Dismantling or Disguising Racialization?: Defining Racialized Change Work in the Context of Postsecondary Grantmaking

Abstract

Grantmaking organizations (GMOs) exert considerable influence on education systems, public policy, and its administration. We position the work of GMOs—in the distribution and management of funds for the public good—as a form of public management. Using recent work on racialized organizations from sociology, critical theories of race, and institutional theory, we address the role of GMOs in dismantling or reproducing inequalities. In doing so, we develop a new construct—racialized change work—to refer to the purposive action that organizations take to build new, equitable organizational arrangements or tear down old, inequitable ones. We develop quantifiable and testable propositions for how racialized change work might spread (engagement), how it might stick (institutionalization), and what effects it may have on producing equitable outcomes (impact). We build these propositions in the context of US higher education and demonstrate their portability across areas of public policy and administration. We conclude with a discussion of our contributions back to the theories from which we draw and their relationship to public administration.

In the wake of the racial impacts of COVID-19 and the ongoing Movement for Black Lives, organizations across sectors are wading anew into racial-equity initiatives. As they do, public administrators and activists alike lament waves of diversity trainings and committees that seem little more than window dressing at best and stalling tactics at worst. Dissonance between Civil Rights era commitments and day-to-day realities of inequitable public administration is well documented in the study of American political development (Mettler 2014; Soss, Fording, Schram 2011). Increasingly, administrative science scholars are spotlighting how public administration itself operates as a tool of the white racial order (Alexander and Stivers 2020; Amis, Mair, Munir 2020; Ray et al. 2020). And yet, we lack frameworks for designing and evaluating change projects—as inroads toward more just administrative practice—toward a more equitable future.

The intersection of critical theories of race and organization science offers fertile ground for a framework to analyze anti-racist campaigns in public management. We leverage Victor Ray’s (2019; see also Wooten and Couloute 2017) theory of racialized organizations, which builds on core works of critical racial theory (e.g., Harris 1993) to critique and advance neo-institutional theory’s (IT) predictions for persistence and change (Colyvas and Jonsson 2011). We deepen Ray’s theory of racialized organizations and develop a new construct—racialized change work—to refer to purposive action that organizations take to build new, equitable organizational arrangements or tear down old, inequitable ones. Racialized change work, insofar as it seeks to dismantle and build organizational arrangements, is distinguishable from other forms of purposive change.

We define racialized change work in terms of the purposive focus on processes and structures that produce or reproduce racialization. By distinguishing racialized change work from other forms of purposive and non-purposive change, we address the need for concrete and empirically actionable approaches to design and evaluate engagement in changing the status quo. We develop quantifiable and testable propositions for how racialized change work might spread (engagement), how it might stick (institutionalization), and what effects it may have on producing equitable outcomes (impact). We build these propositions in the context of grantmaking organizations (GMOs) in US higher education policy and demonstrate portability across public policy and administration domains.

GMOs, as an organizational category, transcend public and nonprofit sectors. Here we consider GMOs broadly, both private foundations and public organizations. We define GMOs by their primary function: identifying or recruiting projects and organizations to deliver funding, in the form of grants, and other types of support (e.g., national attention, technical assistance). In the public sector, GMOs include the Institute of Education Sciences and the National Science Foundation—both of which distribute hundreds of millions of dollars to study and transform public systems of education (among other things) annually. They also include more targeted programs, for example, the Obama Administration’s multi-billion-dollar Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) and Race to the Top initiatives.

PrivateGMOs, from family to national foundations, are also relevant to the study of public administration. The nonprofit sector not only plays a cooperative role in administering public benefits (Cheng 2019; Garrow 2014; Suárez 2011; Suárez et al. 2018), but the proliferation of nonprofits and especially GMOs has its provenance in anti-state efforts to roll back mid-century government expansion (Gilmore 2017; Wolch 1999). Organized philanthropy has a long history as a co-funder, along with the US government, of key social welfare activities (Gilmore 2017; Kohl-Arenas 2019). For example, both the Carnegie and Ford Foundations had a heavy hand in funding the work of task forces, reporting to the Department of Health and Human Services, that shaped post-Civil Rights federal postsecondary policy (McCambly and Mulroy 2019). GMOs thus deserve attention both for their influence on the field of public policy and administration, and as an overlooked category of both public and quasi-public managers.

We first overview US grantmaking, establishing GMOs as powerful actors in higher-education with regard to racial equity. We then delineate organizational processes as they relate to racial inequalities, interacting Ray’s theory with IT to establish our constructs of (1) racialized organizations as a lens onto the building blocks of organizational arrangements, (2) racialization as a form of institutionalization, and (3) racialized change work as a means of dismantling inequalities. We put forth three proposition sets, organized around core questions about engagement, institutionalization, and impact.

Grantmakers in the United States

Across public domains, the “change agent” identity has become a badge of honor for well-intentioned actors. Scholarship demonstrates, however, that change efforts often support, rather than alter, the status quo by reifying modes of reproduction at higher levels of society (Powell and Colyvas 2008). For example, IES has increased its emphasis on educational inequity in its requests for proposals. However, IES also mandates that projects’ outcome of interest reside at the level of student achievement. This mandate is biased toward quasi-experimental studies and randomized control trials of student interventions (Shavelson and Towne 2002). A student-level focus not only precludes studies of and interventions into the organizations and systems in which processes of racialized trauma are embedded—but it also takes for granted measures of student achievement (e.g., standardized test scores) that are themselves racialized (Au 2016).

In education policy, GMOs have advanced policy agendas, like the TAACCCT grant program, which helped to launch a revival in attention to the community college sector as engines for economic recovery (Lester 2014). In the private sector, GMOs’ influence is increasingly salient in legitimizing or challenging field-level conceptions of the goals of a postsecondary education (Bushouse and Mosley 2018; Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange 2018). Grantmakers have taken on policy not as a means but an end, using grantmaking campaigns to instantiate ideas into policy and administration (Barkan 2013; Kelly and James 2015; McCambly and Anderson 2020; Thümler 2011; Tompkins-Stange 2016). By combining policy development with the politics of measurement, both public and private grantmakers have expanded their field-level power by tapping into multiple modes of reproduction (Anheier and Leat 2013; Colyvas and Jonsson 2011). In doing so, GMOs steer social agendas for poor, minoritized communities by determining and policing measures by which social movements are deemed successful (Kohl-Arenas 2019; Reich, Cordelli, Bernholz 2016).

