Management & Global Business Department

It's a startling statistic when you think about it: Unemployment for African Americans, which is currently at 13 percent, is nearly double the national average. Long thought to be the result of racial discrimination, Nancy DiTomaso, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School, believes otherwise, stating that such high unemployment rates for African Americans has, instead, to do with favoritism.

In The Great Divide, the New York Times new series about inequality, she writes: "Such favoritism has a strong racial component. Through such seemingly innocuous networking, white Americans tend to help other whites, because social resources are concentrated among whites. If African-Americans are not part of the same networks, they will have a harder time finding decent jobs. The mechanism that reproduces inequality, in other words, may be inclusion more than exclusion."

How has social media played a role in all of this? Time and again Twitter has been highlighted for its stark divide across color lines, Black Twitter perhaps being its most notable subgroup. Could it be that social networks like Facebook and Tumblr, platforms meant to connect people, have in fact aided in creating greater disadvantages?

 Read More

Professor Jerome Williams from Rutgers University in New Jersey, US, said behavioural targeting, through which advertising is tailored to the individual, was being used by the food industries to complement mass marketing.

“I really believe in the future, you’ll be walking down the street and you’ll look into a window and there will be an ad directly targeting you based on all your purchases in the past six months. That’s the direction we’re going in.”

Ms Martin said there were currently no restrictions on junk food advertising aired during popular children’s programs on TV, the medium which she said was still the “cornerstone” of advertising.

Read More

The unemployment crisis always opens up room for debate.

Author Nancy DiTomaso said the way we inform our friends about work creates an unemployment divide between blacks and whites. According to DiTomaso, whites unconsciously hoard and distribute advantage inside their almost all-white networks of family and friends and this may be one of the factors why the February unemployment rate was 6.8% for whites  and 13.8% for blacks.

DiTomaso, author of “The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism” said racism and inequality have shaped the labor market.

DiTomaso said outside of work, few whites actually associate with non-whites . As a result, when a position opens up, a white person may tell his or her friends and family members looking for work but a majority of them are white.

Her research comes from 250 interviews of working-class and middle-class whites over about a decade in Tennessee, Ohio and New Jersey.

I'm sure her study has some validity especially if you look at a city such as Milwaukee with it's hyper segregation. Diverse neighborhoods are stronger neighborhoods. You learn from people who don't look like you. It just makes sense.

Read More

Getting a job is increasingly about who you know — and that’s making the playing field less even for African-Americans. In a new study published by the Russell Sage Foundation, Nancy DiTomaso, a professor of organization management at Rutgers University, says “hidden” forms of racial inequality tied to seemingly innocuous things like networking are holding black job-seekers back. In a 21st century workplace where hiring is increasingly based on personal connections and internal employee referrals, African-Americans are at a disadvantage — since they don’t have as much “social capital” and aren’t as connected to networks that can help them land good jobs.

Much progress has been made on racism and its economic effects. A recent paper by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that gaps in subjective “well-being” between blacks and whites have shrunk over the past three decades.

Read More

Nancy DiTomaso, a professor and vice dean for faculty and research and professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School of Newark and New Brunswick and author, says that equality in the workplace is often obstructed by Whites’ favoritism for other Whites during the hiring process — even by those who claim to support equal opportunities.

As a result, minorities are boxed out of the job market, which is a major reason for the unyielding unemployment rate among Blacks.

According to DiTomaso, the aforementioned racial bias calls in to question whether there is a meritocratic, skill-based job market in the United States.

DiTomaso’s conclusion is based on her book, “The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism,” where she interviewed 246 randomly selected middle-class White people in Tennessee, New Jersey, and Ohio.

“Without Racism” revealed that economic racial disparities are fostered by explicit racism that plays out in everyday events, such as networking and institutionalized racial bias, which is endemic in the jobs market.

