Leaders and Leadership: A Corpus-Based Approach for Evaluating the Evolution of Leadership

Much has been written about leaders and leadership, managers and management. The terms are often used interchangeably, (see http://thesaurus.reference.com). With rapid changes in technology, and the spread of capitalism, networks which use English as the common language are flourishing. Many authors have written about the affects this has had on management and leadership and the differences between the two. This paper reviews common definitions of leadership, explores some of the key concepts associated with the transition from the industrial to the information age, and the evolution of the terminology of leadership, and then reviews the results of a preliminary research project which uses a corpus-based methodology to analyse the text in a diachronic set of documents collated from the Leadership Quarterly 1990 to 2005. Future research will build on this study as the basis for reviewing other sources and domains in the field of leadership, modelling the relationship between cross-cultural issues and leaders in organizations

Merit as Race Talk: The Ontological Myopia of Merit Knowledge

Can merit be self-evident and anti-racist within U.S. academic evaluative culture? Race is assumed to be self-evident, and merit is no exception. Merit’s reality is not questioned as it is something that is obvious and identifiable within an academic evaluative culture. While scholars note that the definitions of merit reflect the societal elite's cultural norms and definitions of merit transformed to justify racial hierarchies in the U.S., scholars have seldom questioned the racial assumptions upon which these merit transformations take place. Specifically, what have the transformations in merit within the U.S. academy had to presume about race, its role in the social world, and how it operates within the U.S. academy? Conducting a knowledge culture analysis of merit within the academy from 1890 until present, the study argues the contemporary academic evaluative culture has inherited a presumption of the twentieth-century academic evaluative cultures: adjudications of merit are premised upon the colonized proving their assimilability. The colonized have served as fundamental backdrop for how to judge merit because merit in academia’s social world emerged as a language and technology to manage the inclusion of racial difference; or simply, merit as race talk. This myopia makes it so academic evaluative cultures do not question whether the study of merit is the same as the colonial study of intelligence. Given this myopia, academia could begin to explore alternative bases of merit knowledge that are not dependent on adjudicating colonized communities' worth

When Affirmative Action Disappears: Unexpected Patterns in Student Enrollments at Selective U.S. Institutions, 1990-2016

Discussions of U.S. affirmative action policy assume that considering race in undergraduate admissions increases Black and Latinx student enrollments. We show that this assumption accurately describes enrollment patterns for higher-status colleges and universities, but not institutions across the field of higher education. We use fixed effects modeling to analyze the association between a stated affirmative action admissions policy and enrollment trends for first-year students of different racialized backgrounds between 1990 and 2016 at 1,127 selective institutions. We find that, at the most selective institutions, stated policy usage was associated with increased Black student enrollments. However, at less selective institutions, policy usage was associated with decreased Black enrollments and increased Non-U.S. resident enrollments. We also identify close-to-zero estimates of this relationship for enrollment trends of additional demographic backgrounds. We use these findings to elaborate the role of field-level status dynamics in racialized organizations theory. Paradoxically, U.S. American higher education's contemporary racialized status order roughly consists of higher-status institutions that consider race in admissions but do not enroll racially heterogenous cohorts, middle-status institutions that do not consider race but enroll racially heterogenous cohorts, and lower-status non-selective institutions that enroll disproportionately high numbers of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students. This paper is now available at Sociology of Race and Ethnicity journal: https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649221100864

When Colleges Drop Affirmative Action: Trends in Admissions Policies and Student Enrollment at Selective U.S. Institutions, 1990-2016

Scholarship on elite American colleges has identified the rise and persistence of a “diversity imperative” – an institution’s perceived need to enroll racially heterogeneous student bodies to maintain its status in the field. At the same time, a significant proportion of selective institutions have stopped considering race in admissions. To understand the relationship between affirmative action and enrollment, we analyze enrollment trends by race at 973 competitive institutions in states without affirmative action bans from 1990-2016. We find that considering race is associated with an increase in Black and Latinx enrollments at more competitive institutions. At less competitive schools, considering race is associated with a decrease in Black and Latinx enrollments, and an increase in White and Asian/Pacific Islander enrollments. The results indicate that the relationship between affirmative action in admissions and enrollment demographics varies by institutional competitiveness; considering race does not necessarily translate into higher Black or Latinx enrollments or lower White and API enrollments

When Colleges Drop Affirmative Action: Trends in Admissions Policies and Student Enrollment at Selective U.S. Institutions, 1990-2016

Scholarship on elite American colleges has identified the rise and persistence of a “diversity imperative” – an institution’s perceived need to enroll racially heterogeneous student bodies to maintain its status in the field. At the same time, a significant proportion of selective institutions have stopped considering race in admissions. To understand the relationship between affirmative action and enrollment, we analyze enrollment trends by race at 973 competitive institutions in states without affirmative action bans from 1990-2016. We find that considering race is associated with an increase in Black and Latinx enrollments at more competitive institutions. At less competitive schools, considering race is associated with a decrease in Black and Latinx enrollments, and an increase in White and Asian/Pacific Islander enrollments. The results indicate that the relationship between affirmative action in admissions and enrollment demographics varies by institutional competitiveness; considering race does not necessarily translate into higher Black or Latinx enrollments or lower White and API enrollments