Although GMOs confer legitimacy on policy problems and solutions in education, GMOs’ priorities may or may not align with the highest levels of social need (INCITE! et al. 2007; Mosley and Galaskiewicz 2015; Suárez 2012). Similarly, GMOs may not incorporate a community’s understanding of a problem when they set their sociopolitical agendas, and data indicate that values and priorities of the white and wealthy are not representative of minoritized communities (see, e.g., Reich, Cordelli, Bernholz 2016; Francis 2019; Villanueva 2018). This is particularly concerning as GMOs are prime sources of capital and resources needed to convert anti-racist social movements into a new status quo (Rojas and King 2018; Schneiberg and Lounsbury 2017) and because grantmakers have historically influenced policy ecosystems to resist rather than foment progressive movements (Bartley 2007; Francis 2019; Wooten 2010). For example, GMOs frequently neglect more radical goals in favor of moderate movements (Francis 2019; Jenkins and Eckert 1986) and they influence grantees to professionalize, forcing activists to work through institutionalized channels (Brulle and Jenkins 2005; INCITE! et al. 2007; Wooten and Couloute 2017).

Organizational Processes and Racial Inequalities

Whereas organizational theory acknowledges stratification and unequal outcomes, it also treats concepts such as bureaucracy, routines, and strategy as neutral and objective (Alexander and Stivers 2020; Amis, Mair, Munir 2020; Rojas 2019). However, these core concepts are forms of what IT scholars refer to as modes of reproduction. From an IT perspective, an outcome is institutionalized insofar as it creates or is integrated into self-activating modes of reproduction (Colyvas and Jonsson 2011). Self-activating refers to autonomous features “that render a pattern chronic, rather than intermittent or random, and do not require active intervention to sustain that pattern” (Anderson and Colyvas 2021). A mode refers to the means or form of support that maintains the status quo. “Thus, self-activating modes of reproduction manifest in many ways, depending on the research context, from structures to processes; from categories to networks; from routines to scripts and even frames” (Anderson and Colyvas 2021).

How do we make sense of modes of reproduction in a field marked by institutionalized inequalities? From the standard lens, it is not the “DNA” or building blocks of organizations that are inherently inequitable; rather, racial inequity stems from the “genetic expression” these building blocks serve. However, empirical accounts of institutional persistence begin with an origin story, or what scholars call organizational imprinting (Scott 2013). Founders shape organizations to meet their interests determined, in part, by drawing on the temporal and spatial resources of their cultural moment (Johnson 2007). Organizational imprinting is the process by which elements of the broader cultural setting are embedded into new organizations, and once in place can have causal significance long after their founding (Marquis and Tilcsik 2013). Imprinting is salient to the study of racism as features of organizational and political practice in the United States were largely developed under segregationist and white supremacist regimes (King and Smith 2005). Imprinting thus takes on a less benign flavor, predicting that white supremacy, long after an organization is founded, will be activated without individual acts of overt racism via racialized values, rewards, and regulations.

Racialized Organizations

Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organizations posits that organizational arrangements are created to benefit a dominant racial class and that those arrangements are durable, so inequitable organizations adapt despite efforts to undermine them. When combined with institutionalization, Ray’s approach draws attention to actionable loci of persistence, potential for change, and processes that dismantle oppressive structures.

Racialized organizations—as schemas connecting organizational rules and routines to resources—(re)create racial outcomes by routinizing values associated with racial hierarchies (Ray 2019; Ray and Purifoy 2019). In so doing, racialized organizations “limit the personal agency and collective efficacy of subordinate racial groups while magnifying the agency of the dominant racial group” (2019, 36). These organizations drive inequitable outcomes via three core mechanisms: (1) they legitimate the unequal distribution of resources, (2) they treat whiteness as an organizational credential, ascribing status that legitimates “bureaucratic means of allocating resources by merit” (41), and (3) they selectively decouple formal rules from organizational practice, such that rules are enforced that benefit the dominant group whereas commitments to equity or inclusion are decoupled from practice. We position these three tenets as core modes of reproduction by which racialization is (re)produced over time.

Critical to this theoretical lens is the typological distinction between white and non-white organizations (Ray 2019; Smith 2019; Wooten 2019; Wooten and Couloute 2017). Whereas white organizations, like Yale, are often treated normatively, non-white organizations, like HBCUs are routinely burdened with stigma and heightened scrutiny (Ray 2019; Williamson 2004; Williamson-Lott 2018). This dichotomy, in turn, legitimates unequal resource distribution (Harris 1993; Omi and Winant 2014) and administrative burdens (Ray et al. 2020). Consider the ongoing efforts of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support diverse teams of scientists (Intemann 2009). Even as the NSF broadens its calls, applicants with access to state-of-the-art scientific and grant-writing infrastructures maintain a competitive advantage. These infrastructures correlate with both the whiteness of the institutions and of the researchers, such that researchers of color and those from highly diverse institutions remain at a structured disadvantage (Kameny et al. 2014; Villalpando and Delgado-Bernal 2002). This case illustrates how preferences for historically white organizations—in contrast to non-white or minoritized organizations—are legitimated, codified, and reinforced in the tradition of what the “white racial project” (Omi and Winant 2014); a project that deploys and constructs race in order to maintain unequal distribution of material and non-material resources (Emirbayer and Desmond 2015).

Racialization as a Form of Institutionalization

Systemic racism is institutionalized when those systems arise across organizations and occurs with “stunning consistency” (Ray 2019, 48). From an IT perspective, diffusion of these common structures (isomorphism) is less stunning than IT’s silence on the problem of racialization, especially since IT offers myriad tools to dissect racialization as a form of institutionalization. Recent scholarship brings IT scholarship into conversation with critical race theories to present an agenda for examining organizations as the primary driver of racist outcomes.

We enter this conversation by emphasizing the legacy of IT work on institutionalization and the role of actors in persistence and change (Hwang and Colyvas 2020). Institutionalization is both a multi-level process and an outcome composed of (1) the object of institutionalization, which can take the form of a technology, idea, practice, or identity, (2) the subjects that participate in or are affected by institutionalization, including “individual actors (roles) and collective actors (archetypes)” (Scott 2013, 228), and (3) the setting in which institutionalization takes place, such as an individual team or organization, a set of organizations, a field or sector, or society as a whole (Colyvas and Jonsson 2011).