Read more

by Nancy DiTomaso

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s seemed to mark a historical turning point in advancing the American dream of equal opportunity for all citizens, regardless of race. Yet 50 years on, racial inequality remains a troubling fact of life in American society and its causes are highly contested. In The American Non-Dilemma, sociologist Nancy DiTomaso convincingly argues that America's enduring racial divide is sustained more by whites' preferential treatment of members of their own social networks than by overt racial discrimination. Drawing on research from sociology, political science, history, and psychology, as well as her own interviews with a cross-section of non-Hispanic whites, DiTomaso provides a comprehensive examination of the persistence of racial inequality in the post-Civil Rights era and how it plays out in today's economic and political context.

Taking Gunnar Myrdal's classic work on America's racial divide, The American Dilemma, as her departure point, DiTomaso focuses on "the white side of the race line." To do so, she interviewed a sample of working, middle, and upper-class whites about their life histories, political views, and general outlook on racial inequality in America. While the vast majority of whites profess strong support for civil rights and equal opportunity regardless of race, they continue to pursue their own group-based advantage, especially in the labor market where whites tend to favor other whites in securing jobs protected from market competition. This "opportunity hoarding" leads to substantially improved life outcomes for whites due to their greater access to social resources from family, schools, churches, and other institutions with which they are engaged.

DiTomaso also examines how whites understand the persistence of racial inequality in a society where whites are, on average, the advantaged racial group. Most whites see themselves as part of the solution rather than part of the problem with regard to racial inequality. Yet they continue to harbor strong reservations about public policies—such as affirmative action—intended to ameliorate racial inequality. In effect, they accept the principles of civil rights but not the implementation of policies that would bring about greater racial equality. DiTomaso shows that the political engagement of different groups of whites is affected by their views of how civil rights policies impact their ability to provide advantages to family and friends. This tension between civil and labor rights is evident in Republicans' use of anti-civil rights platforms to attract white voters, and in the efforts of Democrats to bridge race and class issues, or civil and labor rights broadly defined. As a result, DiTomaso finds that whites are, at best, uncertain allies in the fight for racial equality.

Weaving together research on both race and class, along with the life experiences of DiTomaso's interview subjects, The American Non-Dilemma provides a compelling exploration of how racial inequality is reproduced in today's society, how people come to terms with the issue in their day-to-day experiences, and what these trends may signify in the contemporary political landscape.

NANCY DiTOMASO is professor of organization management at Rutgers University.

People sit on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. Dozens of Harvard University students are being investigated for cheating after school officials discovered evidence they may have wrongly shared answers or plagiarized on a final exam. Very few colleges or universities have honor codes, which some credit for lowering the rate of cheating on campus.

Continue reading

Farok Contractor says jobs moved abroad are returning as workers buckle down

Some 2.8 million US jobs – 70 per cent of them in manufacturing – have been lost since 2001because of the US trade deficit with China, according to a recent Economic Policy Institute study. Indeed, consumers visiting a Walmart are hard pressed to find much made in America.

It’s true that the share of manufacturing in the US gross domestic product is now only 12- 15 per cent, and the country is predominantly a service economy. But the nation is still the world’s biggest manufacturer, with unrivalled productivity in terms of manufacturing value-added per employee or per hour worked.

Continue reading

In some countries - China and India included - "the climate for academic integrity is not strong", said Mr Pavela, a lawyer by training who has served as a consultant to the US State Department.

"It is not simply an issue of the deficiencies of students, but includes faculty who cut corners or who do not share any more of a commitment to academic integrity than students do," he added.

Cheating for such students, he said, "is a survival mechanism. They are part of cultures where you have to do what you have to do."

Compounding this is the pressure heaped on Chinese and Indian students by relatives and sponsors.

"Those pressures include the potential embarrassment of having to go home (having not) succeeded here," said Don McCabe, professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School and founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity.

But Professor McCabe added that US and Canadian universities had to take their share of the blame, too.

"It's the fault of the institutions in the sense that they aggressively recruit these students and don't adequately orient them in the different traditions of academic integrity," he argued.

Read the full article