Legal-Political Pressures and African American Access to Managerial Jobs

Abstract

Prior work on equal employment opportunity tends to focus on a limited set of factors that influence change in organizational structures and policies. This article considers a broader set of potentially influential legal and political coercive pressures—namely, discrimination lawsuits, federal court dynamics, and state political ideology—and analyzes their implications for concrete changes in organizational behavior. Using national establishment-level data on the supermarket industry from 1983 to 1998, I estimate African American managerial representation using a series of auto-distributed lag (ADL) models with fixed-effects. The results show that in the year following a lawsuit filing against a particular supermarket establishment, African Americans are more likely to enter management. Furthermore, over the long run, coercive isomorphism (whereby establishments subject to a lawsuit come to adopt industry averages for African American managerial representation) seems to prevail. Finally, legal pressures associated with federal court judges' gender and racial/ethnic diversity and state-level government ideology are also influential. I conclude by discussing these results and the importance of systematically incorporating political process into sociological theorizing and analyses of workplace diversity.