (also see Choo & Ferree, 2010; Kwan, 1996; Puar, 2007). By this latter term, Nash refers to the failure to problematize the nature of the categories at hand, as if these dimensions of social difference could be taken for granted—for example, as if the categories “White” and “Black” stood outside of historically specific contexts and struggles. Other work (ironically, work that is not typically cited by intersectionality theorists) has explicitly challenged this latter tendency, as most clearly in the work of scholars writing on “Whiteness.” Thus, in his influential Wages of Whiteness, Roediger (1991) traced the confluences of forces involved in the process of class and racial formation in 19th-century America. He shows how the transformation of artisans into wage laborers led White working men to invest in their “Whiteness,” developing racial identities that in effect compensated them for their class subordination. As immigration expanded the ranks of ethnic “others” from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe, these latter groups were driven to contest their own categorization as non-White. As Roediger shows, gender and sexuality were also involved in the definition of Whiteness, as White working men projected their sexual fears and anxieties onto Blacks. The virtue of this analysis stems not only from its ability to denaturalize “race,” and to show how and why the meaning of Whiteness has shifted over time. In addition (and vital to our purposes here), this work shows how the intersection of class, race, gender, and sexuality congealed in a highly relational manner, as Whites defined themselves in opposition to rural Black “others” who were perceived as a threat (also see Hartigan, 2001; Ignatieff, 1996). ⁶

We believe intersectionality theory has sensitized many scholars to the existence of what Choo and Ferree (2010) have called “multiple marginalities,” and that it stands to complement relational thinking in important ways. These points are especially evident in Bettie’s (2003, p. 33) important ethnography of a California high school. In this work, Bettie takes social scientists to task for their failure to acknowledge women as class subjects. She convincingly shows the ways in which class, race, ethnicity, and gender are interwoven in lived experience, while avoiding the tendency to reduce any single dimension to the primacy of another. She finds, for example, that Latina youth, lacking a strong class vocabulary, often recode class practices as ethnicity (as when they chide middle-class Latinas for “acting White”). Since school authorities implicitly privilege middle-class Anglo students (and by implication, view Latinas as culturally deficient), poor minority women often respond by “doing gender” in precociously sexualized ways that challenge or refuse the authority of their teachers. Ultimately what Bettie demonstrates is that these Latina students are performing identities that are the product of ethnic, gender, sexual and class forces all interacting at one and the same time. Interestingly, Bettie makes explicit use of Bourdieusian thinking, stressing the ways in which collectively formed dispositions mediate the relation between multiple dimensions of structured inequality and the organizationally situated performances in which actors engage.

Interestingly, substantiation for some of the claims of intersectionality theory can be found in fields far outside feminist concerns, perhaps most notably in the work of organization behavior scholars and in research on workplace diversity. Organization studies scholars, for example, have used the term relational demography to capture the processes through which demographic influences congeal within work groups (Chatman & Spataro, 2005; Lau & Murnighan, 1998; Tsui & O’Reilly, 1989). One finding provides a caution against reifying individual demographics, for the attitudes, identities, and orientations that workers embrace often depend on the composition of the dyads, groups, and departments in which they are embedded at work. A second and even more pertinent finding is that the various dimensions of demographic difference derive a heightened salience when they empirically combine, generating “fault-lines” (Lau & Murnighan, 1998) that are much more palpable than would otherwise be the case.

Both of these points are well illustrated in the recent ethnography by DiBenigno and Kellogg (in press), which compared two similar hospital settings that employed nurses under starkly different demographic conditions (here, involving workers in feminized jobs who were distinct in terms of race, nationality, and age). When these demographic differences aligned with occupational categories, the result was a tendency to produce sharp schisms among the hospital workforce—DiBenigno and Kellogg use the term “jurisdictional fault-line”—that generated hostility, conflict, and sharp status hierarchies. These divisions were almost entirely absent in settings where demographic differences cut across occupational lines. Likewise, in his studies of manufacturing workers, Vallas (2003) reported the existence of palpable status hierarchies that combined racial and gender categories, with White male workers in production work holding positions of the greatest prestige, followed by minority men and then White women. Because African American women were “multiply marginal” (Choo & Ferree, 2010), and thus systematically excluded from access to workplace knowledge and informal sociability, they often refused to comply with the norms their coworkers had embraced. The resulting dynamics gave rise to a cycle of exclusion on the basis of race and gender, resistance to such exclusion—and eventually, to resentment among the dominant groups that only reproduced the exclusion of Black women with which the cycle began. Although not explicitly framed in terms of intersectional theory, all of this work provides evidence of the ways in which multiple forms of inequality and social difference combine, generating status hierarchies and boundaries of inclusion and exclusion that have material effects on the work experience that subordinate groups confront.

