Anne Kronberg | Research

Overview

My research lies at the intersection of organizations, work, policy, and social inequality and can be divided into three streams of scholarship. The first and largest stream delves into race, class, and gender inequality in the labor market. Drawing on organizational theory, this stream explores how workplace practices can either exacerbate or alleviate these disparities. Second, I am deeply passionate about finding innovative data to study social phenomena and have extensive experience with quantitative methods. This expertise provided opportunities to collaborate and extend my policy research into education and immigration policy. Finally, my third stream combines my interests in organizational theory, inequality, and cutting-edge research methods to study the intersection between new technology and inequality.

Publications


Interested in more detail? Here is the long version!

How do workplaces shape gender, class, and race disparities in the labor market?

Since the 1970s, more people have built their careers by changing employers throughout their careers rather than climbing an internal ladder. However, how do changing career pathways affect overall race and gender earnings disparities, given that there are more opportunities for disparate treatment in the hiring process than in the promotion process? I used the nationally representative Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1976-2009) and found that mobility outcomes are context-specific and intersectional. For instance, job changes allowed women in privileged positions (i.e., they held "good jobs" and left voluntarily) to catch up to their male peers, while women switching involuntarily or working in "bad jobs" lost ground relative to their male colleagues. Overall, organizational decisions to hire external talent over internal promotions had an inequality-increasing effect on race and gender pay gaps in the U.S. since the 1980s. I published a paper focusing on gender in Social Forces and a paper focused on race-based pay gaps in Work and Occupations.

Workplaces are central to labor market inequality because pay and promotion decisions are typically subject to workplace dynamics. However, because access to workplace personnel records is limited, researchers have paid less attention to pay trajectories once employees join firms. By negotiating access to longitudinal personnel records of a large private U.S. employer (1996-2014), my dissertation overcame these limitations. The findings contradicted the common notion that most pay disparities emerge during the hiring process but gradually disappear as supervisors get to know their employees. Instead, pay gaps between men and women with the same performance rating working in the same job gradually widened post-hire. Patterns indicated that discrimination is less about lacking information (which interactions post-hire would address) and more about a lasting cognitive lens through which all information is filtered. Most importantly, gaps only emerged in departments where supervisors decided over annual performance raises themselves, whereas gaps stayed narrow in departments distributing pay increases centrally. This finding demonstrates how impactful specific employment policies are. I published this paper in Work and Occupations.

To expand my single-case dissertation to a representative sample of firms, I sought out suitable data during my post-doc at Goethe University. I arranged access to German employer-employee-linked data (LIAB), comprising a representative sample of 15,000 establishments and approximately 2 million employees within these workplaces. Many countries link administrative records of firms and employees. However, the LIAB data is unique because it supplements basic economic employer data with an annual establishment survey that captures the HR policies of all firms in the sample.

The first paper (with Anna Gerlach) returns to post-hire pay gaps. We ask which policies are most effective in reducing gender pay gaps post-hire: Formalization (i.e., having written policies for HR practices), childcare support to ease work-life conflict, or career development specifically for women. Using growth curve modeling to examine the pay trajectories of 850,000 employees in 10,000 establishments, we replicated the widening gender pay gaps post-hire originally found in my single-case dissertation. We also found that formalizing HR practices failed to prevent widening gaps. Providing childcare widened gender gaps among less-educated employees. The only policy consistently preventing gender pay gaps from widening for all women was women-focused career programs. Thus, formalization alone is insufficient to address systemic differences, and organizations need identity-based policies that directly reshape access to opportunities. We published this paper in the Socio-Economic Review.

Employees' earnings are heavily impacted by their job mobility. Employees' pay increases particularly fast with managerial promotions. Our second paper (with Anna Gerlach and Dr. Markus Gangl) examines managerial promotions and revisits the phenomenon of the "glass escalator," where men are promoted faster than their female colleagues, especially when working in women-dominated occupations. Our analyses of 723,500 non-managerial employees in 8,500 establishments show that the glass escalator is most pronounced in men-dominated establishments. This paper resolves the contradiction between the glass escalator literature and firm-based literature. The former shows working in a women-dominated environment hinders women's advancement, while the latter argues the opposite. We find that instead of lifting all women's boats, women-dominated establishments only lift women in women-dominated occupations into management, maintaining the male advantage in men-dominated occupations. This paper was published in Social Science Research.