We integrate Ray’s racialization concept with an IT lens to contextualize racialized organizations as the product of institutionalization. Ray’s theory then is not only about schema-to-resource connections, but also the modes of reproduction that uphold those connections. Therefore, the greater the number and strength of modes that link schemas to resources, the more deeply racialized an organizational arrangement. This view is compatible with scholarship that emphasizes how American racism adapts and evolves in ways that maintains white privilege even as some sources of racism erode (Christian, Seamster, and Ray 2019). The degree and manifestation of institutionalized racism raises empirical questions regarding what modes of reproduction comprise it, where it resides among organizational arrangements, and at what societal levels. Likewise, scholarship must analyze the ways and means by which old modes of reproduction are dismantled or weakened and new modes of reproduction emerge.

Racialized Change Work

If institutions and institutionalization are constructs that help us understand an organizational field, how can we distinguish meaningful efforts from performative ones? Entities like GMOs are so embedded in taken-for-granted structures of a field that they may be unable to notice mismatched efforts and results or to envision alternative possibilities (Greenwood and Suddaby 2006; Schneiberg and Lounsbury 2017). Instead, when faced with pressures to change, such elite actors often elaborate existing institutions to protect their status. This is in line with IT and much of the literature critical of GMOs’ hegemonic functions and public administration, though some studies inform when exceptions to this rule would arise and when GMOs will have sufficient resources and motivation to change or create institutions to help them realize their interests (Greenwood et al. 2002; Rao, Morrill, Zald 2000).

Therefore, it is important to distinguish between efforts to change the status quo from efforts that engage directly in dismantling racialization. We use the phrase “racialized change work” to distinguish the latter as a subset of the former. Rooted in more recent actor-focused scholarship, our construct of racialized change work takes inspiration from literature on institutional work (Lawrence, Leca, Zilber 2013), inhabited institutions (Hallett and Ventresca 2006), and micro-foundations of IT (Powell and Rerup 2017). Racialized change work is purposive but not necessarily efficacious. Therefore, an indicator of having achieved meaningful change, such as narrowing an achievement gap, does not in and of itself dismantle or weaken racialization.

Racialized change work, by contrast, refers to focused attention on dismantling schema-to-resource connections that magnify agency of dominant groups at the expense of subordinate racial groups (figure 1). Agents of racialized change might achieve “the whole gamut of outcomes…including achieving one’s objectives, failing at them, and triggering unintended consequences” (Hampel et al. 2017). From a micro-foundations scholarship lens, racialized change work hinges on “pulling down” and “building up” more or less institutionalized practices and meanings in ways that vary by an actor’s relative position in a field and the forms of legitimacy involved (Powell and Colyvas 2008). Seemingly large actor-level changes can result in reproduction at a higher level and vice versa (Colyvas and Maroulis 2015). Given that racialized change work seeks to dismantle racialization, identifying this mode of change hinges on identifying organizational strategies and tools that weaken and/or eradicate modes of reproduction that support racialized schema-to-resource linkages. Success, therefore, would identify outcomes as strategies and tools that seek to replace racialized schema-to-resource connections with non-racialized ones.

The three sections that follow are organized around sets of propositions attuned to a specific question about the engagement in, (de)institutionalization of, and impact of racialized change work. Figure 1 provides a multi-part model for racialized change work. This model operationalizes Ray’s tenets of racialized organizations as a form of institutionalization. It then demonstrates the relationship between key pivot points of racialized change work and the three proposition sets developed in the remainder of this paper. Moreover, for a higher-level overview of our propositions, see Supplementary Material which provides a summary in table format of each core question and linked propositions with grounding examples.

Proposition Set 1: Under What Conditions Do Organizational Actors Engage in Racialized Change Work?

Capacity and Immunity

If racialized change work is a subset of broader change efforts, a logical first question asks: when might an actor seek to challenge the status quo in the first place? Research emphasizes the relationship between field-level pressures, such as market conditions, politics, and established understandings of peers and professions, in shaping whether an organization is likely to challenge the status quo. IT scholarship conceptualizes these pressures in terms of legitimacy, defined here as the status of desirability and appropriateness an organizational form or structure derives by linking to broader cultural frames (Suchman 1995). In competitive environments, maintaining an organization’s legitimacy increases its chances of survival and access to resources (Scott 2013). Typically, organizations deal with legitimacy pressures by looking to similar, and higher status, organizations; looking to established standards or accountability sources; and looking to their networks and affiliations. These three processes, known as mimetic, coercive, and normative mechanisms, beget a similarity in structure—isomorphism—among actors, and even different organizational types, in a field (DiMaggio and Powell 1983).

Despite social movement pressures for racial equity, organizations are likely to resist (even unintentionally) enacting meaningful change. Obstinance might be due to lack of will, lack of skill, or deeply rooted racism. Public administration and political development literature documents how racialized conceptions of deservingness are deeply embedded in policies and routines, such that programs disadvantage communities of color (Garrow 2014; Liang 2016; Soss, Fording, Schram 2011). Policies and programs do so through mechanisms that include establishing heightened eligibility requirements and reducing benefits in minoritized communities (Brown 2013; Liang 2016). Some scholars conclude that racialized, values-based stereotypes, embedded in public administration practice, can be “the most important factor in determining government allocations” (Garrow 2014, 14).

Challenging the status quo requires the ability to circumvent field-level sources of legitimacy which might inhibit advocating for—or enacting—change. Organizations that can survive despite these pressures have a greater capacity to challenge the status quo and are more likely to make the effort (Ansari and Krop 2012). We expect:

Proposition 1.1a: The greater an actor’s immunity to market conditions, political pressures, and resource constraints linked to field-level sources of legitimacy, the greater that actor’s capacity to advocate for and enact changes to the status quo.

In many respects, this capacity to take action that runs contrary to field-level sources of legitimacy is a means of understanding an organization’s power. Public agencies are highly susceptible to isomorphic pressures, particularly in terms of their strategies and organizational cultures, while nonprofits and especially GMOs experience more sporadic and varied pressures to conform (Ashworth, Boyne, Delbridge 2009; Pitts et al. 2010). Relative to other field-level actors, GMOs have asymmetrical power and can be less sensitive to market activities that confer legitimacy (e.g., accreditors and professional associations). Moreover, GMOs’ sociopolitical legitimacy bolsters their alternative viewpoints and movements toward alternative futures as challengers to the status quo (Rao, Morrill, Zald 2000).

