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Abstract
This article presents culture as a vehicle of labor market sorting. Providing a case study of hiring in elite professional service firms, I investigate the often suggested but heretofore empirically unexamined hypothesis that cultural similarities between employers and job candidates matter for employers' hiring decisions. Drawing from 120 interviews with employers as well as participant observation of a hiring committee, I argue that hiring is more than just a process of skills sorting; it is also a process of cultural matching between candidates, evaluators, and firms. Employers sought candidates who were not only competent but also culturally similar to themselves in terms of leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles. Concerns about shared culture were highly salient to employers and often outweighed concerns about absolute productivity. I unpack the interpersonal processes through which cultural similarities affected candidate evaluation in elite firms and provide the first empirical demonstration that shared culture-particularly in the form of lifestyle markers-matters for employer hiring. I conclude by discussing the implications for scholarship on culture, inequality, and labor markets.
Keywords
cultural capital, culture, hiring, homophily, inequality, interpersonal evaluation, labor markets
Over the past 40 years, there has been considerable debate about the role that culture plays in labor market stratification. On the one hand, status attainment and labor market scholars have portrayed culture as peripheral to occupational sorting (Blau and Duncan 1967; Tilly and Tilly 1998). On the other hand, cultural sociologists contend that culture is an important basis on which valued material and symbolic rewards-including access to desirable jobs and occupations-are distributed (Lareau and Weininger 2003).
Yet, little empirical scholarship investigates the role that culture plays in occupational attainment. One of the most crucial moments in labor market stratification is the decision to hire. As Bills (2003:442) notes, "Ultimately . . . both attaining an occupational status and securing an income are contingent on a hiring transaction." Although scholars often hypothesize that cultural similarities between employers and job candidates matter for employers' decisions (Lamont 1992), systematic empirical research on the role of culture in hiring is virtually nonexistent (Huffcutt 2011; Stainback, Tomaskovic- Devey, and Skaggs 2010).
Providing a case study of elite professional service firms, I investigate the often suggested but previously untested hypothesis that cultural similarities-defined here as...