What Makes People Targets: A Multi-Actor Study of How Ethnic Discrimination is Perceived, Tackled and Avoided

Introduction

Despite progressive anti-discrimination legislation and the popularity of diversity policies touted as the key to a culturally diverse workplace, discrimination of ethnic minorities in the labor market is remarkably persistent and pervasive.

Theoretical Framework

TARGETS integrates literature from sociology, social psychology, organization, and sociolegal studies into a novel multi-actor and dynamic theoretical framework to examine what makes people targets of ethnic discrimination.

Key Contributions

Both conceptually and empirically, the key contribution of our approach is that we define and operationalize discrimination claims as, inherently, relational. We test the core proposition that relational claims-making is the key mechanism through which discrimination is perceived, legitimated, or contested by multiple actors.

Levels of Analysis

We develop and test this theory at two levels of analysis:

1. Macro Level:

   • We map how structures and practices, such as anti-discrimination laws and diversity management policies, can confer or deny legitimacy to discrimination claims, in the workplace and courtroom.
   • These structures may create an 'illusion of fairness' that reproduces durable inequalities in the distribution of organizational resources, such as access to jobs and career opportunities.

2. Micro Level:

   • We zoom in on the micro-foundations of the claims-making process, focusing on its relational and dynamic nature, respectively.
   • First, using an innovative research design, we pioneer the use of linked, multi-actor factorial survey experiments to capture the discrimination attributions made by multiple actors (targets, perpetrators, allies, and bystanders), simultaneously.
   • Second, we collect real-time longitudinal data on the job search strategies that ethnic minorities adopt to avoid becoming targets.

Dynamic Approach

Our dynamic approach improves on existing accounts that all too often treat them as passive labor market agents and contributes to theory development on how supply-side behavior can counteract labor market inequalities.