Mandatory reading for both junior professionals and senior management alike.
A sociological inquiry into the cultural disadvantages faced by Black professionals in elite, professional service firms.
Although racial bias is mostly muted in highly competitive and prestigious law firms, consulting companies, and investment banks, according to Woodson, a sociologist and professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, Black professional employees still contend with “subtle social dynamics,” that generate racial discomfort and diminish their career prospects. Drawing on life-history interviews, the author documents the workplace disadvantages that stem from the discrepancy between a firm’s dominant white culture and prior life and educational experiences that likely featured minimal engagement with that culture. In these firms, social relationships are key to positive yearly evaluations, promotions, collegial support, rewarding assignments, and partnerships. “Careers are determined by the discretionary actions and subjective assessment of their predominately White colleagues,” writes Woodson. In addition to instances of overt racial discrimination, many Black professionals suffer from “feelings of alienation, frustration, and isolation.” Two types of racial discomfort ensue: social alienation related to personal background and cultural repertoire, and stigma anxiety generated by perceptions of the risk of unfair treatment. In response, many Black professionals engage in “racial risk management,” which often further weakens relationships with colleagues. Although Woodson concentrates on race, he acknowledges its intersection with gender and class. “For Black women…gender-related cultural difficulties can be just as challenging as racial ones,” he notes. As for remedial action, firms must be more supportive, Black professionals must engage in acts of “strategic acclimation and acculturation,” and white colleagues should “reduce social alienation by using more inclusive interactional habits, for example by engaging in more open-ended discussions that draw out the interests and experiences of colleagues.” In this well-researched book, Woodson identifies a significant and widespread consequence of the country’s racial divide.
Mandatory reading for both junior professionals and senior management alike.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780226828725
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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