What is the interrelationship between public policy and race and class-based inequality?

Complementary to my broader interest in policy solutions, several collaborative projects examine the connection between public policy and inequality. This research expanded to education and immigration policy and involved innovative data collection, such as combining a content analysis (e.g., of homeschooling magazines or immigration laws) with administrative records and public statistics to generate new datasets for a first-of-its-kind theory testing. My expertise in quantitative research methods was key during data collection and analysis.

The first project with Dr. Regina Werum, Dr. Linda Renzulli, and Dr. Steven Boutcher examines how social movements have shaped the regulation of homeschooling since the 1970s. We constructed longitudinal, state-level data that combined precedent-setting homeschooling court cases with state-level political, economic, demographic, and educational indicators between 1972 and 2007. We find that in addition to social movement factors, race- and class-based status competition contributed to changing homeschooling laws. Two papers from this project were published in Mobilization and Sociological Forum.

Two additional papers, written in collaboration with Dr. Irene Browne and different coauthors, focus on U.S. immigration policy targeting Hispanic immigrants. The first paper in Social Forces found that Black legislators vote more restrictively on immigration bills when Black and Latino/a interests compete (e.g., in the labor market) and vote less restrictively when both groups suffer (e.g., bills to increase policing). However, how do restrictive immigration laws affect U.S. citizens not intended as targets? We used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth to answer this question. Our results highlight that laws targeting undocumented immigrants, such as employment verification (E-Verify) or collaboration between local police and ICE (287(g)), limit self-employment among Black and Hispanic U.S. citizens. Thus, despite entrepreneurship being celebrated as a pathway to success for marginalized populations, restrictive immigration laws stifle entrepreneurship as a growth engine. We published this work in Sociological Perspectives.

The effect of technology on work

Technology constantly changes the nature of work, and across several projects, my third research stream focuses on how technology affects workers' lived experiences.

Currently, the largest U.S. companies rely heavily on technology in their production process. For instance, Amazon warehouses use extensive digital tracking to coordinate and supervise workers. How does technologically-mediated surveillance affect workers' attitudes towards their employers? In a paper published in Socius, Dr. Steven Vallas and I combined unique data from 46 qualitative interviews and 558 quantitative surveys with Amazon warehouse workers. We identify two counter-veiling mechanisms affecting workers' stances towards their employers. Heavy usage of surveillance technology left workers alienated from their work and resulted in a more oppositional and critical stance towards their employer. However, Amazon also recruits many workers who experience financial hardship. Financial hardship prevents workers from adopting an oppositional stance even when feeling alienated. Therefore, our paper suggests that large logistics companies may offset the alienating effect of surveillance technology with a personnel strategy targeting marginalized workers to prevent oppositional class orientation and potential organizing efforts.

Besides reshaping existing work, technological advances also create new kinds of occupations, especially in the platform economy. To better understand newly emerging occupations, my ongoing research expands organizational theory and inequality research to digital content creators. Not only does the number of full-time online content creators on platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, or Instagram increase, but also these platforms are central sites of cultural production, shaping popular culture and public opinions. Consequently, demographic representation among content creators is important. Yet, it is unclear how current organizational and inequality theory translates to digital platforms. To learn more about the content creation process, specifically among live streamers on the Twitch platform, I conducted in-depth interviews with 30 active content creators, seven former content creators, and five live chat moderators between May 2020 and May 2021. Manuscripts are currently in progress.

The preliminary analyses of the interviews generated several hypotheses regarding the role of platform features in shaping race and gender-specific disparities in content creation. Thus, an ongoing, quantitative project builds heavily on my previous workplace inequality research to examine how technological features on the Twitch platform (e.g., new chat moderation tools or built-in tipping/donation functionality) amplify or alleviate race and gender differences in who stays on the platform and who gains popularity. I received funding from the Russell Sage Foundation Pipeline Grant, allowing me to build the first representative quantitative study of content creators of its kind. The study is a longitudinal panel of 4,200 channels representing a stratified random sample of English-speaking channels on Twitch.