(Photo by iStock/AndreyPopov)
Summer Jackson, a professor of management in the behavioral unit at Harvard Business School, studies the challenges of diversity at work. Since graduate school, Jackson has investigated how and when organizations can establish spaces for individuals to organize and thrive across their differences. While she was embarking on her dissertation, a fast-growing technology firm caught Jackson’s eye, thanks to signals that suggested the company’s openness to outside researchers and commitment to becoming more diverse. Not only had ShopCo (a pseudonym) signed on to President Obama’s Tech Inclusion Pledge, but also it tracked employee demographics over time and showed transparency about the challenges it faced.
With ShopCo’s approval, Jackson embedded herself in the firm to observe recruitment practices as demand for hiring accelerated. How did ShopCo conduct its search for underrepresented engineering talent, a critical part of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mission? Jackson answered this question by observing one particular process: ShopCo’s decision to adopt or reject 13 different recruitment platforms to attract racial minority candidates. In a new paper that disentangles organizational dynamics at ShopCo, Jackson explains why minority recruitment failed: Employees found the platforms repugnant.
Jackson’s research at ShopCo spanned 20 months and included nearly 2,500 observational hours and 150 structured interviews across three phases of data collection that began with receiving her own desk at the firm and an invitation to attend weekly team meetings.
“The goal of organizational ethnography,” Jackson says, “is to understand the systems of meaning that underpin people’s actions in organizations every day: how we dress, how we talk about our work, how we orient our desks, what activities we do. Even how we run our team meetings and offsites can say a lot about what a company values, what its culture is, and how people make sense of how to navigate these spaces.”
Starting with the premise that a company is its own culture, Jackson sought to uncover deeply held values or beliefs among ShopCo managers and employees regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“I began with the people team, or human resources, to understand the current company practices for recruitment,” Jackson says. “Then I spent time with the engineers and hiring managers in the technology department. I tried to understand their experiences with hiring, what they thought made a good candidate, and what challenges they faced in trying to diversify their workforce.”
Rapid growth presented ShopCo with a pressing need to make new hires. The longer vacancies went unfilled, the more the company’s future growth was threatened, and the development of a new product was inhibited. A long hiring cycle would only ensure that ShopCo lost excellent candidates to its competitors. Eager to try new products to speed up recruitment and hiring, ShopCo employees tested out several platforms, including products designed to help companies identify Black, Latino, and Indigenous engineers. Rather than assuming the awkward task of racially identifying people, ShopCo managers would rely on technology to get the job done efficiently.
Jackson expected the platforms, easy-to-use market solutions, to be a slam dunk for ShopCo. Instead, she discovered that employees felt “repugnance” at having to “shop” for diversity. They bristled at the perceived commodification and objectification of Black and brown engineers. The firm’s mostly white managers and employees wanted the platforms to serve as a community broker, not a transactional one that simply checked a box for compliance reasons. In an ecosystem filled with good and bad actors, ShopCo employees felt like bad actors when interacting with the platforms. Rather than the usual decision-making biases that emerge in studies of DEI in corporate contexts, Jackson found that “repugnant market concerns” explained failure at ShopCo.
“Jackson’s meticulously executed and deeply insightful, ethnographic study addresses one of the more puzzling concerns: why, despite all the evidence of well-intended initiatives, DEI still lags behind,” says Aharon Cohen-Mohliver, a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at London Business School. “Her study shows that even well-meaning organizational managers can falter in their DEI efforts due to underlying, complex attitudes toward targeted recruitment platforms designed to attract racial minorities.”
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Find the full study: Summer R. Jackson, “(Not) Paying for Diversity: Repugnant Market Concerns Associated with Transactional Approaches to Diversity Recruitment,” Administrative Science Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 3, 2023.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.