Abstract

My dissertation addresses a theoretical assertion in the literature that increasing the numbers of groups historically excluded from occupations will decrease inequality among workers at work (Bergmann 1986; Brewer and Brown 1998; Smith and Elliott 2001, 2002; Kanter 1977; Williams 1992; Wingfield 2009). It is assumed that if groups of workers are nearly evenly represented in occupations (or in integrated occupations), the more equally the labor market rewards will be distributed across the work organization. Yet, scholars of work have not studied integrated occupations enough to test these assumptions (Gatta and Roos 2005; Kennelly 2002). In this dissertation, I investigate upwards mobility from entry-level, integrated occupations to advanced occupations, to evaluate if parity of numbers between groups of entry-level workers does result in equal opportunity of advancement to better jobs. My research tests the assumption that if groups can equally get hired into entry-level jobs within a job ladder, that they will have the same chances to move into better jobs.

The primary research questions of my dissertation include: Does increasing the representation of women and minority groups reduce gender and racial inequality in work organizations? Why do groups with similar educational backgrounds get their foot in the door but some are more likely to advance in one sector than the other? To best examine why some groups have greater access to better quality jobs than others, I chose to design a comparative case study of service occupations. I selected the occupations by examining national service employment data to identify internal job ladders that met the following criteria. First, the job ladder had to provide advancement to better jobs for workers. Second, the job ladder had to be integrated by gender and race-ethnicity in entry-level positions with nearly even numbers of workers eligible for advancement. My analysis of data from these selected cases described not just the larger patterns found within workers advancement to better jobs, but also identified the mechanisms that explained why these patterns exist within specific types of internal job ladders.

The two types of internal occupational ladders that met these criteria in the service sector were backline kitchen work and frontline casino work, with almost the same basic education and experience requirements for workers. My analysis revealed that these internal ladders showed similar patterns of occupational integration at the entry-level but different patterns of occupational segregation in advanced positions, indicating that some have greater chances to advance from the entry-level occupation to a better job. It's often assumed that integration of occupations is the solution to reduce inequality in the labor market. Even though occupational integration has the potential to reduce inequality, it isn't a simple solution to inequality.

To examine why, I conducted qualitative interviews with 46 people employed as workers, supervisors, managers, owners, and executives in the restaurant and casino industries and observed participants in one restaurant kitchen and one casino gaming pit. From this research, I found that men are more likely to advance in restaurant kitchens, while women are more likely to advance in table dealing, and white workers are more likely to advance in casino management. Each workplace requires workers to be highly interactive with others but their interactive engagement at work is quite different. In restaurant kitchens, interaction largely takes place among kitchen workers engaging in intensive team work and rarely with customers ― or backline interactive work. On casino floors, interaction largely takes place between customers and dealers and rarely among workers ― or frontline interactive work. Access to better jobs varies across gender and race by the type of interaction in the workplace, either backline or frontline interactive work.

My dissertation looks into the workplace to examine workers' mobility once they are hired into jobs. I argue mobility is a central characteristic of job quality and connect it to the persistent segmentation of internal job ladders. In the entry-level service occupations that I selected, there is the potential to move up into good jobs. By comparing the service interactions of backline workers with frontline workers, my dissertation adds to the literature on service work, stratification and mobility. I argue that workplace banter is a key mechanism that shapes the mobility of workers differently, depending on the type of interaction and its character of banter. Organizational norms of banter and the degree to which they were followed by workers influenced their opportunities to advance into better jobs. Racial and gendered inequalities were reproduced in the workplace, shaping upwards mobility differently for groups of workers, depending on the type of service work and the norms of banter. My dissertation adds to the stratification literature by drawing on the theory of boundary work to contribute a new analysis of interactional norms in the workplace that explains why groups have different access to mobility in internal job ladders.

This dissertation explores the paradox of labor that is both precarious and stable. While most research in the social sciences approaches precarious labor from an organizational perspective, I analyze precarious labor as a lived experience through borderlands theory. My case study focuses on workers from a bagged salad company, Miracle Vegetable, in California’s Salinas Valley. Data was collected through a workplace ethnography, interviews, and five years of fieldwork in the community. Individuals participating in my study were undocumented farm laborers when they arrived from Mexico. However, they are now unionized industrial workers with legal residency who have permanently settled in the Salinas Valley. From a subject-level perspective, their lives exemplify the contradiction of achieving upward social mobility while continuing to endure precarious socioeconomic conditions. Borderlands theory helps unpack the borders that workers navigate, such as being permanent residents but not citizens and unionized factory workers that earn similar wages as undocumented farm laborers. I argue that labor precarity and labor stability reinforce each other by conceptualizing precarious stability. This concept advances sociological understandings of precarious labor by moving beyond the binary of good and bad jobs or primary and secondary labor market sectors.