One of the more important contributions to feminist understandings of the workplace is Joan Acker’s (1990, 2006) analysis of the gendering of organizations. In her early work, Acker argued that extant discourses of organization theory were implicitly male dominated, and predicated on the existence of an abstract, disembodied worker who seems to exist without gender. Yet on closer scrutiny, Acker showed that the presuppositions underlying this notion of the abstract, disembodied worker are heavily gendered: They are premised on an unencumbered freedom from reproductive or domestic obligations that is only ever enjoyed by men. She concluded that the very structure of work organizations has been shaped by a gendered logic that has only rarely (if ever) been made visible (cf. Williams, Muller, & Kilanski, 2012). In her more recent work, Acker (2006) moves beyond her earlier analysis, now recognizing the ways that class and race combine with gender to form particular types of “inequality regimes.” By this concept she refers to “interrelated practices, processes, actions and meanings that result in and maintain class, gender and racial inequalities within particular organizations” (Acker, 2006, p. 443). Acker proposes that inequality regimes exist ubiquitously within organizations, and often the very requirements of work are organized around the effort to ensure that employees internalize and comply with the regime that the organization adopts.

Acker’s work is highly suggestive and relevant to relational conceptions. By using the concept of inequality regimes, she begins to acknowledge the structural configurations that race, class, gender, and sexuality can assume when they combine to shape the way work organizations are governed. Put differently, she offers a structural-political approach toward organizational patterns that has been absent from intersectional analyses. Yet because her thinking operates at a highly abstract level of analysis, the precise patterns that inequality regimes can empirically assume, or the dynamic, relational processes through which specific regimes are formed are unspecified (cf. Burawoy, 1985). Needed are comparative, multisited ethnographies that can compare the types of inequality regimes that tend to emerge under different conditions, much along the lines of work by Ely and Thomas (2001), who elegantly contrast the diversity perspectives, and correlative forms of inclusion and exclusion, that emerge within three unique organizational settings. Equally suggestive is the 2011 study by Meyers, which found two sharply distinct inequality regimes—one that naturalized the privileged position of by White men, and a second that institutionalized an egalitarian ethos along racial and gender lines—at two otherwise similar worker-owned businesses. What is even more central in intersectional work is the insistence on avoiding the assumption, often implied in the categorical approach, that gender and race simply exacerbate class-based divisions but rarely exert autonomous or even primary effects in their own right. This is why Choo and Ferree (2010, p. 136) call for a “systemic approach” to intersectionality, avoiding the assumption that class always already provides the primary driver of social inequality. Instead, they propose a view “that sees everything as interactions, not ‘main effects’” (also see McCall, 2005). Scholars, in fact, must stake out, through empirical work, the complex processes that underlie status hierarchies of various sorts, teasing out the ways in which differences steeped in gender, race, class, and nationality mutually constitute one another over time.

Discussion

The foregoing analysis has examined three distinct theoretical traditions whose advocates have, in varying ways, sought to develop relational conceptions of workplace inequality. The categorical model of “durable inequality” is premised on the emergence of linkages between class-based structures of inequality and external categorical distinctions; when combined, the result unequally positions actors within the claims-making process, in turn inscribing inequalities in job rewards that persist even in the face of economic competition. The literature on symbolic boundaries, derived from Bourdieu and Lamont, draws attention to the boundary work that actors perform under given social conditions. Here, the focus centers on the symbolic representations and subtle processes of valorization and vilification that actors deploy in their effort to shape the social environment to their own advantage. The point is that meanings, symbols, narratives, and discursive practices are neither innocent nor trivial; rather, they actively shape both the structure and the allocation of work. Theories of intersectionality, finally, insist on the simultaneity of race, gender, and class inequalities, which act in mutually constitutive ways that can result in especially potent forms of domination and subordination. Intersectionality scholars provide an important reminder that while boundaries drawn along the lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality may be analytically distinct, they typically commingle, generating status hierarchies and inequality regimes whose configurations (and relative susceptibility to change) remain poorly understood.

