No abstract

In order to explain persistent racial inequality, researchers have posited that black Americans receive fewer job benefits from their social networks because of their reluctance to provide assistance to others who are looking for work. We test this idea on a national scale using geo‐coded data from the General Social Survey. Our results show that, on average, blacks offer more frequent job‐finding assistance to their friends than do whites. However, additional analyses reveal that race‐based job‐finding assistance is context dependent, as blacks living in areas characterized by concentrated black poverty have lower odds of helping others search for jobs than members of other races and in other community contexts.

Production teams have become a dominant form of work organization as labor markets have become increasingly diverse. This transition likely affects coworker networks-possibly undermining entrenched patterns of workplace segregation. Contact theory suggests that teams can foster network diversity when workers cooperate and share values emphasizing mutual respect. Yet variants of conflict theory, including the critical teams literature, contend that the benefits of teamwork may be eroded by associated factors, including peer discipline, work intensification, and job insecurity. This study uses 2006 General Social Survey data to assess whether and how teamwork affects the racial diversity of worker acquaintance networks, contrasting worker-and manager-directed teams. We find a positive relationship between teams and diversity, but only when teams are worker directed. Despite countervailing tendencies highlighted in the literature, teams foster greater cooperation between workers, which in turn promotes cross-racial friendships. African Americans tend to receive the greatest diversity payoffs from teams. These findings suggest that teamwork can undermine segregation, though only with certain implementations and with variation across groups.

Does the ethnoracial composition of local labor markets influence informal regulation of employment opportunities? To address this question, we link Census data on racial composition with survey data on unsolicited job leads in the 23 largest U.S. metro areas. The aim is twofold: (1) to operationalize three distinct conceptualizations of ethnoracial composition (general diversity, co-ethnic presence, and particularistic representation), and (2) to examine the influence of each at two distinct levels of local labor markets (the metropolis as a whole and occupational segments within each respective metropolis). Logistic regression results reveal that the odds of receiving unsolicited job leads do not vary by metro-level composition, but they do increase significantly with shares of white workers in local occupational segments. These results suggest that racial preference and privilege scale up to influence how employment opportunities are socially regulated in and across local occupational fields.

Students' positive perceptions of the learning environment increase retention and persistence in STEM disciplines.This study presents results from a Learning Environment Questionnaire administered at the beginning and end of the semester in a redesigned general/introductory microbiology course offered in traditional lecture, flipped and online sections. Split-sample t-tests and chi-squared tests were used for cross-section and within section analyses, respectively. The findings support the study hypothesis that student perceptions of the learning environment will vary as a function of platform. This work demonstrates the additional effect of the time in the semester when students complete the questionnaire and this effect on students' perceptions over the course of the semester relative to their initial perceptions. The results of this study offer insight on student perceptions of the learning environment as universities embrace online education in introductory and gateway courses as a response to rising student enrollments and diminishing resources.