In the last decade, gay men and other men who have sex with men (MSM) have come to the fore of policy debates about AIDS prevention. In stark contrast to global AIDS policy during the first two decades of the epidemic which excluded MSM from policy outside the West, UNAIDS now identifies MSM as "marginalized but not marginal" to the global AIDS epidemic. This dissertation provides an account of this controversial reversal of global AIDS policy and uses it as a point of departure for understanding the role of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) like UNAIDS in the formation of global health priorities.

In contrast to the emergence of other health and social policy issues, various studies observe that efforts to establish a global agenda for addressing HIV and AIDS have been highly concentrated within intergovernmental organizations. How and in whose interests do new priorities emerge within AIDS IGOs? Health policy researchers argue that IGOs have considerable influence in the formation and dissemination of health policies around the world. However, there is a particularly rich debate among sociologists and political scientists about whether and how IGOs can act autonomously and pursue policy priorities that are not supported by states. Because these organizations generally lack enforcement power and are dependent on states for financial resources and legitimacy, IGOs have traditionally been conceived as lacking autonomy to pursue their own policy interests independent of the interests of states. Yet, recent interventions by sociologists have shown how IGOs strategically navigate the demands of states and even attempt to reconfigure the external environment to promote alignment with the policy interests of the IGO. Nonetheless, concerns about resources continue to plague IGOs and often constrain their agency.

In this dissertation I argue that a key limitation of existing studies on the autonomy and influence of IGOs is their narrow focus on the decision-making and agenda-setting stages of policy making. I extend sociological research on the influence and autonomy of IGOs by addressing how concerns about implementation shape the particular structures and strategies that AIDS IGOs adopt in order to pursue their own policy interests. Many of these strategies are not easily understood by existing theories of IGO behavior which argue that as bureaucracies, IGOs will seek to expand their autonomy and influence in a sector. In contrast, I argue that IGOs with limited power to enforce policy implementation by states are highly sensitive to an implementation-autonomy trade off and may actually give up some autonomy in decision-making in order to facilitate broader implementation by states. IGOs also face additional barriers to implementation due to decentralization of the organization at the regional- and country-level and competition from other IGOs, nongovernmental organizations, and bilateral and private donors. Using archival data from World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS and its successor, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), two IGOs mandated by the United Nations to coordinate a global response to AIDS epidemic, I show in Chapter 1 how concerns about implementation have shaped decisions about the organizational structure of these IGOs. In addition, I show how implementation concerns have promoted the adoption of particular strategies - organizational inreach, interorganizational cooperation, evidence-based advocacy, and bidirectional pressure - to align policy preferences among states, other organizations, and even their own staff.

The use of these strategies by AIDS IGOs has had consequences beyond the decision-making phase of policy development. Drawing on a novel dataset compiled from five waves of UN Country Progress Reports on HIV/AIDS (2003, 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2012), I show in Chapter 2 that the use of these strategies has promoted the alignment of national AIDS programs with UNAIDS policies on MSM over time. On the ground, IGO interest in HIV among MSM has also provided new technologies for seeing MSM in hostile political contexts. As I show in a country-case study presented in Chapter 3, claims for the recognition of same-sex sexualities in Malawi have had the most institutional success within the national AIDS programs which increasingly identifies MSM as a key target for public health intervention. Additionally, links between Malawian organizations and transnational research and advocacy networks have provided a context in which (male) same-sex sexualities have become statistically visible and institutionalized, providing a basis for future grassroots mobilization.

At the same time, however, IGO interest in MSM has reinvigorated opposition to homosexuality among Malawian political elites and ordinary citizens. In Chapter 4 I introduce original household survey data collected in Malawi in 2012 (N=1491). Building on qualitative findings from Chapter 3, I use these data to quantitatively examine the effects of variation in aid allocations across Malawi's administrative districts on attitudes toward homosexuality. Results show that in districts with higher levels of annual aid per capita, individuals hold more negative views of homosexuality. Thus while IGOs have had a substantial effect on state-level and donor-level adoption of policy priorities, they have had much less success in changing public views toward homosexuality on the ground. These results suggest that models of global diffusion that utilize policy change as an indicator for cultural change may be greatly overestimating cultural change on contentious issues like homosexuality.

In sum, IGOs have become central actors in the formation, diffusion, and implementation of AIDS policy concerning same-sex sexualities. They develop new policy ideas and set priorities that may diverge substantially from the interests of member states, both rich and poor. However, IGOs also face considerable barriers to implementing their policy priorities: from reluctant states to the decentralization of staff across dozens of country offices to competition from other organizations and private donors. In this dissertation I show how barriers to implementation shape the structures and strategies of IGOs. As such, this work contends that IGOs are not simply disinterested forums in which states pursue their own interests or passive collections of rules and norms, but autonomous, influential, and self-interested actors that shape the policymaking process and the world around them, sometimes in unexpected and undesirable ways.