Each of these traditions incorporates relational thinking. Each can make a substantial contribution to analysis of social inequality. And each is limited in significant ways that are likely to persist unless theorists and researchers begin to engage in forms of intellectual exchange that more explicitly breach the analytic divisions these genres have established among themselves. In this respect, we follow the thinking of Lamont and Fournier (1992), who note that “boundaries in sociological theory are like boundaries in everyday life: they are arbitrary even if we are reluctant to acknowledge them as such” (p. 4). Thus, if relational models of work organizations and social inequality more generally are to make sufficient gains, arbitrary lines and divisions across distinct schools must increasingly give way to discussions that foster dialogue and debate across analytical genres. ⁷

The importance of this point can be illustrated when we recall the respective strengths and weaknesses of the categorical model and boundary theory. As we have suggested, the categorical approach is discursively deficient: While some scholars in this genre do acknowledge the importance of cultural resources as elements in the claims-making process, they do so only abstractly. Because this genre of research has failed to include meanings and symbolic constructs within its research designs, researchers have been able only indirectly to infer their nature and effects (Reskin, 2003). For its part, boundary theory errs in precisely the opposite direction: It fastens on symbolic constructs, but only rarely anchors them within the organizational and institutional contexts in which symbolic boundaries gain purchase on the distribution of material rewards. The question must then be asked whether, or in what ways, the relative strengths of these two frameworks might be combined.

One strategy begins by relying on the conceptual vocabulary that boundary theory has used to characterize the types of distinctions that dominant groups construct under given circumstances. Lamont’s own research, for instance, draws a sharp distinction between “cultural” and “moral” boundaries, as part of her effort to transcend the narrow coordinates of Bourdieu’s original framework. Her effort in this regard, however, may underestimate the ways in which these types of symbolic boundaries combine. Certainly, in the corporation that Kanter (1977) studied, men invoked a wide array of symbolic representations to exclude women from positions of authority, generating unflattering images (the pet, iron maiden, seductress, etc.) that “naturalized” women’s characteristics in ways that symbolically disqualified them from entry into managerial positions. Vallas (2001, 2006) found that engineers seized on the alleged lack of scientific or theoretical knowledge possessed by manual workers and technicians, raised questions about their work orientations and commitment to the firm, and at times defined them as dirty and uneducated brutes, in spite of the technical knowledge and certified skills that workers had amassed. Discursive constructs such as these operate in a manner that closely mirror Roscigno’s (in press) conception of “symbolic vilification” as well as Hill Collins’s (2000) emphasis on the “controlling images” that have construed African American women as mammies, matriarchs, welfare mothers, and Jezebels. Few of these symbolic constructs can be fitted into Lamont’s typology, it would seem. What all of these tropes have in common is their tendency to fasten on the symbolic vulnerabilities that members of the dominant group sense, framing the characteristics of the out-group’s members in unflattering terms that can be injurious to their collective prospects. Whether such symbolic representations are so egregious as to be actionable (as in Roscigno’s studies), or instead assume more subtle yet still pernicious forms (as in many of the studies cited above), the impact of such symbolic constructions is surely bound up with both the structure of opportunity (the shaping of internal labor markets, exposure to outsourcing and downsizing) and the value placed on workers’ skills. Needed is research that addresses some or all of the following four tasks: (a) captures the discursive constructs that emerge with respect to subordinate groups, (b) identifies the conditions under which such images are most salient, (c) links such images to the formal and informal aspects of the organization, showing how symbolic constructs operate to discredit or disqualify members of the excluded group, and (d) identifies the resources with which excluded workers seek to challenge such distinctions as well.

