CHAPTER6RESEARCHLEARNING OBJECTIVES• Describe the importan.docx

CHAPTER
6
RESEARCH
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
• Describe the importance of responsible research choices
• Outline an effective, efficient research strategy
• Create search terms for focused online searches
• Gather relevant research materials
• Discover the note-taking approach that works best for you
• Evaluate the credibility and usefulness of different sources
• Effectively organize research materials and choose the most
useful ones
• Correctly cite your sourcesCHAPTER OUTLINE
• Introduction: Becoming an Expert
• Researching Responsibly
• The Research Process
• How to Conduct an Online Search
• Gathering Your Materials
• Reading Your Materials and Taking Notes
• Evaluating Sources
• Revising Your Claims
• Organizing Your Research Information
• Choosing the Sources for Your Speech
• Citing Your Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism
• Getting Help from a Research Expert
Robert and Dixie have been assigned to speak on either side of
an issue, a kind of “pros and cons” format. They chose home
schooling as their issue. each has a general position on it (Dixie
is in favor, and Robert against) but they admit they just don't
know that much about it. So what now? How do they become
well enough informed to give a speech on the topic? Where
should they even start? How can you keep track of your
research? Do you have cite it?Overview

Research is necessary for an effective public speech. This
chapter will help you make responsible, well-crafted, and
carefully executed research choices. First, we will help you
figure out what you already know and translate that knowledge
into a research strategy. Next, we will provide some concrete
tips on where to go for research (including other people as well
as the Internet and the library), how to design a good search
query for search engines and databases, and how to narrow your
search. After that, we will address what you need to do once
you have collected your research material, including how to
read through it, take notes, and evaluate which sources are
worthwhile. Finally, we will deal with how to use your research
process to refine your arguments, choose and organize your
quotations, and give proper credit for the sources you use in
your speech.
MindTap®
Start with a warm-up activity about Stephanie's speech, and
review the chapter's Learning Objectives.INTRODUCTION:
BECOMING AN EXPERT
Researching, composing, and delivering an effective public
speech requires you to acquire some expertise on your topic.
You don't have to be the kind of expert who can produce
original facts, figures, and data and publish groundbreaking
work regarding your topic. But you do need to become enough
of an expert on your topic to translate the research that you
have done to an audience that may not have the same
background or comfort with concepts and terminology that you
have developed in your research. On your topic, you are the
expert for your audience's purposes. You should cultivate
enough expertise on your topic to bring new insights to your
audience and to speak with confidence and credibility.
MindTap®
Read, highlight and take notes online.
The audience members may know nothing about your topic. If
this is the case, what you say could help shape their opinions,

so your words should be backed up with some
reliable information. Or you may be speaking in front of an
audience that already has a good base of knowledge about your
topic—and some strong opinions. In this case, your credibility
depends on having a good grasp of the literature about your
topic.
Expertise matters. For example, consider how a few medical
experts changed the way we think about vaccination. In 1998,
the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published a
study claiming a strong link between the autism and early
childhood vaccination for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR).
The findings were widely publicized, and a movement against
vaccination emerged. Parents worried that if they vaccinated
their children, they would put their children at risk for
developing a serious developmental disorder. Immunization
rates declined significantly. According to an investigation by
London's Sunday Times,1in Britain before the study, 92% of
children were vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella.
After the study, vaccination rates declined by 12%, and similar
declines were reported in the United States. In Great Britain,
the number of cases of measles rose from 58 in 1998 to 1,348 in
2008, and similar increases occurred in the United States.
Yet, it turns out that the study reported in The Lancet was based
on flawed evidence, with a number of good reasons to question
its claims. For example, although there has been a significant
increase in diagnosed autism in the last few decades, there has
been only a slight increase in MMR vaccinations. Children who
aren't vaccinated have a similar risk for acquiring autism as
children who are vaccinated. Moreover, the increase in autism
didn't start at the same time as the introduction of the MMR
vaccination.2
What does a story about bad laboratory research have to do with
the kind of research you will conduct for public speaking?
Plenty. Even though you probably won't be presenting
laboratory research to the public, the way you put together your
research about your topic—including the quality of your

arguments and the sources you choose—will make a difference
in the way your audience thinks about your topic.
The sources, ideas, and arguments that speakers use to justify a
position in public have public implications, guiding the way
that people think about significant problems. The question to
keep asking yourself is whether the research you present in your
speech will help your audience members to make better choices,
perhaps changing their habits, their votes, or the way they think
about the world. Citing bad research can perpetuate dangerous
myths, and it might cause your audience to jump to unsafe
conclusions. You have the choice and the responsibility to make
sure the conclusions you come to in your speech are well
founded and well supported by high-quality
research.RESEARCHING RESPONSIBLY
In a good presentation, the points are delivered in an articulate,
well-organized manner using high-quality research from reliable
sources, which are cited properly. Whether you undertake your
research conscientiously can make the difference between
misinforming your audience members and providing them with a
truly helpful answer to a significant problem. In other words,
you have choices about how you find and use research in your
speech. Because these choices have implications, you have to
engage in the process of researching, citing, and using
information in your speech as if it matters to your audience.
Sometimes research seems like an annoyance—necessary for an
assignment, but not all that important if your topic isn't obscure
or controversial. But you shouldn't think about research as a
process you can complete by just going through the motions. No
matter how well you think you know a topic, responsible
research will reveal new possibilities for argument and
invention, giving you more choices. You might find incredibly
persuasive support for your opinion, or you might change your
mind as you unearth the best counterarguments against your
position. The fact that you don't know the outcome is the best
reason to research—in fact, it is the reason to research.
Geoffrey Canada speaks often on behalf of the Harlem

