Legal-Political Pressures and African American Access to Managerial Jobs

Prior work on equal employment opportunity tends to focus on a limited set of factors that influence change in organizational structures and policies. This article considers a broader set of potentially influential legal and political coercive pressures-namely, discrimination lawsuits, federal court dynamics, and state political ideology-and analyzes their implications for concrete changes in organizational behavior Using national establishment-level data on the supermarket industry from 1983 to 1998, 1 estimate African American managerial representation using a series of auto-distributed lag (ADL) models with fixed-effects. The results show that in the year following a lawsuit filing against a particular supermarket establishment, African Americans are more likely to enter management. Furthermore, over the long run, coercive isomorphism (whereby establishments subject to a lawsuit come to adopt industry averages for African American managerial representation) seems to prevail. Finally, legal pressures associated with federal court judges 'gender and racial/ethnic diversity and state-level government ideology are also influential. I conclude by discussing these results and the importance of systematically incorporating political process into sociological theorizing and analyses of workplace diversity