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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. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

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.

The emergence of rock and roll transformed the world of popular music in the mid-1950s. It inspired many teenagers to consider making music themselves, and they invented a new cultural form, the teen rock and roll band. Drawing on my research on the first generation of grassroots bands in the post-Elvis era, I describe how the social structure and status system of schools shaped this new cultural form and why it developed as a male-dominated form of cultural production. Drawing on research on cultural capital, status attainment, and deviant subcultural involvements, I develop a framework for understanding how participation in grassroots cultural production affects life-course trajectories.

It is well known that only ratios of lambda coefficients are identified from moments among measured variables in most covariance structure models with latent variables. Typically, researchers establish a metric for latent variables by fixing the lambda coefficient for an arbitrarily selected reference indicator. This paper demonstrates that this practice can produce arbitrary calibration of latent variables, undermine interpretation of metric parameters, and lead to invalid cross-population comparisons. The problem is illustrated with hypothetical examples. Analytical results are derived, and implications for sociological research are discussed.

This article presents a structural equation model for assessing the effects of group membership when observations are clustered by group. Within a LISREL specification, the net similarity in outcomes between a pair of observations in the same cluster is generated by an unobservable which captures the group effect. Analogies to the conventional ANCOVA model are noted, and an application to the assessment of "neighborhood effects" in reports of "neighborhood quality" from the 1976 Annual Housing Survey is presented. Estimates from the unobservable variable model are compared to those from a naive regression model and the model subjected to a specification test. The pitfalls of proceeding with the naive model are discussed, and the potential for future work exploiting the clustering in large-scale social surveys is emphasized.

Drawing upon data from more than 5,000 dyads, the authors examine how the strength of employees' intraorganizational ties and the social resources of their network members affect influence-conferring support, task support, and social support. The authors hypothesize that the effects of tie strength and social resources will vary with type of network support and theorize how three mechanisms—trust, risk, and redundancy—explain the differential effects of tie strength and social resources on intraorganizational support. Their findings highlight the variable effects of tie strength and social resources and illustrate the unique ways in which strong ties operate within work organizations.

Hollywood films and television programs reach a diverse global audience, but young white men typically write the stories. Why do veterans older than the age of 40, women, and minority writers have such a difficult time finding work in Hollywood?