Tainting or Telling: How the Meaning of Social Ties Varies by Context

While previous research has analyzed how the presence or absence of social ties shapes labor market outcomes and inequalities, less is known about how employers interpret the value of ties in personnel decisions and how these meanings may vary by context. We examine these issues in the context of a high-stakes moment of stratification in academic careers: faculty tenure decisions. Drawing from archival analysis of more than ten years of external tenure evaluations across four disciplines at four R1 universities, we analyze how evaluators describe their relationships with candidates and the meanings they attribute to various types of ties when evaluating a tenure case. We find distinct cross-disciplinary patterns, which were strongest in sociology and computer science. Sociologists view ties to candidates as tainting, corrupting the integrity of the evaluation process by including potentially biasing information unrelated to the quality of a person’s scholarship. Conversely, in computer science, ties were seen as telling, providing useful information about a candidate’s intellectual, social, and moral qualities that were seen as integral to evaluating the strength of a tenure case. Regardless of the actual strength of the tie, sociologists frequently engaged in a strategy of social distancing, in which they asserted their own impartiality by downplaying their existing connections to a candidate, while computer scientists emphasized the closeness of their social ties with candidates as valuable affective and informational resources to be embraced in review. Interviews with faculty in both disciplines shed light on processes underlying these patterns. Overall, the study reveals that the use and value of social ties in personnel decisions are not universal but rather vary according to cultural norms embedded within different institutional contexts and the structure of work in particular settings.