Race , Gender , and Workplace Power

people, and things” (Wolf and Fligstein 1979), is an essential aspect of social stratification (Bendix 1956; Braverman 1974; Dahrendorf 1959). In this study we focus on one dimension of power: authority and control over others in the workplace. Weber ([1914] 1968) conceptualized this dimension of power as a form of “legitimate authority” because it derives from organizational positions that people occupy rather than from the people themselves. We concentrate specifically on how race, ethnicity, and gender affect the likelihood of attaining successively higher levels of such authority. This issue merits attention for several reasons. Despite significant progress in the socioeconomic status of working women and minorities, data analyses at the city, state, national, and cross-national levels continue to document race and gender inequalities in workplace power (see Smith 2002 for a recent review). Moreover, federal reports indicate that discrimination claims pertaining to promotion have risen steadily in recent years, while discrimination claims pertaining to hiring have declined (Myerson 1997). These patterns suggest that workplace power constitutes a central battleground in struggles for equalizing opportunities in coming years—a possibility fueled by rising expectations of unprecedented numbers of women and minorities now employed in the formal economy. Another reason for investigating racial and gender inequalities in workplace power is that despite the popularity of the “glass ceiling” metaphor, surprisingly little, direct research exists on related assumptions. For example, numerous quantitative studies document ascriptive inequalities in workplace power, but few examine whether these inequalities increase at higher levels of power, and none adequately account for factors that ethnographic research contends are important, namely, the ascriptive contexts in which positions of power are embedded and the networks that supposedly play key roles in the allocation of these positions to particular individuals. Conversely, ethnographic research is insightful, but it only comes from a few, select case studies (e.g., Kanter 1977). Race, Gender, and Workplace Power