Different GMOs will possess greater and lesser levels of immunity to these conditions, pressures, and constraints. For example, some GMOs within the federal government are given more latitude and relative immunity from direct congressional oversight than others. Private GMOs exhibit similar variation—for example, we have observed divergent grantmaking behavior among GMOs still tied to—and whose boards are primarily populated by—their for-profit parent corporation when compared to GMOs that have been effectively spun off from such corporations and answer, for example, to highly activist boards. Therefore, we would expect:

Proposition 1.1b: GMOs will have greater immunity to market conditions, political pressures, and resource constraints than other types of elite actors in the postsecondary field (e.g., accreditors, colleges, and states) and will thus have greater capacity to advocate for and enact changes to the status quo, and

Proposition 1.1c: The greater a GMO’s immunity relative to its peers, the greater the GMO’s capacity to advocate for and enact changes to the status quo relative to its peers.

Social Proximity and Contradictions

Seo and Creed’s (2002) seminal work unpacks a central paradox—how do change efforts often reproduce the status quo?—by looking at contradictions, or the inconsistencies or tensions between espoused intentions and system design within a field. The intensity of an actor’s interactions—and/or disenfranchisement—with contradictions sensitize them to opportunities to change existing arrangements. Initiating change becomes more likely when actors face contradictions that result in negative feedback. Contradictions can produce benefits for some and disadvantages for others. When contradictions produce disadvantages (e.g., getting fined or negatively rated), actors will more likely mobilize for change (Greenwood and Suddaby 2006).

Consider the contradiction between an equal opportunity rationale and the multiple mechanisms of reward for exclusionary practices in higher education that can enable and foster change processes (Bévort and Suddaby 2016; Greenwood et al. 2011; Schneiberg and Lounsbury 2017). Most academic administrators earnestly desire for higher education to act as a mechanism for social mobility. To the nation’s white, elite colleges, policymakers, and grantmakers—whose education was largely in such contexts—these aspirations are not undermined by funding or policy environments. By contrast, administrators and policymakers with deep ties to minoritized students or minoritized college types (e.g., community colleges or HBCUs) interact with the same policies and performance metrics but experience deep disadvantages as a result of these conditions. Such contradictions surface in diverse ways, from disproportionate distribution of grant funds to higher resourced colleges on the basis of infrastructure metrics that correlate with relative whiteness (McCambly and Colyvas Forthcoming), to state-funding models whose incentives favor white, high-income students and high-revenue universities and colleges (Gándara and Rutherford 2020).

Given relative immunity to most field-level pressures and market/regulatory exchanges, typical modes of disadvantage do not apply to GMOs in the context of potential racialized change work. Contradictions develop over time as prior arrangements come into conflict with new social circumstances (Kim, Colyvas, Kim 2016). This may come to elite attention as social movements and other forms of insurgent action coalesce around these contradictions (Rojas and King 2018). Rather than primary encounters with contradictions, GMOs’ sensitivity to contradictions will be determined by their secondary exposures through their networks. GMOs frequently cross boundaries, interacting with a range of actors—both central and marginal to power and legitimacy—creating the potential for exposure to field-level contradictions. The more exposure an actor has to contradictions, the less they will take-for-granted the existing constraints of the field, which increases their motivation for institutional change (Battilana, Leca, Boxenbaum 2009; Seo and Creed 2002).

We argue that for a GMO to take up racialized change work, some mechanism must exist for the GMO to interpret the contradictions they encounter in a way that is not sufficiently justified by taken-for-granted explanations. For example, myriad explanations in higher education (e.g., K-12 failure, assumed cultural deficits) allow equal opportunity logics to hold even as contradictory racial outcomes persist. GMOs would need to interpret these justifications as insufficient and therefore problematic to reaching their own goals for exposure to these contradictions to motivate racialized change work. Therefore, we expect:

Proposition 1.2a: The more frequent and meaningful the connections a GMO has to minoritized actors who are disadvantaged by contradictions, the more likely these GMOs will challenge the status quo, and

Proposition1.2b: GMOs will more likely engage in racialized change work (a) when they encounter contradictions relevant to racial inequality and (b) if they face conditions or evidence that cast doubt on extant justifications for the status quo.

Proposition Set 2: When Do Efforts for Racialized Change Challenge the Status Quo?

Contemporary IT scholarship defines institutionalization in terms of modes of reproduction ((Anderson and Colyvas 2021; Colyvas and Jonsson 2011; Scott 2013); an innovation becomes institutionalized insofar as it taps into existing modes of reproduction or creates new ones. We theorize the process of racialization in the same way: racialization is maintained or strengthened when modes of reproduction are reinforced or multiplied and weakened or eliminated insofar as those modes of reproduction are weakened or eliminated. IT emphasizes the role of meanings and practices in institutionalization processes as a means of tracing change to the setting and how the innovation transforms as it becomes embedded (or not) deeper into the setting (Colyvas 2007; Colyvas and Powell 2009). When organizations seek to do something new, they provide rationales for doing so, either evoking old rationales or creating new ones to support innovations; likewise, they could ascribe a different meaning to an old practice to preserve its legitimacy.

In the context of racialization, this approach is especially useful, since one way that intentional change occurs is through design and implementation of new rules, policies, and procedures. When these elements are introduced, active framing takes place (Fiss and Zajac 2006; Gray, Purdy, Ansari 2014), especially in terms of a problem to address and means-ends relationships ascribed to the rule/policy/procedural solution(s) (Kim, Colyvas, Kim 2016). Scholarship underscores the importance of how race is framed in the first place (Schneider and Ingram 1993; Warikoo and Novais 2015). McCambly and Colyvas (Forthcoming) demonstrate how frames centering the needs of racially minoritized groups can trigger racialized and deleterious implementation. Understanding racialized change work and its effects requires attention to framing and sensemaking processes through which these frames affect racialization.

Frames and Racialization

GMOs and attending individuals develop strategies in the context of a problem frame. Organizations engage in problem framing, or assign meaning to conditions in ways that mobilize people, resources, and policies, to support their preferred response to a social condition (Benford and Snow 2000; Gray, Purdy, Ansari 2014). Frames cognitively and culturally focus actions on (or exclude from vision) specific social problems and limit policy responses to a set of taken-for-granted understandings (Béland 2016; Gray, Purdy, Ansari 2014).

Framing scholarship suggests that certain frames would be more disruptive than others to racial orders. Even under the auspices of addressing inequity, some policy frames authorize actors to award resources to the most “qualified” recipient (meritocratic distribution), whereas others push actors to award resources based on need (compensatory redistribution) (Berrey 2015). Social movement scholars investigate framing as a means to present and gain acceptance for alternative conceptions of a social order; adopted ideas about societal and organizational-level equality are important variables in social reform. Racialization frames can be understood in terms of two modes: race-evasive frames (Bonilla Silva 2017) and anti-racist frames in table 1 (McCambly and Colyvas Forthcoming).

