Page 155 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

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BRIEF, BUTZ, DEITCH
OUTSIDE THE BOX
We were very pleased, and also a bit embarrassed, to have discovered an
impressive body of literature in sociology concerned with the factors af­
fecting sex and race compositions of organizations (e.g., Reskin, McBrier,
& Kmec, 1999). The pleasure stemmed from our interest in understanding
how racial prejudice plays out in organizational settings (e.g., Brief, Dietz,
Cohen, Pugh, & Vaslow, 2000). As will be demonstrated, the discovered
sociological literature taught us that we had been approaching the prob­
lem of racial discrimination in organizations too narrowly and that a fuller
explanation of the problem (and consideration of its tentative solutions)
requires one to look outside and inside organizations. Discipline-wise, this
necessitates building bridges between organizational sociology and orga­
nizational psychology that likely and naturally will be constructed from
ideas evident in social psychology. These bridges, however, are more the
subject matter of the next section of this chapter than this one.
The embarrassment associated with our sociological discovery is a func­
tion of timing; as serious students of employment discrimination, we
should have found the body of work considerably earlier than we did.
It clearly would have enriched our research. Although we were aware of
an occasional sociological study on the race and sex compositions of orga­
nizations, not until we read Reskin et al. (1999), who pulled much of the
available research together, did we recognize that sociology had so much
to offer in regard to what we had been studying psychologically for several
years. The only explanation (not justification) for our oversight stems from
our "micro" organizational behavior view of the world. Like most organi­
zational psychologists, we look to people and organizations to understand
whatever phenomenon intrigues us. Here, we intend to show that it is time
to step out of that box and embrace organizational sociology as an essential
source of knowledge for understanding what goes on in organizations. As
it is clearly time to abandon a micro-macro distinction, we now turn to the
organizational sociology literature to attempt to aid other organizational
psychologists concerned with employment discrimination discover what
is outside the box.
According to Reskin et al. (1999), the literature on workplace sex and race
composition emerged following Baron and Bielby's (1980) appeal to those
studying stratification and inequality in labor markets to "bring the firm
back in" (p. 760). Reskin et al. (1999) also observed that this growing body of
scholarship had been guided by Baron and Bielby's own empirical research
(e.g., Baron & Bielby, 1985) and by ideas evident in the organizational
demography literature (e.g., Pfeffer, 1983) and in Blau (1977) and Kanter
(1977).