BRINGING CLIENTS BACK IN:

Using qualitative data from a cohort sample of 76 current or former Wall Street professionals, I argue that the perception that clients prefer homophily with their service providers shapes Wall Street careers and contributes to gender inequality. I also reveal how some women on Wall Street partially insulate themselves from biases against them by deliberately avoiding positions that are most dependent on client relationships. I hypothesize that the strength of client preferences for homophily in service providers in the Wall Street context is related to the high status of this service profession and its clients.     

Truncation Strategies in Matching Markets—in Search of Advice for Participants

We consider the strategic options facing workers in labor markets with centralized market clearing mechanisms such as those in the entry level labor markets of a number of professions. If workers do not have detailed information about the preferences of other workers and firms, the scope of potentially profitable strategic behavior is considerably reduced, although not entirely eliminated. Specifically, we demonstrate that stating preferences that reverse the true preference order of two acceptable firms is not beneficial in a low information environment, but submitting a truncation of the true preferences may be. This gives some insight into the successful operation of these market mechanisms.     

Towards a Theory of Competitive Progression: Evidence from High‐Tech Manufacturing

This study replicates and extends Ferdows and De Meyers' observed ‘sand cone’ model of cumulative competitive capabilities by means of Roth's related competitive progression theory (CPT). Using path analysis, we model and test the relationships among the generic competitive capability constructs of conformance quality, delivery reliability, volume flexibility, and low cost as predicted by CPT. Our results, drawn from a sample of high‐tech manufacturers, provide further evidence that on average, these four capabilities are acquired both cumulatively and in that sequence. We also find that each generic capability increases operational know‐how and reduces non‐value‐added directly and/or indirectly through the enhancement of successive capabilities in the progression, which in turn improves profitability. The paper contributes a theoretical rationale for the observed sand cone effect, describes how the competitive progression acts to influence accelerated organizational learning over an innovation cycle, and offers evidence that combinative capabilities have strategic value for high‐tech manufacturers.     

Reducing bias through indirect social contact: assessing the impact of student involvement with faculty-led research on unauthorized immigration

This paper explores how working on a faculty-led research project influenced the views of Master of Social Work students concerning unauthorized immigrants. Five graduate assistants worked for one year with two faculty members and one doctoral student to code data from interviews with social workers at immigrant-serving organizations in South Carolina. The master’s students then reflected on what they learned from participating in data analysis tasks, indicating that the experience had further sensitized them to the social justice concerns confronting unauthorized immigrants. Drawing on social contact theory, we argue that student participation in faculty-led research can provide a form of indirect social exposure to other groups, which reduce bias, and suggest that such experiences be included in how educators conceptualize the implicit curriculum in schools of social work.     

The Influence of Service Orientation on B2B e‐Service Capabilities: An Empirical Investigation

E‐Services, or the company's portfolio of service offerings available to its customers through the Internet, are an emerging area of interest to operations management. Yet little is known about the operations and capabilities needed for provision of business‐to‐business (B2B) e‐services. This paper aims to make a contribution toward closing this gap. First, we develop a new construct of B2B e‐service capability, a term that captures a generic set of five interrelated and complementary dimensions: (1) e‐service recovery, (2) e‐customization, (3) ease of navigation, (4) service portfolio comprehensiveness, and (5) information richness. These combined operational abilities are associated with B2B service delivery, including its portal design, technology architecture, and mix of product and service offerings. They are posited to be necessary for delivering effective B2B e‐services. We also argue that, both service orientation (SO) and customer receptivity to technology, influence B2B e‐service capability. We empirically test a path model using structural equation modeling on a sample of 181 businesses that have deployed B2B e‐services. We find that the influence of SO on performance is not direct but rather mediated by the e‐service capability, a finding that holds for both goods producers and service providers. We suggest that a firm's SO may mitigate industrial customers' resistance toward conducting business online.     

Intersectionality and coalitions in social movement research—A survey and outlook

Over the last 30 years, intersectionality has become a prominent concept, but in social movement scholarship, its adoption has yet been limited. So far, the concept is primarily employed to analyze the mobilization of women of color and other gendered mobilizations. In this article, I argue that intersectionality matters for all social movements—both as an analytic and as a political strategy. It is important to understand that all social movements and movement organizations are shaped by multiple axes of privilege and discrimination, which influence who participates in these movements and how, what demands are pursued and which are neglected, and how the issues of the movements and movement organizations are framed. My review starts out with defining and distinguishing between structural intersectionality and political intersectionality. Then, I survey a range of social movements from an intersectional perspective. This is followed by a discussion of coalitions and other strategies to achieve political intersectionality. The article concludes with an outlook on future directions for intersectional analyses in social movement scholarship.     

The Vernacular Landscape of Assisted Living

This article is an exploration into the vernacular landscape of Assisted Living (AL), a conceptual idea borrowed from cultural geographer J.B. Jackson, which distinguishes formalized, planned space from those spaces which are unintended and often created spontaneously--vernacular. Based upon three large-scale, multi-year ethnographic studies in Maryland, we consider some of the ways people who live in AL relate to and respond to the built environment, at times subverting the intended purpose of design to make it their own. The conflict that often ensues over both planned and vernacular public and private space, we propose is ultimately the product of living within an environment that is both someone's home as well as a place of business, whose job it is to keep people safe. Within this physical context of vernacular private and public spaces, this article enriches understandings about the way autonomy and privacy expresses itself.     

Because I'm Worth It? Understanding Inequality in a Performance‐Based Pay System*

How do workers understand pay inequality? Every organizational field has a taken‐for‐granted compensation system that shapes understandings of rewards. Using data from 76 Wall Street professionals, I analyze how individuals interpret, understand, and justify inequality in a performance‐based reward system where pay is supposed to be based on merit. A majority of securities workers believed that the performance‐based pay system produced equitable rewards. But a substantial minority challenged the procedural and/or distributive justice of this pay system, producing counterinstitutional accounts. These accounts took three general forms: accounts of arbitrariness, accounts of misinformation, and accounts of discrimination. All of these counterinstitutional accounts pointed to nonmerit influences on bonuses. I argue that these challenges might undermine the legitimacy of the pay system, but most men and women who challenged the system exited their firms or the industry, so that their challenges did little to destabilize Wall Street's pay practices. Wall Street appears to maintain its legitimacy in part through the self‐selection of dissenters out of the system.     

Youth,slang, and pragmatic expressions: Examples from Brazilian Portuguese1

This article draws on an ethnographic study of the stigmatized speech style of poor black male youth in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. These youth are said to speak gíria (‘slang’), and their speech is often described as incomprehensible to the Brazilian middle class. Speakers and listeners point to a wide range of pragmatic expressions as some of the most salient linguistic features associated with this speech style. This article presents examples from Brazilian Portuguese slang, in which youth draw on sound words, obscenities, address forms, and addressee‐oriented tags to create new pragmatic markers and forms of indefinite reference. It is argued that these pragmatic expressions offer multiple opportunities for speakers to convey stance, novelty, and style, social goals long associated with slang. This data suggests that we broaden the purview of slang beyond the lexicon to investigate the ways in which speakers actively innovate within the area of pragmatics.