Race-Evasive Frames

Race-evasive frames comprise the empirically dominant approach in contemporary organizations and also reflect Ray’s (2019) critique of organizational theory’s neutral terminology. Race-evasiveness (often called color-blindness) is “the belief that racial group membership should not be taken into account, or even noticed—as a strategy for managing diversity and intergroup relations” (Apfelbaum, Norton, Sommers 2012, 205) and is the most common stance taken by white individuals and organizations (Rattan and Ambady 2013). This ideology drives discourse and policymaking in most domains (Apfelbaum, Norton, Sommers 2012; Bonilla-Silva 2017) and is associated with harmful outcomes, including insensitivity to blatant discrimination and the distribution of resources and benefits to whites (Plaut, Thomas, Goren 2009; Purdie-Vaughns et al. 2008). Race-evasive frames have proven resistant to investments in race-based policies to ameliorate inequality (e.g., affirmative action) as they are not driven by moral or political convictions about the need to proactively eliminate inequalities (Hild and Voorhoeve 2004).

Race-evasive frames can stall socially progressive outcomes through ideological insistence that everyone be treated equally without regard to race, accompanied by denying the consequences of racism pervasive in organizational routines, law, and policy (Bonilla-Silva 2017). These frames operate on a consensus that few Americans are racist and whites do not systematically benefit from cultural favoritism.

Anti-Racist Frames

A second class of frames has recently (re)emerged—what we term “anti-racist frames.” Anti-racist frames take a structural approach that “foregrounds the unequal power relationships between racial groups in society... [the] normative consequence of this frame is that individuals should actively resist the racial ideologies and injustices that they perceive” (Warikoo and Novais 2015, 861). This perspective, historically held by few whites in power, is not limited to eliminating active discrimination or producing dominant group benefits. Instead, anti-racist frames invoke a responsibility to identify historical traditions of oppression and to offer proactive solutions (Bonilla-Silva 2017; Hild and Voorhoeve 2004). However, many argue that anti-racist frames threaten dominant group privileges and are only taken up when justified in terms of the benefits to dominant classes, often called “interest convergence” (Bell 1980; Yosso et al. 2004). Higher education organizations routinely tout multicultural politics, yet gain legitimacy and resources through processes that appeal to and serve exclusionary and inegalitarian ends (Wooten and Couloute 2017).

The taken-for-granted nature of race-evasive frames is one mode of reproduction by which racialized stratification persists. Scholarship predicts that only when actors adopt frames for action directly aligned with challenging modes of racialized reproduction will they mobilize resources to disrupt these modes and produce new ones. One can thus analyze organizations’ frames for evidence of engagement in racialized change work. Therefore, we would expect:

Proposition 2a: Race-evasive frames adopted to motivate change will likely adhere to, and therefore maintain, modes of reproduction that support racialization, and

Proposition 2b: Anti-racist frames adopted to motivate change will be more likely to break from, and therefore weaken, modes of reproduction that support racialization.

Policy design theory (Schneider and Ingram 1993) provides an additional layer to the previous predictions by directing attention to “how constructions of groups, problems, and knowledge then manifest themselves and become institutionalized into policy designs, which subsequently reinforce and disseminate these constructions” (Schneider and Sidney 2009, 106). Empirical cases demonstrate how policy designs can disseminate and institutionalize ideas about groups and social problems (McBeth et al. 2014). For example, whereas groups associated with positive constructions (e.g., white, middle class) tend to receive beneficial policies with high levels of discretion and provisions, groups associated with negative constructions (e.g., poor people of color) receive policy designs that distribute burdens and have “low levels of discretion [and] long implementation chains” that tend to benefit advantaged groups (Schneider and Sidney 2009, 107).

Policy design theory demonstrates how race-conscious policy may trigger biases that become codified and applied through “racialized burdens” in public administration (Ray et al. 2020). As such, policy designs that disproportionately distribute administrative burdens along racial lines act as a tool of the white supremacist state enforcing inequitable access to resources and agency (Ray et al. 2020). For example, McCambly and Colyvas (Forthcoming) demonstrated how one public GMO shifted a core mode of reproduction that was responsible for race-evasive distribution of resources that privileged white institutions in their funding practices. Despite framing racial inequity as a core problem, this GMO strengthened racialization by layering administrative burdens onto minority-serving institutions and reduced their agency with more deeply institutionalized accountability and scientifically rationalized processes. In short, under prevailing, white-serving paradigms, policies intended for public welfare can still be stratified to disadvantage minoritized groups. This occurs when governing bodies have strong commitments to preserving the racial order and relative privileges of whites, even as they pursue an agenda ostensibly targeting needs of non-dominant communities. Therefore, we expect:

Proposition 2c: The stronger a grantmaker’s (individual or organizational) commitments to maintaining the status quo for whites in a racialized field, the more likely it is that anti-racist frames will be enacted in ways that mollify justice aims by moving institutionalization from one mode of reproduction to another.

Proposition Set 3: When Are Racialized Change Efforts Meaningfully Implemented?

Whereas proposition sets 1-2 focus on conditions and organizational processes that facilitate racialized change, proposition set three focuses on microprocesses critical to substantive implementation and impact. Frames guide meaning-making and action but are not themselves sufficient to effect change (Bromley and Powell 2012; Lowenhaupt, Spillane, Hallett 2016). Efficacious racialized change work is incomplete without theorizing conditions under which GMOs’ adopted frames will have their intended field-wide effect. Disruptive frames can produce backlash; espoused frames can become merely symbolic. To succeed, frames must combine with organizational processes that create routines and work modes that challenge existing arrangements. Resistance could also manifest in policy designs themselves such that the status quo is upheld, as prevailing policy paradigms bias the distribution of benefit and burden. This leads us to ask: how can an anti-racist frame take hold within a GMO if it challenges the social privileges of the actors distributing funds and the racial order of the domain in which they work?

Organizational Processes and Sensemaking

Framing and policy design processes occur at the organizational level. Changes at this level depend on corresponding changes to individual action that are enabled and constrained by prevailing norms, values, and cognitive frameworks (Colyvas and Maroulis 2015; Hallett and Ventresca 2006). Internal organizational processes involving individual actors can translate organizational changes into quantifiable outcomes (Battilana, Leca, Boxenbaum 2009; Lipsky 2010). To enact change, actors must have an interest in enacting change and the resources to do so (DiMaggio and Zucker 1988).