The categorical model of social inequality has viewed the distribution of job rewards as the outcome of the claims-making capacities of dominant and subordinate groups, and viewed these capacities as partly due to the demographic distinctions that exist between groups at the establishment level. While this view is both theoretically insightful and empirically substantiated, we contend that that the categorical model has only begun to identify the conditions that shape the outcome of the claims-making process. Extending our knowledge here will require that we more fully specify the organizational resources—both material and symbolic—that occupational groups can deploy in the claims-making process as such. One illustrative effort in this direction is the study by Nelson and Bridges (1999), which examined the process of wage determination in four well-documented lawsuits alleging gender discrimination in pay. Although in the view of the courts, the men’s wage advantage stemmed from market forces rooted far outside the boundaries of the firm, Nelson and Bridges find that subtle forces within the firm acted to privilege the men: the occupational groups in which the men were employed had established a stronger sense of unity and cohesion among their own ranks and had formed enduring alliances with the directors of other departments. The result lent greater power, legitimacy, and visibility to the men’s claims of skill and expertise, and enabled them to reproduce the privileged position of their occupational groups. Equally suggestive are the experiments conducted by Castilla and Benard (2010), which found that normative contexts that emphasized the meritocratic nature of a firm’s culture actually generated heightened levels of gender bias in the evaluation of men’s and women’s work. The point here is that putatively “gender-blind” contexts may inadvertently take their revenge on efforts to achieve equality. Needed is more research of this sort, which draws attention to the wider array of social and cultural resources that impinge on the claims-making process, both within the firm and within its immediate environment (Castilla & Benard, 2010; Cohen & Huffman, 2003).

One question that has not received sufficient attention in these genres of research concerns the level of analysis at which empirical research is most usefully posed. Lamont’s comparative research was especially interested in identifying regionally and nationally specific variations in boundary work. More recent studies in the boundary genre, however, have tended to be couched at the micro-social level of analysis (Bettie, 2003; Blair-Loy, 2001; DiBenigno & Kellogg, in press; Vallas, 2006). With some notable exceptions (e.g., McCall, 2001), intersectional studies have also been couched at the micro level. This bias toward case studies has made it difficult to grasp the ways in which variations in organizational conditions can shape the nature of boundary work, or the ways in which larger structural forces might be implicated in the production of social inequality. The question then is how we might seek to unpack the workings of categorical distinctions at a macro level of analysis, in ways that are sensitive to the discursive practices in which particular groups engage and to the connections between these practices and the distribution of job rewards as well.

Some guidance is afforded by Hatton’s (2008, 2011) recent studies of precarious employment, which apply historical methods to the advertising campaigns used by the major temporary help firms in the United States. Previous historical studies on this terrain had fastened on the class-linked effort of the temporary help industry to reshape employment law, and which made it possible for temporary firms to establish the value of their services (see Gonos, 1997). Hatton’s research confirms the validity of this narrative, but adds to the story a number of important themes involving race, gender, and ethnicity. The result provides a richer understanding of the ways in which boundary work can be conducted at the national level.

Until the 1930s, employment agencies in the United States were subject to strict regulations at the state level, reflecting public suspicion about the role played by padrones, agents who profited by trafficking in the labor of immigrant workers. Bias against the padrones drew on deep ethnoracial bias against Italian and Southern European immigrants generally, and led to regulatory approaches that sharply limited the space in which employment agencies might expand. ⁸ It is not surprising, then, that during the post–World War II years the major firms in the temporary help industry engaged in a national advertising campaign that mobilized an entirely new and far more appealing public image: that of the “Kelly Girl” icon. Represented was a young, White, attractive, middle-class woman often wearing a dress, heels, and even white gloves. This iconic figure found its way into prominent advertisements not only in personnel magazines, but also in outlets aimed at the general public (e.g., Newsweek, US News & World Report). Temporary help was being publicly reframed, in other words, as the industry used highly gendered and racialized constructs to neutralize the older, unsavory image of the pardon. Redefining temporary work as a benign and even welcome phenomenon, the industry was able to reshape public opinion, thereby winning support for the passage of new employment laws and regulations that were far more favorable to temporary employment.

