Search

In this paper, we develop a working theory examining how the organizational apparatuses of colleges and universities, as well as larger trends in higher education, contribute to unequal outcomes for faculty from working-class backgrounds and their upper- and middle-class counterparts. Based on 30 interviews with a nationwide sample of academic faculty and graduate students in sociology, we adapt an analytical approach introduced by Victor Ray, a theory of racialized organizations, to identify several common mechanisms in higher education that hinder working-class faculty members' ability to form professional relationships and gain prestige at post-secondary institutions, disrupt efforts to diversify faculty bodies socioeconomically, and preserve class-based inequalities by masking the saliency of social class in faculty settings. Adapting Ray's analysis, we divide these organizational features of higher education into three categories—superstructure (collective ideologies), structure (policies and norms), and substructure (individual schemas)—illustrating how these features uphold and reinforce one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]