Scholarship refers to these processes as “sensemaking.” Sensemaking occurs around moments of change or disruption that threaten the status quo. These moments push actors to reevaluate their own roles and answer the question “what should I do next?” (Maitlis and Christianson 2014; Spillane, Parise, Sherer 2011; Weick et al. 2005) The sensemaking perspective is part of the micro-foundations of IT which considers how people “inhabit” institutions through their work and meaning making to constantly recreate institutions over time (Hallett and Ventresca 2006). Many studies recognize the pervasiveness of “decoupling,” the separation of action among individual actors from some element of organization-level espoused values (Spillane, Parise, Sherer 2011; Westphal and Zajac 2001). “Loose coupling” occurs when an organization’s compliance with a top-down edict is ceremonial and disconnected from organizational actors’ practices (Lowenhaupt, Spillane, Hallett 2016; Westphal and Zajac 2001). This occurs more often under conditions in which actors are unable to access resources necessary to meet new demands, possess the power to defy institutional pressures, or have free access to models for loose coupling (Bromley and Powell 2012; Fiss and Zajac 2006).

Ray (2019) recognizes selective decoupling as one of three drivers of racialization, what we refer to as modes of reproduction. Decoupling literature centers sensemaking as a key mechanism by which institutional changes are catalyzed or thwarted at the point of implementation. Sensemaking theory positions actors as simultaneously enabled and constrained by their institutional environment (Sewell 1992). As they experience a disruption, individuals strive to first sense-make by looking for “reasons that will enable them to resume the interrupted activity and stay in action” (Weick et al. 2005). These reasons are drawn from prevailing institutions (e.g., existing constraints, values, goals, metrics, or traditions) Weick et al. 2005). Only when the “resumption of the project” becomes problematic is sensemaking biased toward identifying a new course of action (Westphal and Zajac 2001). Actors working within higher education—a racialized organizational field—can draw from myriad sources of racialized macro-institutional pressures in order to resist meso-level indictments of racial injustice. By racialized field, we mean that higher education is an organizational field that routinely delivers greater resources (e.g., per student funding) and agency (e.g., political freedom to innovate) to white-serving colleges and universities and less so to organizations that serve predominantly Black and brown communities.

Two sequences may occur following a frame change at the organizational level—which can take the form of a new formal policy or new informal aspirations—that threatens broader institutionalized patterns. First, actors within the organization can make sense of this change within prevailing norms, regulations, and schema such that they dismiss the need to take obvious actions and instead interpret their role as preserving the status quo with ceremonial changes (Battilana 2006; Hallett and Ventresca 2006). This is prevalent in organizations with strong commitments or dependencies on prevailing arrangements (Greenwood and Hinings 1996). Alternatively, if actors within the organization see the change as a fundamental and unavoidable challenge to their role, they may engage in sensemaking processes that lead to new routines, criteria, and structures that link the frame with the process of implementation and organizational action, leading to more disruptive change (Bévort and Suddaby 2016; Rerup and Feldman 2011). The outcome depends on actors possessing adequate interests in change (e.g., they find it either valuable or necessary) and the resources (e.g., knowledge, agency) to engage in sensemaking aligned with the goals of the new frame. If symbolic changes result in material consequences, then some combination of organizational sensemaking and aligned shifts in organizational routines have been effective in bridging higher- to lower-level change (Battilana, Leca, Boxenbaum 2009; Fiss and Zajac 2006; Gray, Purdy, Ansari 2014). In racialized change work, we posit that change processes must be designed to resist pitfalls of decoupling.

Adopting a new frame does not undo the many racialized currents of values, regulations, practices, and norms from which actors draw legitimacy, resources, and schema for their work. Instead, to make sense of a disruption, actors are pulling down from these materials to identify the “best” way forward in light of vast networks of values and taken-for-granted assumptions in their field (Weick et al. 2005). Only when something about the disruption makes the status quo impossible do actors engage in change. If race in US education is an order and a field unto itself, we can imagine how modifying frames as a stand-alone strategy will face significant obstacles on the road to meaningful disruption. Because modes of reproduction and legitimacy in the broader field are largely drawn from processes of exclusion and deep-seated biases in favor of white-serving organizations, frame changes will only disrupt microprocesses of behavior that create and recreate macro-foundations of racial exclusion if they can substantially prevent the “resumption of the project” and force the creation of new legitimated models of action. For example, multiple grantmakers in the midst of their sudden 2020 push to administer racial equity funds began to reexamine for the first time, their white-dominated networks of partners and experts because of the limitation this network imposed on their ability to reach communities of color in ways that aligned to their highly public commitments to support the Movement for Black Lives. Therefore, we expect:

Proposition 3.1a: Anti-racist frames adopted at the organization level will be enacted only if individuals: (1) are confronted with routines or arguments that make reversion to the status quo untenable and (2) have sufficient resources and interest to make sense of these changes and develop new models for action.

When adopting anti-racist frames, dominant actors are likely to feel threatened and resist frames that delegitimize the privileges of their “in-group,” even to the point of increasing their racial bias (Quinn 2020; Rattan and Ambady 2013). As such, actors in organizations like GMOs would need to provide a structure for sensemaking that would create an interest, even among groups whose privilege will not be maximized by an anti-racist frame, to implement new models for action. Sensemaking literature refers to this as “sense giving,” whereby stakeholders and leaders influence sensemaking of others toward a preferred set of definitions that fit the organization’s intended change (Foldy et al. 2008; Gioia and Chittipeddi 1991; Maitlis 2005). Organizational sensemaking processes in which leaders and stakeholders engage in sense giving lead to more prolonged sequences of aligned (rather than one-time) actions and a richer, unified narrative for change (Maitlis 2005). For example, many GMOs are now creating artifacts (demographic review tools) and processes (grantee equity interviews) that act as mechanisms for institutionalizing anti-racist practices (McCambly, 2021). We expect:

Proposition 3.1b: During organizational sensemaking processes in response to an anti-racist frame, actors will more likely achieve a unified purpose and prolonged commitment to change if leaders and stakeholders engage in structured and aligned sense giving efforts that enlist all organizational members.

Means-Ends Decoupling

Successful disruption of institutionalized processes at the micro level is a critical component for macro-level institutional change (Bévort and Suddaby 2016). This process of deinstitutionalization and replacement produces new routines, scripts, and potentially new legitimated models for action that can challenge an institutionalized order such as racialization (Hedström et al. 1998). The way individual actors go about their work and make sense of changes in these processes are the same processes by which macro-level assumptions are enacted and reified over time. If all the previous conditions are met, could we predict changes in a field that disrupt the racialized schema-to-resources link?

