Does Ethnic Concentration Influence Employees' Access to Authority? An Examination of Contemporary Urban Labor Markets

Abstract

This article examines whether ethnic concentration in establishments, occupations, and industries influences the authority attainment of white, Hack, Hispanic, and Asian men and women. Data from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality and the 1990 decennial census indicate that “horizontal” concentration among roughly equivalent coworkers and within local industrial and occupational sectors has little effect on minority chances of accessing positions of authority. However, “vertical” concentration in the form of racial/ethnic matching of supervisors to subordinate work groups exerts a strong and consistent effect among all groups, implying that authority attainment depends a great deal on the opportunity to supervise largely coethnic work groups. We conceptualize this “ethnic matching” of supervisors to subordinates as a kind of “sticky floor” that binds individual opportunity for workplace authority to the structural opportunity to exercise control over members of one's own race and ethnicity.