Organization and social inequality

HSS205 Lecture on Oct 15 and Oct 22

Using example such as gender, race, and class to reflect the broader society

Social inequality: - different organizational culture emerging out of social interaction, link organization to broader society, reinforces different level of social inequality.

Here we only use Gender inequality in organization as example to elaborate, and discuss the two researcher’s work.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter “Man and women in corporate world”

She argued that number of proposition makes difference of interaction. The issue of social power within minority statue is not exactly in number and not necessarily links with number; however, the number itself is an important factor that does make difference.

She examined one of Industrial Corporation, where there were less 10% female employees, a typical male dominate company. Female employee’s life is very much influenced by the proposition of corporation. Women there were taken as “Token”

Women token have to deal with many issues of male employees do have to deal with. It is stressful, therefore resulting high turnover rate.

Kanter developed “Typology”, where she defines as following:

	Social category A	Social category B
Uniform	100%	0
skewed	Up to 85% dominants	Up to 15% tokens
tilted	Up to 65% majority	Up to 35% minority
Balanced	50%	50%

Tokenism,
1. Visibility, i.e. get attention,
2. Contrast, polarization and exaggeration of differences
3. Assimilation involves use stereotypes about a personal social type.

The performance pressure:

Typically performed their job under public and symbolic conditions, which is different from the rest

1.Publicity,
• upper level women become public creatures, under constant scrutiny
• restricted freedom of action
• play by different set of rules, to maintain the split between public and private self.

2.Symbolic consequences
• women were visible as category members
• their acts had extra symbolic consequences
• representing whole category, not themselves.
• Double standard in measuring performance

3.Tokenism eclipse, not difficult to have presence noticed, but difficult to have performance noticed, comparing to dominants

4.Fear of retaliation
• Important not to make the dominants look bad
• Need to toe fine line but just doing just well enough not too well
• Getting along well with peer group
• Good performer must play down, non aggressive

Tokenism imposes the direct pressure to tokens, while social class impact is not so direct.

Boundary heightening- difference between tokens and dominants be exaggerated:

1.exaggeration of dominant’s culture, tokens serve to underline rather than undermine majority culture, (conforming), when group becomes large, it becomes enough to influence majority culture.
2.reminders of difference: interruptions in the flow of group activities, highlighting the difference
3.informal isolation: when dominants have secrets they are not willing to share; move location of some activities to more private setting
4.loyalty test, whether or not tokens will use knowledge of dominant against them?

Role encapsulation

when tokens have no choice but accepting dominants’ culture. The characteristics of token are:
• represent the social group they are belonging to, not themselves
• always fighting stereotype of what tokens must be like
• any ambiguity reduced to a stereotype
• familiar roles and assumptions can keep token in a bounded place and out of mainstream interaction.

Three different ways of role encapsulation

1.Status levelling: misperceived roles, for example, female professionals are taken as receptionist; mistaken identity, assuming lower social status, or relationship affiliated to men
2.women’s slot: special positions for tokens, females minister is liking to assign to MOE, MOH or MHF etc.
3.Stereotyped informed roles, mothers, seductress, pet, iron maiden
Tokens’ response to rule encapsulation, is easier to accept a stereotype than to fight it, thus reinforce the stereotyping.

Kanter argued, tokenism is a self-perpetuating system, unless external pressure for change to break cycles created by the social composition of group; more token in group will transform token into minority.

Taylor Cox Jr. “Managing Diversity”

Diversity is variation of social and cultural identities among people existing together in a defined employment or market setting. It is double edged sword, may increase productivity, efficiency or impose great challenge to company.

In the global era, the challenge of company facing:

More jobs to chase after a few skilful people and increasing diversity of people with skills to do the job, not to care about other social characteristics, that leads the diversified workforce.

Social and cultural identity:- refers to the person affiliation with certain groups, which have significant influence on people’s major life experiences.

Market and employment system:- includes wide variety of groups, and wide geographical scope.

Facing opportunity and challenge, there is the need of managing diversity, to understand the effects of diversity and implement behaviour, work practice and policies that response to the problem in effective ways.

Problems and challenge of diversity in organization:-

1.diversity as potential performance barrier,
•lack of effective communication leads to increased conflicts
•low level of social attraction, social cohesion, low level of social commitment
•high cost from identify harassment and discrimination behaviour, social and legal cost
2.diversity as value added activities, proper training, can increase creativity and innovation, if organization has dealt with work tension caused by diversity , the diversity group can increase its performance by 10% comparing homogeneous group


Then why past effects have failed?

1.Misdiagnosis problem, the problem is not that there are few people of certain social cultural identity group; or people are less sensitive. The root cause of failure is organization culture works against diversity in work force. The organization culture is so unhealthy that tokens are leaving.

2.Wrong approach, problem diagnosis is limited to “insufficient number” of tokens, therefore the solutions are often sought by changing composition via recruitment. But bring more minority groups is not enough, due to interdependence of system, changing in one element requires adjustment in all other elements in the system to function effectively; further more, change culture, is necessary, otherwise, will result sub-optimization or outright failure.

3.Misunderstanding of learning curve- how fast do the development of organization and its members adjust the changing environment? There were a lot of wishful thinking, management or leaders often assume that learning curve is steep, i.e. fast learner, while in reality, it is fat, i.e. slow learner. That results dysfunctional behaviour on the part of leaders.

(note: social inequality can be seen in other ways, like racial, class and religious. The studies we discuss here is very specifically address to corporation world, In Kanter's case, tokenism addressing the extreme small group of minority, which is not so common as social develops. However, the other form social inequalities, like racism has long term historical, socially constructed and institutionalized. Till today, the efforts and realities are still shocking)