Despite the fact that diversity management is now a recognized field of scholarly research and professional practice, there is surprisingly little consensus as to how to design diversity practices that work. Recent research demonstrates that programs that establish oversight for diversity (e.g., diversity councils, diversity staff, targeted recruitment programs) tend to produce the greatest inroads for women and minorities in management. However, how diversity practices actually work to challenge or reinforce existing social inequalities in firms remains less clear. In this article, I provide an inside look into diversity recruitment – a type of diversity practice generally considered to be effective in reducing organizational inequalities – in elite professional service firms. Drawing upon interview and ethnographic evidence from recruitment and hiring in elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms, I analyze what diversity recruitment looks like in these firms on-the-ground. I find that although elite professional service firms tend to have the ingredients for success on paper, they face significant obstacles in increasing the representation of racial minorities among new hires in practice. I argue that: (1) the presence of structural and status divides between those responsible for overseeing diversity recruitment and those who have the power and authority to make hiring decisions, and (2) widespread cultural beliefs among decision-makers that diversity is not a valid criterion of evaluation, stymie firms’ efforts to diversify. My findings highlight how in order to be successful in translating diversity programs into actual results, those charged with overseeing diversity programs need not only formal organizational authority but also sufficient power and informal status to wield influence in decision-making.

Approaching the public representation of a “difficult past” as a macro-level impression management dilemma, this article addresses how states manage reputation-damaging elements of their histories on global stages. Through an empirical case study, I examine how the Croatian government has represented the country to international audiences via tourism after the wars of Yugoslav secession. Challenging assumptions that contentious historical moments will be commemorated, I find that the state has managed Croatia’s “difficult” recent past through covering and cultural reframing rather than public acknowledgement. The country has omitted the war from representations of national history and repositioned Croatia as identical in history and culture to its Western European neighbors. I draw from Goffman’s work on stigma to explain the Croatian case and to develop a broader theoretical framework for understanding the conditions under which public recognition of reputation-damaging events is likely not to occur. I conclude by discussing theoretical implications for scholarship on collective memory, cultural sociology, and world polity theory.

Although social status plays a crucial role in the generation and maintenance of social inequalities, how status processes operate in naturalistic social contexts remains less clear. In the following article, I provide a case study of doormen – individuals who simultaneously represent status experts and status judges – at a highly exclusive nightclub to investigate how people draw status distinctions in micro-social settings. Using interview and ethnographic data, I analyze on what bases doormen evaluate the relative worth of patrons and confer the status prize of admission. I find that in making such decisions, doormen drew from a constellation of competence and esteem cues, which were informed by contextually specific status schemas about the relative material, moral, and symbolic worth of particular client groups. Moreover, the ways in which doormen used these cues and schema depended on the identity of the specific patron being evaluated. As such, I argue that processes of interpersonal evaluation and status conferral are contextually specific, culturally embedded, and interpersonally variable. Despite such variations, a patron’s perceived social connections seemed to outweigh other types of cues in admissions decisions. I conclude by discussing these findings in light of both status characteristics theory and Bourdieu’s work on the transubstantiation of capital to suggest that social capital is a powerful status cue that can, under certain conditions, be a more potent source of social distinction and status advantage, or hold a greater conversion value, in systems of stratification than other types of qualities.

Although a robust literature in sociology and economics has demonstrated a positive relationship between education and socio-economic attainment, the processes through which formal schooling yields enhanced economic rewards remains less clear. Employers play a crucial role in explaining the economic and social returns to formal schooling. Yet, little is known about how employers, particularly elite employers, use and interpret educational credentials in real-life hiring decisions. In the following article, I analyze how hiring agents in top-tier professional service firms use education to recruit, assess, and select new hires. I find that educational credentials were the most common criteria employers used to solicit and screen resumes. However, it was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige. Employers privileged candidates who possessed a super-elite (e.g., top 5) university affiliation and attributed superior cognitive, cultural, and moral qualities to candidates who had been admitted to such an institution, regardless of their actual performance once there. However, attendance at a super-elite university was insufficient for success in resume screens. Importing the logic of elite university admissions, firms performed a secondary resume screen on the status and intensity of candidates’ extracurricular accomplishments and leisure pursuits. I discuss these findings in terms of the changing nature of credentialism and stratification in higher education to suggest that participation in formalized extracurricular activities has become a new credential of moral character that has monetary conversion value in labor markets.

Homophily – the increased likelihood of association with similar others – plays a crucial role in shaping interpersonal interaction and stratification. To date, research has downplayed the cultural dimensions of homophily, both in its strong focus on demographic characteristics as sources of attraction and its lack of attention to processes of meaning-making. This article seeks to bring the cultural aspects of homophily to the fore. Through a case study of hiring in elite professional service firms, I analyze the role that cultural similarities play in producing or inhibiting interpersonal attraction in hiring. Drawing from 120 interviews with employers and participant observation of a hiring committee, I analyze the micro-level processes through which similarities in leisure pursuits, backgrounds, and styles of self-presentation between employers and job candidates can produce homophily in hiring; the meanings employers attribute to the presence or absence of particular similarities; and how employers deploy these meanings in real-life candidate evaluation to reproduce or challenge existing social inequalities.

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In the following paper, I present labor market stratification as an emotional process fundamentally rooted in micro-social interaction. Drawing from Randall Collins’ theory of interaction ritual (2004), I provide a case study of hiring in elite professional service firms to analyze how evaluators’ “gut” feelings and emotional responses to candidates affect hiring outcomes and inequalities. This analysis represents the first empirical application of Collins’ intriguing but heretofore untested theoretical propositions about the role of emotion in social stratification. After demonstrating how feelings of excitement and emotional energy (Collins 1990) generated in interaction serve as crucial mechanisms of candidate evaluation, I then extend Collins’ work by proposing a theoretical model of emotional energy development in job interviews. Specifically, I highlight the mechanisms and characteristics that tend to produce, sustain, and inhibit feelings of emotional energy in interaction as well as parse out the various phases of interaction at which energy gains and losses are most consequential for influencing hiring outcomes and inequalities. I conclude by discussing the implications of my findings for both
interaction ritual theory as well as recent work in cultural sociology, economic sociology, and social stratification.