IDENTITY SALIENCE OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE: THE INTERSECTION OF RACIAL AND OCCUPATIONAL IDENTITIES IN HIGH-RISK PROFESSIONS
Abstract
Despite decades of effort, issues of race and color in organizations remain unresolved. Representative Bureaucracy (RB) has been a necessary but insufficient response to these challenges. While RB promotes diversity and inclusion, it struggles to address deeper issues of equity and justice, which are seen in the persistence of police brutality, even with increased representation of officers of color. This dissertation will propose a new theoretical approach to address the shortcomings of RB, a framework for the Identity Salience of Organizational Culture (ISOC). The ISOC framework seeks to build beyond RB to explain how the culture of high-risk professions with a legacy of racialized, majority-white practices fosters an identity salience that supersedes individual identities. These dynamics force cultural identity assimilation (CIA) and maintain racial disparities that undermine RB's effectiveness in resolving issues of true equity and justice. This dissertation will first introduce the ISOC framework, adjacent to RB, explaining how ISOC can account for the gaps between passive, symbolic, and active representation. While the ISOC framework can be applied across multiple fields, RB's insufficiency is frequently portrayed in areas of law enforcement (LE), both in scholarly studies and in the media. As such, the second paper will apply the ISOC framework to the field of law enforcement, demonstrating its applicability. While LE is intuitively high-risk and arguably both historically racialized and majority-white, others are more nuanced. The third paper will present a quantitative study to identify which occupations fall into the high-risk, high-CIA category using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys (FEVS). A fourth complementary qualitative study will explore employee perceptions, feelings, and attitudes within similar organizations, offering insight into how professional identity and culture shape experiences of inclusion, exclusion, and assimilation/conformity. By introducing the ISOC framework, this research will provide a new lens to address race and color-based issues in organizations, expanding upon RB to propose a deeper understanding of how organizational culture perpetuates racial inequalities and limits the effectiveness of RB.