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Achieving Holism: Narrating Multiple Identities in the Moment and Over Time
No full textPeople’s multiple identities often wax, wane, and are transformed over their lifetimes, both as sources of personal meaning and as realities communicated to others. Yet, despite a research turn toward studying identities as multiple and dynamic, largely still missing is a cohesive view of people’s efforts to narratively integrate the sum of their many evolving parts. In this paper, we take a narrative perspective on the notion of identity holism to theorize how people build a meaningful whole by making narrative claims involving “4Cs”—credibility, coherence, continuity, and causality. Cutting across these claims are more abstract themes, or leitmotifs, of identity coalescence and coevolution, which are internally experienced as static and dynamic holism, respectively. We discuss how holism, and particularly dynamic holism, fosters personal authenticity, wisdom, adaptiveness, and resilience; the broader contributions of our theorizing to the literatures on identity and narrative; and implications for management and future research
Behind the Curtain of Workforce Diversity: Evidence from EEO-1 Reports
Full text linkWe leverage the 2023 court-ordered FOIA release of standardized Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO-1) reports to examine the workforce diversity of federal contractors. Using the released data for a sample of over 19,000 publicly traded and private firms, we provide descriptive evidence on the variation in gender and racial diversity of these companies’ workforce. We also document the existence of a racial gap between managers and lower-level employees. A substantial portion of that gap cannot be explained by industry or geographic factors, reflecting the influence of firm-level characteristics. Then, focusing on a sample of over 800 publicly traded federal contractors, we find robust evidence that the racial managerial gap is associated with firms’ decision to withhold the voluntary disclosure of their EEO-1 forms. While our findings are subject to several caveats, we provide important evidence on workforce diversity and highlight the importance of using granular, firm-level data to study diversity topics
Inequality in startup hiring
No full textStartups are increasingly central to job creation, innovation, and economic mobility, yet research on hiring inequality focuses predominantly on established firms and founders, overlooking the non-founder workforce. We develop a comprehensive framework for understanding how startup hiring practices affect labor market inequality. We propose that startups differ from mature firms in ways that make their hiring dynamics uniquely consequential for inclusion and exclusion. Integrating demand-side perspectives, we advance a four-part analytical framework organized around why, when, how, and who startups hire. We discuss how hiring motivations, timing, and methods interact to determine workforce composition, producing recursive effects that affect long-term diversity trajectories. Finally, we outline a research agenda highlighting the temporal, organizational, and contextual contingencies of startup hiring. By shifting attention from founders to employees and from supply-side to demand-side processes, this framework reconceptualizes startups as pivotal institutions in the reproduction and potential mitigation of inequality. It reveals how the architecture of opportunity in emerging ventures impacts the broader distribution of work and wealth
Career Transition and Professional Identity: Dynamic Processes, Multiple Selves, and Nonlinear Trajectories
No full textThe evolving landscape of contemporary careers is marked by frequent nonlinear transitions and their concomitant identity dynamics. In this review we define career transition as a movement from one institutionally recognized work role sequence into a role that forms part of a different role sequence and that is perceived as career discontinuity by the person making the transition. We review the current state of research on career transition and professional identity to uncover overarching themes and important lacunae in our understanding of the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of change in today's varied and often circuitous careers, recommend directions for future research, and elaborate on practical implications for people and organizations
How to Implement Bottom-Up Organizing: Lessons from Agile Piloting and Scaling
Full text linkNovel bottom-up forms of organizing, such as agile, have become increasingly prevalent in companies. While such organizing forms emphasize bottom-up employee involvement, they also require commitment from top-level executives. However, knowledge about how companies can move from piloting to scaling agile and top-level executives’ role in managing this transition is currently limited. This article’s analysis of six leading organizations unveils the tensions that top executives need to anticipate and address in each phase of the implementation process to support and progress bottom-up organizing. It also suggests selective interventions that top executives can make to keep the agile implementation process on track
Institutions, history, antagonisms, and development: the contributions of Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson
Full text linkThe 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, “for studies on how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” This article reviews the laureates’ work, emphasizing how their big picture approach to long-run development and their broad analytical perspective blending history, economic theory based on class antagonisms, case studies, and an effort to move beyond correlations towards identifying causal effects have enriched and transformed the approach of shedding light on the old inquiry on the deep drivers of prosperity. I then discuss the vast subsequent research on the impact and origins of institutions and historical development, which has brought novel insights about the deep drivers of prosperity, testing old influential conjectures and expanding the set of questions. With authoritarianism on the rise and constitutional checks and balances challenged, the lessons from history and the new insights of this research agenda appear more topical than ever
What's in It for Me? Beliefs About Relative Costs to Well-Being Explain Why People Deprioritize Moral Improvements.