Hatton’s research is instructive in several respects. First, it nicely fastens on boundary work performed at the national level, and illustrates the ways in organizational actors can invoke powerful cultural tropes in an effort to reshape the economic terrain to their own advantage. Second, it approaches such boundary work in ways that have bearing on the organizational conduits through which employment opportunity is likely to flow. And third, it underscores the need to address the intersection of multiple axes of inequality. Refashioning the public image of the temporary employment agency required advertising campaigns that simultaneously “did” gender, race, and class on the public stage. This line of analysis shows that relational dynamics occur at many levels, requiring research that attends both to the wider culture and to its inevitably complex, multilayered, and intersectional form.

Perhaps the key issue facing researchers in this field, and that emerges from our comparisons of the three genres, is that of connecting structure and meaning, and organizational conditions with the discursive mechanisms that actors use during the claims-making process. As we have seen, scholars have tended to err in the direction of either structure (the categorical approach) or meaning (as with boundary theory). Closing this gap requires research that can generate data on the discursive practices and cultural constructs shared among managers, professionals, and workers, and combine them with data on the economic, organizational, and institutional conditions that account for variations in their nature. One way of achieving this combination would be to work backward, beginning with statewide data on antidiscrimination cases (such as Roscigno skillfully assembled), appending to these cases data on the organizational and institutional contexts in which the behavior occurred. What are the organization-level or field-level attributes that generate particular types of vilification? How do firms exhibiting such actionable behaviors differ from firms that do not? Key will be research designs that operate across two distinct levels of analysis, connecting the discursive constructs or symbolic representations shared at the level of the work group to contextual data on the conditions found at the level of the establishment and the organizational field.

Similar research designs have been constructed in recent years, though with theoretical goals that have differed from what we suggest. An excellent example is the study by Kalev, Dobbin, and Kelly (2006) that explored the consequences of three different types of diversity strategies for the mobility prospects of women and minorities. Combining retrospective surveys of work establishments with EEOC-1 data, Kalev et al. showed that structurally rooted diversity practices (those that assigned diversity to a specific department or office within an organization) had led to much more pronounced improvements in equal opportunity than did practices that fastened on either social psychological or network processes. Likewise, Kalev (2009) found that team structures seem to disrupt deeply encrusted status hierarchies based on gender and race, opening up greater access to managerial jobs. While these findings are both provocative and important in their own right, it would be helpful to invert the assumptions these authors have made and to examine the ways in which relational demography has shaped the practices that firms adopt in responding to the equal rights movement. Arguably, establishments whose managers are disproportionately dominated by White men will favor inequality regimes that rely heavily on sensitivity training, for example, in effect psychologizing what is in fact an organizational and political process (a phenomenon that Bourdieu, 1984, dubbed “symbolic violence”). The point here is that the diversity practices at firm adopts may well reflect the very problems (racial and gender domination) which they claim to address. By exploring the demographic and organizational conditions that generate particular types of diversity practices, viewing them as themselves a function of categorical processes and boundary struggles, we would in effect be taking steps to develop a political sociology of inequality regimes (Ely & Thomas, 2001; Padavic, Ely, Reid, & Trefault, 2011).

Conclusion

In this article we have scrutinized three distinct species of relational thinking about organizational inequality, exploring the virtues and limitations of each. Many questions remain. Can the epistemological differences that govern each school become the source of useful dialogue and debate? Can the analytically distinct origins of these genres give way to more synthetic models that blend insights that cut across these genres of research? The stakes that surround these questions have if anything grown in recent years, owing to three overarching features of the current economic landscape that seem especially worthy of commentary: the decline of the Fordist firm and the “standard” employment model it supported; the unevenness of occupational desegregation efforts over the last several decades, which have left some occupational domains untouched (or worse); and the retreat from the ideal of equal employment opportunity within the political and corporate arena writ large. Below we briefly comment on these developments and what they portend for the effort to advance relational perspectives toward organizational inequalities.

