Journal Articles

Minority Vulnerability in Privileged Occupations : Why Do African American Financial Advisers Earn Less than Whites in a Large Financial Services Firm?

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Building on recent work on contemporary forms of bias in meritocratic personnel systems, the author assesses sources of racial disadvantage in an output-based pay-for-performance system for compensating financial advisers in a large financial services firm. Using data from expert reports submitted in racial discrimination litigation, the author shows how racial differences in access to white wealth, limits on African Americans’ full participation in broker teams, racialized approaches to multicultural marketing, and diffuse lines of authority for diversity and nondiscrimination created racial barriers that were sustained and amplified by a cumulative advantage system for allocating productivity-enhancing resources. The author concludes with a discussion of management strategies for minimizing minority vulnerability in privileged professions and the challenges faced when the sources of bias are neither unconscious nor unintended but are instead located at least in part in racially segregated social relations and power differences among professionals who hold formally equivalent positions in a company’s job structure.

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Detail Information

Series Title

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

Call Number

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Publisher

Thousand Oak : sage publisher., 2012

Collation

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Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

00027162

Classification

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Content Type

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Media Type

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Carrier Type

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Edition

Vol. 639 no. 1, January 2012,pp 13-32

Subject(s)

discrimination
Meritocracy
Minority Vulnerability in Privileged Occupations
Racial bias
Cumulative advantage
Opportunity hoarding

Specific Detail Info

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