Full text linkMost people are interested in improving themselves, but they show less interest in improving on moral traits. Why don't people particularly want to be more moral, and why do people prioritize improving certain traits more than others? Across four preregistered studies of U.K.-based CloudResearch ( = 252; = 110) and Behavioral Research Lab ( = 303, = 301) participants, we test four classes of explanations. Results rule out explanations based on the ideas that moral traits are seen as more difficult to change and as either more or less causally central. Instead, people are less interested in moral improvements because they believe (a) that they are already highly moral and (b) that nonmoral improvements would more effectively improve their happiness and goal attainment. These results clarify the perceived tradeoffs between well-being and morality and show that personal well-being is a central motivation for personality change
Increasing Black Employees’ Social Identity Affirmation and Organizational Involvement: Reducing Social Uncertainty through Organizational and Individual Strategies
Full text linkDespite the psychological benefits of authenticity, Black employees within predominantly White organizations often face the dilemma of whether to downplay versus highlight their social identity. Our research introduces social uncertainty as a unifying lens to understand the reluctance of these employees to express their social identity. Highlighting the central role of social uncertainty also helps identify novel factors at both the organizational level (authenticity climates) and individual level (perspective-taking) that can encourage Black employees to engage in social identity affirmation—authentic expressions of the positive aspects of their social identity. To test our hypotheses, we conducted two survey studies, two experiments, qualitative interviews, as well as coded text responses to our experimental prompts. Across our studies, authenticity climates were associated with greater social identity affirmation by Black employees, and this relationship was strengthened when these employees engaged in perspective-taking. Consistent with our theorizing, social certainty mediated these direct and moderated effects. In addition, social identity affirmation increased Black employees’ organizational involvement. Our experimental studies offer causal evidence for the roles of both authenticity climates and Black employees’ perspective-taking, our qualitative interviews vividly illuminate our hypotheses, and our text response analyses provide insight into how authenticity climates operate. Overall, the current research highlights how organizations can help Black employees feel comfortable emphasizing and expressing their true selves by increasing their social certainty. These findings also have direct implications for organizational leaders, providing them with actionable strategies to create more inclusive environments
On the Limits of Chronological Age
Full text linkAnalysis of population aging is typically framed in terms of chronological age. However, chronological age itself is not necessarily deeply informative about the aging process. This article reviews literature and conducts empirical analyses aimed at investigating whether chronological age is a reliable proxy for physiological functioning when used in models of economic behavior and outcomes. We show that chronological age is an unreliable proxy for physiological functioning due to appreciable differences in how aging unfolds across people, health domains, and over time. We further demonstrate that chronological age either fails to predict economic variables when used in lieu of physiological functioning or predicts additional effects on economic behavior and outcomes that are largely unrelated to physiological aging. Continued reliance on chronological age as a proxy for physiological functioning might impede the ability of societies to fully harness the benefits of increasing longevity
The macroeconomic impact of chronic disease in the United Kingdom
Full text linkThis paper examines the macroeconomic impact of chronic disease in the United Kingdom (UK). We use individual-level data to estimate how diagnoses of six major diseases affect labor market transitions and combine these with a tractable growth model with age-specific productivity and labor force participation to quantify the impact of chronic disease on UK economic growth. Using a novel machine learning approach to classify National Health Service (NHS) cost data, we also provide new estimates of disease-specific treatment costs. Our findings indicate that a 20% reduction in disease incidence would increase annual GDP by 0.99% after five years and 1.51% after ten years. Most of the gains are due to increased participation in the labor force, especially among workers aged 50 to 65 years. Reductions in mental health conditions and musculoskeletal conditions contribute the most to these effects. Our analysis points to three important features of preventative health policies: (1) the potential welfare gains are substantial and manifest themselves in terms of both improved population health and increased output growth, (2) only around 40% of long-term effects appear after five years, and (3) the 50–65 age group experiences the largest labor force participation gains. This last feature is due to two factors: improved health at those ages prevents transitions into health-related inactivity and a larger share of workers reaches this age band as a result of reduced transitions into inactivity at earlier ages. This compounding effect underscores the importance of targeting prevention efforts at earlier ages