Decoupling is often studied in terms of the “gap” between an adopted policy and a practice. But what if the new practice is not well aligned to the goal of more equitable racial outcomes in a field? Recent scholarship specifies another type of decoupling that occurs due to means-ends contradictions (Bromley and Powell 2012; Voronov and Yorks 2015). In means-ends decoupling, apolicy or frame is adopted in full, but there is little or no relation between the adopted practice and the desiredoutcome. Despite organizations’ “myths of causality, control, and coherence,” the relationship between means and ends can be unclear and largely based on field-level conceptions of appropriate strategies (Bromley and Powell 2012; Cole and Ramirez 2013; Wijen 2014). These assumptions could have no effect, and by drawing on existing beliefs, could reify existing arrangements (e.g., the case of trickle-down economics). This is common in domains where great effort goes into developing and surveilling policies, even though their ultimate effects are unclear. Means-ends decoupling is particularly dangerous where new myths of surveillance and control are developed out of beliefs that may create more durable models to reinforce existing racialized ends. For example, while the Ford Foundation embraced the Black Power movement for a period in the 1960s and 1970s, they interpreted the movements’ “failure” to eradicate racialized outcomes using Ford’s metrics as a signal to abandon grass-roots funding in favor of an elite-development model divorced from Black Power’s long-term vision (Rooks 2006). This example reminds us that even policies with metrics to ensure implementation compliance are not always properly align to achieve greater racial justice or deinstitutionalize racialization.

Organizations thus face a trade-off: they must assure compliance to avoid policy-practice decoupling, while also creating conditions flexible enough for agents to respond if means (new practices) are not suitable to changing local outcomes, particularly in poorly understood causal chains (Wijen 2014). Bromley and Powell (2012) predict that as field-level policy-practice decoupling persists, managerial and accountability logics will strengthen. Wijen’s (2014) empirical case demonstrates that balancing between the two types of decoupling requires both (1) strong adoption and compliance procedures around a set of guiding principles internalized by implementers and (2) discretion at the agent or sub-unit level to test innovative practices and adapt change tactics to local environments.

We posit that means-ends decoupling is a crucial aspect of racialization, because it presents a novel identification strategy for examining organizational responses to institutional contradictions. Returning to the prior example from McCambly and Colyvas (Forthcoming) whereby a GMO developed an anti-racist policy to invest in more marginalized college types, while also introducing elaborate accountability measures and attention to remedial educational programs, both of which drew on prevailing, racialized beliefs about what non-dominant students and organizations needed to succeed. The actors faithfully implemented the policy, but the means’ persistent connection to prevailing beliefs in the field undermined the organization’s ultimate goals. The empirical and theoretical question is: under what conditions would actors make sense of this contradiction such that they would seek to deviate from the prevailing beliefs to recraft their means? And under what conditions would this contradiction be rationalized to preserve the status quo? We expect:

Proposition 3:2a: If GMOs engaged in racialized change work interpret moments of means-ends decoupling as an opportunity for innovation that would dismantle prevailing beliefs and/or decenter whiteness, then they are more likely to realize a coherent change strategy that advances racial justice outcomes in a field, and

Proposition 3.2b: If GMOs engaged in racialized change work interpret moments of means-ends decoupling using prevailing beliefs—elaborating on rather than changing means-ends pairing and/or centering whiteness—then they are less likely to realize a coherent change strategy that advances racial justice outcomes in a field.

Indicators, Schemas, and Resources

If GMOs are operating in a racialized field, by what mechanisms do they either reify or disrupt structures that support inequitable schema-resource connections, even if these structures are treated as color blind or neutral? Rivera’s (2012) study on discrimination in hiring exposed how privileging whiteness can occur even through ostensibly color-blind processes within organizations, demonstrating how organizations can legitimate the unequal distribution of resources and decouple organizational procedures in ways that systematically advantage dominant racial groups (Hirschman and Garbes 2019; Smith 2019). These processes happen through difficult-to-measure processes of bias, discrimination, and preferential treatment via meritocratic rewards for structural privilege (Berrey 2015; Khan and Jerolmack 2013). These organizational processes enable and validate the unequal distribution of resources and rewards (Emirbayer and Desmond 2015; Ray 2019).

By situating higher education in terms of its foundational stratifying purpose and constructing that purpose as a material feature of the field, we can better understand how diversity initiatives can uphold an inequitable racial status quo (Pollock 2010). If initiatives fail to challenge modes of reproduction deeply rooted in hidden forms of white supremacy, rhetoric aimed at “celebrating diversity” or enforcing color-blind standards will fail to modify (and could even strengthen) sources of legitimacy in a field that upholds the racial order (Bonilla-Silva 2017; Emirbayer and Desmond 2015; Jung 2015; Wooten 2019). For example, courts are likely to interpret the presence of diversity programs as evidence of nondiscrimination, even without showing effects on hiring. These “diversity” practices then reinscribe inequalities and insulate power from further intervention (Kalev, Dobbin, Kelly 2006).

In this context, how can GMOs engage in racialized change work to unseat the prevailing racial order? What levers can they pull, and when will they be effective? The majority of resource-distribution projects fund and legitimize inequality work at better-resourced and more-prestigious organizations (Kelly and James 2015), yet these organizations serve only a fraction of minoritized populations in the United States. By awarding preference to these types that possess key markers of legitimacy in higher education (Bastedo and Bowman 2010; Espeland and Sauder 2007), GMOs enact one mode of reproduction for the institutionalized racial order wherein organizations that serve the greatest proportion of minoritized students are also the least-resourced.

From an organizational perspective, prestigious universities are a homogenous slice of the larger field, particularly in terms of demographics they serve (e.g., age, race, class), resources at their disposal (e.g., endowment), and prestige (e.g., U.S. News and World Reports rankings and Carnegie Classifications). This concentration of grant resources to a homogenous group in a diverse population of colleges and universities is an instantiation of racialization Moreover, the processes that institutionalize racial and class-based stratification in higher education are different in community colleges—which serve more minoritized students than any other sector—than at elite or middle-tier universities.

IT posits that while experimentation, like that afforded by grant-funded programs, may be important to institutional change, not all actors are equally likely to experiment in ways that disrupt the status quo. Actors that benefit from existing arrangements will be the least likely to challenge them (Seo and Creed 2002); experimentation leading to change is likely to come from groups that are marginalized by current arrangements and have direct experiences with institutional contradictions (Hinings et al. 2003; Seo and Creed 2002). Organizations marginal to the political system, or with lower legitimacy, are denied the benefits of current institutional configurations and have fewer costs and greater incentives to experiment with alternative models as a way to access to capital (Schneiberg and Lounsbury 2017).

