Background Readings on Organizational Wokeness

Last year, Charles Lehman and I wrote pieces for the Autumn 2021 issue of City Journal (Charles’s essay, my essay) giving organizational explanations for the rise of woke capital. Here is a list of articles that Charles and I put together of scholarly works, mostly in sociology, that inspired our essays.

Background on Neo-Institutionalism

• Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony (Meyer and Rowan 1977)

• The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields (DiMaggio and Powell 1983)

EEO, Affirmative Action, and DEI

• The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions (Dobbin and Sutton 1998)

• Inventing Race (Skrentny 2002)

• Diversity Rhetoric and the Managerialization of Law (Edelman, Fuller, and Mara-Drita 2001)

• A Retrospective View of Corporate Diversity Training From 1964 to the Present (Anand and Winters 2008)

• Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies (Kalev, Dobbin, and Kelly 2006)

• Mixed Signals: The Unintended Effects of Diversity Initiatives (Dover et al. 2020)

• Have We Moved Beyond the Civil Rights Revolution? (Skrentny 2014)

• Legal environments and organizational governance: The expansion of due process in the American workplace (Edelman 1990)

• Legal Ambiguity and the Politics of Compliance: Affirmative Action Officers’ Dilemma (Edelman et al. 1991)

The Social Construction of Race 

• Race Categorization and the Regulation of Business and Science (Lee and Skrentny 2010)

• Making Hispanics (Mora 2014)

• Inventing Race (Skrentny 2002)

Firm Responses to Activism 

• The Nixon-in-China Effect: Activism, Imitation, and the Institutionalization of Contentious Practices (Briscoe and Safford 2008)

• A Political Mediation Model of Corporate Response to Social Movement Activism (King 2008)

• The Politics of Alignment and the ‘Quiet Transgender Revolution’ in Fortune 500 Corporations, 2008 to 2017 (Ghosh 2021)

Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Control

• Social Responsibility Messages and Worker Wage Requirements: Field Experimental Evidence from Online Labor Marketplaces (Burbano 2016)

• Corporate Social Responsibility as an Employee Governance Tool: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment (Flammer and Luo 2017)

K-12 Education

• Contentious Curricula (Binder 2009)

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