Procrustean Review

(Expanded Version - Additional Elements in Blue, including at the end my comment on the reviewer’s reply)

I appreciate any attention given to my research, but Martin Morse Wooster has misled your readers by characterizing my book Identifying Talent, Institutionalizing Diversity as an “enthusiastic defense” of diversity initiatives. In reality, it is serious social science with much to offer even those readers skeptical of diversity initiatives.

Before rebutting the review, I will clarify my political orientation. I confess that I am an Asian American professor who has indeed participated in diversity initiatives in higher education, and worse, I am that cliché, the liberal sociologist. Nevertheless, I would still describe my book as a balanced and, more importantly, a rigorous study of foundation diversity policy.

This book questions the conventional wisdom that American organizations have adopted diversity policy mainly because the nation has become, largely through immigration, more culturally diverse. A serious reader would realize that the book’s primary goal is to reveal why foundations embraced diversity. Only secondarily does it examine whether such policies have met their rhetorical goals.

As Wooster has distorted the book’s orientation, allow me to summarize the work. There are five empirical chapters: three 30-year case histories of when, how, and why Foundation News and Commentary and two large community foundations started prioritizing diversity; one chapter on the role of the Ford Foundation in shaping those three cases; and one chapter assessing the relative homogeneity of standpoints on diversity among 45 foundation trustees, staff, and grantees. Without giving away the punch line, the book boils down to this point. Organizations have a complex life of their own and are not simply vehicles for demographics and politics. I conclude the book by discussing the implications of that complex interpretation for understanding and researching contemporary race relations in the United States. In brief, I did not write the book Wooster might have preferred to review. At the risk of seeming immodest, however, I believe I wrote something better.

Wooster criticizes my book for three failings: (1) focusing too much on who foundations hire rather than “what they do,” by which Wooster narrowly means handing out grants, (2) not citing certain program evaluations of two Ford Foundation projects, and (3) failing to show that Ford’s spending on feminism and African Americans has been correlated with the race and gender of its recent presidents. He also criticizes my writing ability by translating formal sentences of data analysis into “sound-bites” of colloquial English. In short, he criticizes me for making a weak case for affirmative action policy in foundations and, worse, communicating it in a style not suitable for journalism. If these were my goals, I would agree.

My book, however, is not about the success of affirmative action hiring, or even of diversity initiatives, at improving organizational performance. Rather, focusing on the case of foundations, I examine how, when, and why one institutional field chose to prioritize diversity, and my intention is to contribute partial answers to core questions in the study of race relations and organizations: (1) What factors shape the common sense of Americans about race? And (2) how do private organizations negotiate their environments? These are foundational questions that will outlast Wooster’s beef with affirmative action.

There are at least three substantive problems with Wooster’s review. First, as the book makes clear, foundations do much more than simply hire people or hand out money. My case histories of the Cleveland and San Francisco foundations spend less than 15 percent of those pages on the foundations’ racial and gender composition. The balance analyzes the distinct management styles, racial priorities, relationships with external actors, and broader urban context for every directorship at these institutions from the 1960s to the early 1990s. I might be criticized for deciding not to count grants, but the book cannot be criticized for an exclusive focus on hiring. My analysis questions the simplistic expectation that changing the race or gender of office holders transforms organizational culture and practice. In fact I clearly demonstrate that it is the “more White male” Cleveland Foundation with the stronger record of involvement in race relations.

Second, my chapter on the Ford Foundation provides an abbreviated organizational history for the express purpose of explaining its recurrence in the three case histories. For this specific task, its 40-plus scholarly references are sufficient. I discuss the foundation’s Grey Areas and population programs not to evaluate their performance but to reveal how Ford’s urban, international, and social movement involvements since the 1950s contributed to the foundation field’s eventual conception of “philanthropic pluralism.”

Third, contrary to Wooster’s assumption, race is important to foundations and other organizations in many ways beyond the complexion of their staff and trustees. As I carefully demonstrate in the chapter that Wooster criticizes for bad writing, race is not as important a factor in organizational culture as some diversity proponents assert, but neither is it as insignificant as some diversity policy critics want to believe.

I can only guess that Wooster wanted a book about affirmative action to sandwich between (1) his opening claim that, despite seeking diversity, large American foundations are culturally homogenous organizations led by boring and irrelevant CEOs and (2) his conclusion that hiring for professional training amounts to a preference for liberalism and that foundations should instead hire on the basis of “intellectual diversity.” Although my book is neither a defense nor a promotion of affirmative action, he reviewed it as such by assuming that the only reason for writing a book on foundations is to judge their performance. Contrary to his assumption, you can also study foundations to explore and explain their many roles in society. One might read Ellen Lagemann’s excellent Philanthropic Foundations: New Scholarship, New Possibilities (1999) for many approaches to foundation studies more advanced than the traditional approaches of unequivocal self-congratulation, complete indictment, or “the life and times” of founders.

Rather than conducting program evaluation, my book seeks to understand the successful institutionalization of a new policy that had the original goal of insulating affirmative action from conservative politics under the rhetorical promise of greater productivity. That said, my policy history can be used to raise critical questions for policy evaluation: If productivity rationales for diversity are actually strategic justifications for older concerns for injustice, what are the appropriate criteria for evaluating diversity initiatives? If foundation diversity policy depends on local political capacity, what kind of policy models can serve as feasible benchmarks for evaluation? If a singular national foundation is behind the “consensus” on diversity, what is the ultimate meaning of policy success or failure?

Wooster is correct that Identifying Talent, Institutionalizing Diversity is not an easy read, but since when have serious people restricted themselves to easy reading?

Sincerely,

Jiannbin Lee Shiao

Associate Professor

University of Oregon

Postscript.-In a reply to the published version of my letter, Martin Morse Wooster continues to mischaracterize my book as primarily about the racial/ethnic and gender composition of foundations. As noted above, my attention to racial and gender composition comprises a small proportion of the relevant chapters. Furthermore his excessive repetition of “and gender” might mislead readers into expecting to find something close to a full gender analysis in my book. He also characterizes my 49-page chapter on the Ford Foundation as lacking thoroughness, simply on the grounds that my discussions of its “Gray Areas” (pp. 177-181) and population programs (p. 190) do not cover the five books and a memoir that he wished it would cover. A better question is whether the chapter succeeds at its intended purpose as summarized above. Third, the reader will have to judge for her/himself whether my prose is “needlessly obscure” and “jargon-laden” for professional social science. In sociology, one does not expect to read articles in journals such as the American Sociological Review in the same way as one reads the magazine, Contexts, also published by the American Sociological Association. That said, I will try in future books to communicate my analysis more clearly, but issues of style aside, Wooster’s review remains a Procrustean distortion of my book’s substantive content.