Although social scientists have written a great deal about the decline of the Fordist model of work and the erosion of permanent, full-time employment (Kalleberg, 2011; Piore & Sabel, 1984; Vallas, 1999, 2012), much of this work has sidestepped the impact of post-Fordism on racial and gender inequality. Yet as many theorists contend, efforts to dismantle the Fordist firm have given way to more precarious, temporary, project-driven models of work that depend on far more fluid and negotiable processes than during the era of Fordist bureaucracy. If so, then many of the structural safeguards that had placed limits on the application of workplace biases may well have lost much of their efficacy. An increased emphasis on team work, for example, may place an increased emphasis on group cohesion, yet it may at precisely the same time open up increased space for the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion along racialized or gendered lines. This is precisely the conclusion reached by Williams et al. (2012; also see McIlwee & Robinson, 1992), whose recent study of geoscientists in industry finds something of a wild-west context in which an individualized employment relation opens the door to the reassertion of gender biases in multiple forms. Arguably, such dynamics of inclusion and exclusion may operate even more powerfully in fields where technical expertise is less codified, and itself depends on acceptance as a member of given occupational groups. More is at stake than the allocation of job rewards in the post-Fordist work organization, however. For it may well be that the evolving structure of the post-Fordist firm can itself be informed by preexisting hierarchies along the lines of gender and race. As firms shed internal layers, engage in major office closings and plant shutdowns, and hive off massive portions of their operations, which jobs are being defined as mission critical and which as expendable? Are hidden biases beginning to inform the “core competency” of the firm, in ways that expose some groups to outsourcing, off-shoring, and downsizing, at higher rates than others? Baron and Pfeffer (1994) raised such questions as these nearly two decades ago (cf. Vallas, 1999), but they have yet to receive systematic attention since then.

A second feature of the current employment landscape that impacts our scholarly agenda is the unevenness that has unfolded with respect to employment desegregation. As Charles and Grusky (2004) and England (2010) have shown, there were undeniable gains toward occupational desegregation by gender in the wake of civil rights legislation, but these gains have been highly uneven across occupational and class sectors. Although middle-class jobs have shown a marked decline in the index of dissimilarity since 1950 (with some slowing of the pace since 1990), working-class jobs have shown almost no change for more than half a century: They remain as gender segregated as they were in 1950. Although there is much debate about the sources of this pattern—England herself adopts a supply-side perspective, stressing the essentializing notions of gender that have been culturally prevalent—the validity of her interpretation remains very much in doubt. In what ways have demand-side conditions at work—those rooted in the workplace itself—excluded women from specific employment domains? What has been the role of various employment intermediaries (counselors, teachers, family members, and social networks)? And have the sagging fortunes of blue-collar men, whose employment stability has suffered the sharpest declines of all demographic groups (Hollister, 2011), generated subtle and not-so-subtle processes of occupational exclusion? Presumably, professional jobs (which are highly credentialed) provide something of a more level playing field for women and minorities (relatively speaking) than do manual working-class jobs. What, then, are the criteria by which blue-collar applicants’ employability is judged? What are the group-level dynamics that impinge on retention? Are queuing processes at work here in ways that have yet to be unpacked?

A final feature of the contemporary context worth noting here involves the decline in support for equal employment opportunity within the legal, political, and corporate arenas (Edelman et al., 2001; Tomaskovic-Devey et al., 2006). Although there have been hopeful signs with respect to corporate policy and judicial rulings with respect to sexual orientation, we believe that the structural basis that once undergirded the civil rights framework has been materially weakened. Indeed, the very emphasis on teamwork that firms have embraced may itself invite pernicious processes that rest on the exclusion of “others” who are not deemed worthy of inclusion. It is unsettling to see firms begin to define prolonged joblessness as itself a mark of inferiority (Rampell, 2011) and to read journalistic accounts that corporate recruitment efforts have increasingly relied on the informal networks of their own employees (Schwartz, 2013). Do such developments enable firms to reproduce the job attachments of the currently employed in an era in which the employment contract has been all but shredded? Can efforts to ban blanket exclusions of unemployed job-seekers succeed, despite the weakening of equal employment opportunity controls more generally?

In a neoliberal era in which the value of individualism has been constantly reaffirmed, and in which structural interventions to achieve equal rights have increasingly come under siege, relational models of inequality, capable of identifying the collective-level dynamics that underlie organizational inequalities, have never been so sorely needed as now. Will our theoretical and conceptual tool kit be equal to the task?