Ethnic Matching of Supervisors to Subordinate Work Groups: Findings on " Bottom-up" Ascription and Social Closure

Research on minority authority attainment tends to stress top-down processes of social closure, whereby the dominant social group produces and preserves positions of power and inuence by excluding out-group members. We argue that this view, while helpful, is incomplete. Returning to Weber’s original conceptualization of social closure, we argue that top-down exclusion often generates pressures for bottom-up ascription, whereby employers match supervisors to the social characteristics, particularly race and ethnicity, of their subordinate work groups. Results from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality strongly support our argument and also reveal that bottom-up ethnic matching reduces perceptions of racial discrimination among subordinates. These results offer a useful corrective to the assumption that elites only reproduce themselves and underscore the importance of group composition for understanding mobility opportunities available to minority workers.