Campus Political Activities courtesy of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Dr. Lauren Rivera | Peter G. Peterson Professor of Corporate Ethics, Professor of Management & Organizations, and Professor of Sociology | Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management

Talk Title: Tainting or Telling? Social Ties and the Construction of Excellence in Tenure Evaluations

Research on workplace evaluations offers competing accounts of social ties. Networks research portrays social ties as sources of information that can enhance evaluation, whereas cultural sociology frames them as conflicts of interest that can undermine evaluative integrity. In this paper, we examine how these competing logics operate within a single, high-stakes evaluative setting: external letters for faculty tenure decisions. Drawing on archival analysis of more than a decade of external tenure letters for candidates employed at two major R1 universities and interviews with letter writers from top departments, we find distinct cross-disciplinary patterns, which were strongest in sociology and computer science. Computer scientists largely viewed ties as providing useful information about a candidate’s intellectual, social, and moral qualities that were seen as integral to evaluating the strength of a tenure case. Conversely, sociologists viewed ties to candidates as corrupting the integrity of the evaluation process by including potentially biasing information unrelated to the quality of a person’s scholarship. We use our qualitative data to demonstrate that the meaning of social ties in workplace evaluations is embedded in relational cultures: field-specific, taken-for-granted cultural understandings of what constitutes the appropriate relationship between evaluators and candidates. We suggest that relational cultures can help shed light on conditions under which social ties will be perceived as tainting or telling within a given context.