These predictions suggest that prestigious universities are less likely to innovate in ways disruptive to existing configurations, because they benefit from them in terms of rankings, status, and reputation. Conversely, community colleges with little prestige or reputational resources have more to gain from experimentation that could lead to new measures of success. It is unclear, however, under what conditions grantmakers invest in community colleges, which in a racialized field are the least legitimate (Ray 2019; Smith 2019). The dominance and replication of existing organizational types will favor existing modes of reproduction in a field, rather than challenge them (Schneiberg and Lounsbury 2017). From a racialized perspective, this implies that supporting, emulating, or replicating organizational forms that produce racial inequality is likely to produce more inequality, not less.

The potential field-level power of GMOs begins to emerge, not only to invest in certain types but to set or reset terms of legitimacy, if they can escape traps that favor current racialized orders. Practices and organizations associated with minoritized populations are distinguished as less legitimate, providing basis and justification for unequal arrangements (Ray 2019). It is no surprise, then, that GMOs routinely award high-burden, small, and project-based grants to BIPOC-led nonprofits, in contrast to low-burden, larger grants delivered to white organizations (Dorsey et al. 2020). Thus, in addition to lifting up marginalized organizational types, changing reward systems to legitimate the replication of new practices by de-monopolizing dominant groups’ access to resources would also disrupt the status quo (Colyvas and Maroulis 2015). Doing this, however, also requires GMOs to actively challenge grantmaking processes that routinely (re)enact these racialized privileges. For example, one Midwest GMO has begun the developing a cadre of grantwriters to routinely support BIPOC-led organizations, thereby reducing the relative privilege of well-funded, white-led organizations in grants competition (McCambly et al., 2020). We thus expect:

Proposition 3.3a: GMOs are most likely to enact racialized change work insofar as they use resources to build legitimacy and agency among organizations that are likely to disrupt the status quo. Specifically, these will be organizations that do not benefit from current arrangements and are disadvantaged by contradictions central to the perpetuation racial inequality.

Likewise:

Proposition 3.3b. GMOs are least likely to enact racialized change work insofar as they use resources to weaken the legitimacy or agency of organizations or communities that are likely to disrupt the status quo and are hindered by racialized contradictions, and

Proposition 3.3c GMOs are most likely to enact racialized change work insofar as they alter the self-reproducing rewards and incentive mechanisms that support taken-for-granted practices used as capital by white-serving organizations.

Racialized Change Work and Contributions to Public Administration

Public and private GMOs wield agency over resources—pecuniary and nonpecuniary—and are deeply embedded in systems that legitimize the racialized delivery of public benefit. We use GMOs as a context to develop a framework for disentangling thought and study about when and how to (1) empirically characterize actors as engaging in work to diminish racialization in public sectors and (2) use theory to make testable predictions about the engagement, substantive implementation, and impact of this work. The propositions developed are intended to be translated across empirical contexts into concrete hypotheses. This work is timely because some GMOs and public agencies are poised to leave behind long-standing commitments to white-serving thought and practice. Moreover, our project is practically and theoretically urgent in light of diversity and equity programs that have failed to spread, stick, or deliver benefits to minoritized communities, thereby upholding racialization and the broader white racial project (Ray 2019; Omi and Winant 2014).

Omi and Winant’s (2014) concept of the “white racial project” reminds us that race is not separate from racism, rather race is a construct born of racism. A white racial project denotes work legitimizing, routinizing, and protecting a racial order that produces advantage, privilege, and narratives of superiority ascribed to whiteness. Even public campaigns intended to help those from disadvantaged racial categories may not disrupt the white racial project and indeed can be an integral part of white racial narratives. Therefore, if public administration and management were to emerge from its history of symbolic and material color-blind racism, then it must move beyond topics like implicit bias or achievement gaps. Instead, actors must take up racialized change work to dismantle modes of reproduction rather than create updated racist narratives.

To this end, we offer a construct—racialized change work—to refer to purposive action that organizations take to build new, equitable organizational arrangements or tear down old, inequitable ones. Much scholarship has taken up the problem of organizational change, from characterizing different types of change to isolating factors that causally affect change to explaining obstinate persistence (Poole and Van de Ven 2021; Scott, Reuf, Mendel, and Coronna 2000). The problem we address, however, requires specific characterization of not only the type of change in question but also the organizational system that comprises its context. Our lens, which situates racialization as a form of institutionalization, provides this context. Racialized change work, insofar as it seeks to dismantle and build organizational arrangements, is distinguishable from other forms of purposive change and can be understood as a subset of broader forms of change (intended or unintended; successful or not). By distinguishing racialized change work from other forms of purposive and non-purposive change, we can address the need for concrete and empirically actionable approaches to design. We can also evaluate advocacy for and engagement in changing the status quo. The three proposition sets presented in this paper theorize the conditions under which GMOs and other public managers are more or less likely to attempt racialized change work (engagement), the framing and design parameters for predicting if this work will be meaningfully carried out within organizations (institutionalization), and the work’s efficaciousness (impact).

Racialized change work, as a construct and a framework, pushes scholars of public administration to move from critique to reimagination. Both IT and Ray’s theory of racialized organizations provide lenses for explaining the (re)production of white supremacy within the administrative state. Our contribution, then, is the application of these tools with a vision toward diminishing the racism baked into US public administration. Whereas most public managers are attuned to measuring contributions to the public good in terms of individual impacts (i.e., health, education), we propose a constellation of metrics that refuse usual claims to equality or fairness that mark public administration as a race-evasive rather than anti-racist field. Our propositions focus on how actors can engage with and embed racialized change work that departs from narratives (e.g., white saviorism) and practices (e.g., meritocracy) that legitimize racialization. Racialized change work, as material shifts in power and resources, is a logically prior step to attaining the social outcomes typically measured in public administration, especially because diminishing racialization will likely change the very ways we measure such outcomes when we get there.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the 2018 Alberta Institutions Conference participants for feedback on early iterations of this project, and to colleagues Naomi Blaushild, Mesmin Destin, Claire Mackevicius, Quinn Mulroy, Aireale Rodgers, and James P. Spillane. This project was sponsored, in part, by the Northwestern Presidential Fellowship.

Data Availability Statement

No data were used in the development of this paper.

References