White Institutional Isomorphism in the Birth of National Public Radio Laura Garbes De

When the “Blank Slate” is a White One: White Institutional Isomorphism in the Birth of National Public Radio Laura Garbes Department of Sociology Brown University [email protected] Brown University Box 1916 Maxcy Hall, 108 George Street Providence, RI 02912 Laura Garbes is a PhD candidate in sociology at Brown University, where she studies racism, whiteness, and cultural organizations. Her research explores the racialization of sound in public broadcasting. She is affiliated with Brown University's Swearer Center for Public Service, and a member of the Du Boisian Scholar Network. Abstract A burgeoning literature at the intersection of the sociology of race and organizations explores the organization’s role in (re)producing racial inequalities. The present paper builds from this growing literature in its analysis of the formation of National Public Radio (NPR), to better understand how organizational actors translate racialized practices into new organizations at their foundation, even when they seek greater racial inclusivity. I coin a new analytical concept, white institutional isomorphism, to analyze how organizations that embrace a mission of diversity may end up reproducing racially exclusionary practices. White institutional isomorphic pressures are racialized norms that shape the standards and practices adopted across organizations within a given field. Using organizational meeting minutes, external reports, oral histories, and founder memoirs, I show that early implementation of station membership criteria, hiring practices, and programming priorities, while considered race-neutral decisions by the founders that shared a white habitus, inhibited the inclusion of nonwhite voices into NPR’s workforce, station membership, and programming. Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge and thank the archivists at the National Public Broadcasting Archives in College Park, Maryland for their help in identifying relevant materials. I would also like to thank the following individuals and groups for their feedback on earlier versions of this draft: prabhdeep s. kehal, José Itzigsohn, Chinyere Agbai, Amanda Ball, Danielle Falzon, Ieva Zumbyte, Daniel Hirschman, Tina Park, Mark Suchman, Michael Kennedy, the Eastern Sociological Society 2018 Mini-conference on Race and Organizations, and the 2018 Work, Organizations, and Economy Workshop at Brown University. 1 When the “Blank Slate” is a White One: White Institutional Isomorphism in the Birth of National Public Radio Work at the intersection of the study of race and organizations shows that race in organizations, beyond a demographic variable, is an ordering principle that structures organizations and informs their cultural practices (Nkomo 1992; Ward 2008; Berrey 2015). This research has yet to explain the agentic process by which organizational decisionmakers embed racialized mechanisms into organizational structure, policy, and norms. In this paper, I show how organizational actors translate prevailing patterns of racial exclusion from the broader field into new organizations, even when they seek greater racial inclusivity. I consider this process at National Public Radio (NPR), a nonprofit media organization whose mission espouses pluralism and service to a diverse set of publics. Despite this mission, NPR served a disproportionately white audience from 1970-1977. How did the founders implement organizational practices at NPR’s founding that inhibited racial inclusivity, even as they sought to create a media organization built on stated ideals of pluralism? I argue that when the founders and employees translated standards from the existing racialized organizational field of noncommercial radio, they transferred much of that field’s racially exclusionary practices, even as they thought themselves to be striking out a new path. I introduce a new concept, white institutional isomorphism, to examine NPR founders’ adaptation of racially exclusionary mechanisms from the larger organizational field of noncommercial radio. White institutional isomorphism adapts DiMaggio and Powell’s concept of institutional isomorphism (1983), which has been used to understand why so many characteristics are shared across an organizational field. I amend DiMaggio and Powell’s original formulation in two major ways. First, I draw on recent literature on inhabited institutionalism to 2 emphasize micro-level interactions and decisions that shape organizational formation within a field. Second, I use the concept of white habitus (Bonilla-Silva, Goar, and Embrick 2006), to understand how white racial subjectivities are socialized and orient micro-level interactions and decisions. I examine NPR’s organizational meeting minutes, external reports, oral histories, and founder memoirs in the time period 1967-1977 to explore how institutional actors, shaped by both larger field-wide precedents and their own white subjectivities, developed policies that, while race-blind on their surface, inhibited racial inclusivity in station membership, workforce composition, and program production. These decisions were shaped by what I term white institutional isomorphic pressures: racialized norms that shape how founders and employees adopt standards and practices across organizations within a given field. Ultimately, the process of white institutional isomorphism creates a white racialized organization (Ray 2019). WHITE RACIALIZED ORGANIZATIONS I situate this work within a growing body of scholarship on racialized organizations (Ray 2019), which takes seriously race as a structuring force in society’s institutions. Racial inequality is the outcome of historically constructed processes of exclusion that become institutionalized through organizational practice (Beggs 1995; Lewis and Diamond 2015). White dominance pervades job market processes (Royster 2003), normative structures and ways of thinking within organizations (Leo Moore 2007), and workplace labor distribution (Wingfield 2019). Even radical racial justice projects, once folded into existing organizations, conform to white dominant structures to fit and survive (Rojas 2007). I join this scholarship in approaching whiteness as a historically constructed category of classification inextricably linked to the creation of the race concept. In the United States context, 3 the distinction of ability and humanity by race emerged in the eighteenth century to serve the interests of elite settlers and slaveholders in structuring the economic and social systems of the British colony, and later nation (Omi and Winant 2015; Robinson 1983). The settler’s logic of ordering bodies by race made processes of subordination, chattel slavery, and indigenous genocide thinkable alongside rhetorics of democracy and freedom by deigning non-settlers as “raced” for dehumanization and settlers as unraced, or white (Du Bois 1940; Nakano Glenn 2015; Wolfe 2016). Crucial to the success of this larger colonial project of racial formation was the advancement of a white racial project (Winant 2001) entrenching ideologies of white supremacy as common sense amongst elite settlers. Given mass media’s role upholding these ideologies, media influences the experiences of people of color, and white racial attitudes towards communities of color (Saha 2018; Wang Yuen 2017). Whiteness, an ideology whose utility is maintaining power, and whose definition hinges on the creation of racial “others,” is a remarkably flexible construction (Mills 1997; Painter 2010; Roediger 1991; Scott 2009) that shifts to endure macro-level policy changes (Bonilla-Silva 2013). Through this lens, whiteness as an ideology creates the category of white people (Fields and Fields and Fields 2014), whose racialization grants the group and its attendant norms material advantages. In the contemporary organizational context, white dominance remains ideologically salient amidst the inclusion of nonwhite bodies when an organization institutionally privileges the behaviors and norms associated with white populations. The dominance creates expectations of employees – white and (especially) nonwhite – to conform to such standards if they are to remain legitimate (Ray 2019). In the cultural industries, nonwhite actors are often expected to conform to stereotyped expectations of their racialized groups (Wang Yuen 2017). 4 NPR is a particularly relevant case for understanding racialized organizations given these colonial origins of whiteness and its ideological persistence to present. As a public entity established through U.S. government legislation in the Civil Rights Era, NPR sought to advance democracy and provide a news source that reflected America’s many voices. NPR’s failure to do so in its first ten years of operation suggests that organizational formation in an era of racial inclusion is still profoundly shaped by the exclusionary legacies that preceded it. Foregrounding the racialized dimension of institutional theory, I employ the concept of white institutional isomorphism to understand the enduring importance of whiteness as a field-wide factor in organizational formation and development. ORGANIZATIONAL FIELDS AND INSTITUTIONAL ISOMORPHISM To understand white institutional isomorphism, it is necessary to first explain organizational field theory. A field is “a community of organizations that partakes of a common meaning system and whose participants interact more frequently and fatefully with one another than with actors outside the field” (Scott 1995: 56). DiMaggio and Powell (1983) theorize that organizations are not only

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