Children's Zone, a pioneering school he founded. Do you think
he should do and present research about his own work?
Do you need more reasons to conduct responsible research? You
probably can't be clear and persuasive about your topic if you
have only a hazy understanding of it. Actually, haziness in their
speech is one of the ways to spot people who are trying to
manipulate or deceive others into agreeing with them. We are
naturally suspicious of a speaker who doesn't offer good
evidence for his or her claims. When speakers demonstrate
mastery of the details in their speech, we tend to trust them
more. Having a well-researched speech helps the audience see
your claims as plausible and avoids creating the impression that
you're talking about something you don't know much about.
TRY IT! FINDING OUT WHEN RESEARCH IS NEEDED
Is it possible for unsupported claims to be persuasive? Try this
experiment:
• Choose a topic and write an outline for a speech about it in
about a minute, without researching or checking any facts.
• Then share it with a classmate or friend and see how
persuasive he or she thinks the speech would be.
• What does your classmate's reaction tell you about research?
If your credibility is one more reason for responsible research,
another reason is that your evidence is the audience's evidence;
your listeners use the evidence you give them to persuade
themselves. The impression made by a charismatic speaker
fades quickly, but compelling bits of evidence, useful
information, and well-chosen examples may stick in audience
members' minds for a long time.THE RESEARCH PROCESS
Research can seem like a formidable task if you throw yourself
into it without a plan. But if you break the process into a series
of manageable steps, you will be well on your way to an
effectively researched speech. The keys are knowing where to
start and being able to manage the process. The basic elements
in the research process are:
1. Figuring out what you already know about your topic
2. Designing a research strategy

3. Organizing a search strategy for the various databases and
resources that you will use
4. Gathering your materials, with complete source information
5. Reading and evaluating your materials and taking notes
6. Revising your claims and selecting the information you will
use
7. Organizing and selecting research information and
integrating it into your speech
8. Generating citations for your materials
In this chapter, we will walk through each of the steps in this
process, focusing on practical advice for sharpening your
research skills. Although there are many valid ways to engage
the research process, having a well-thought-out plan and an
organized approach to finding and using your materials is the
key
Figuring Out What You Already Know
Once you have chosen a topic that matters to you (or one has
been assigned), start your research process by detailing what
you know about your topic already. Make your existing
knowledge work for you by forecasting what you would say
given just what you know about the topic.
Draft a brief outline of what you might say if you had to give
the speech right now, without doing any research. In preparing
this outline, ask yourself a few questions:
• What is your opinion on the topic as it currently stands?
• What are the reasons you hold this opinion?
• What arguments and ideas do you think your audience will
expect to hear in support of the topic?
• What are the best counterarguments to your position?
Don't worry about making the outline perfect; just get down on
paper what you already know. For example, if you were to argue
that marijuana should be legalized in your state, you might
write down this thesis and three-point outline.
Thesis: Marijuana should be legalized because the costs of
keeping it illegal are too high.

1. Enforcing marijuana laws costs too much and takes up
valuable law-enforcement resources.
2. The dangers of marijuana use are overstated, and we should
be focusing on more dangerous drugs.
3. Making marijuana legal would allow for better regulation of
it and would create a significant new stream of tax revenue.
Now ask yourself the questions suggested earlier. Here they are
again, with your possible answers.
• What is your opinion on the topic as it currently stands?
I believe marijuana should be legalized because enforcing
marijuana laws has large social and economic costs.
• What are the reasons you hold this opinion?
Because it seems like a lot of law enforcement costs are
associated with marijuana laws, and I think these resources
could be used elsewhere.
• What arguments and ideas do you think your audience will
expect in support of the topic?
They might expect me to say I'm a marijuana user, but I'm not,
so I probably want to present the case in terms of the public
policy costs. They might expect a defense that marijuana is
harmless, and they might expect me to argue that enforcement is
not effective in reducing marijuana use.
• What are the best counterarguments to your position?
Keeping marijuana illegal lessens marijuana use, and marijuana
use creates significant social problems because of addiction and
its associated criminal behaviors.
You might notice that a few themes have popped up in your
outline. Circle or list these and think about the ways they
connect to your thesis. The following points connect to the
thesis that marijuana should be legalized because the costs of
enforcing marijuana laws are too high:
• Marijuana enforcement
• Rates of marijuana use
A necessary part of the research process is to figure out what
you may know already. For instance, for a speech advocating
the legalization of marijuana, you may already know that the

use of marijuana for medical purposes is legal in some states
but is contrary to federal laws.
• Harms of marijuana use
• Economic and social costs of marijuana laws
• Sources and uses of tax revenue
With this list, you're ready to begin researching. Your goal is to
be sure you know something about these themes and that you
have facts to back up what you say With any luck, you will find
that your opinion has been confirmed by others, or you may find
that you need to change your opinion.
Designing a Research Strategy
Once you have sketched what you already know about the topic,
the next step is to design your research strategy, which consists
of answers to three basic questions:
1. Where are you going to look? A good answer to this question
requires more than just saying you will go to an Internet search
engine. Skilled researchers rely on a number of different
resources to find the best facts, data, evidence, and support for
their claims. The next section, “Deciding Where to Go,”
describes the variety of sources you could try.
2. How will you look for your sources? What search terms will
you employ, and how will you modify them to get the best
results? The section “How to Conduct an Online Search” will
offer helpful hints.
3. What do you expect to find? It is a good idea to have at least
some sense of the kinds of facts, data, and evidence you will be
looking for. Your initial outline can serve as a useful resource
for this, but you should be constantly doing a mental update of
arguments that may turn out to be crucial to your speech.
Your answers to these three questions, which you can write
down for reference if you find it useful, will help you orient
your research strategy. First, they will give you a focus and a
goal to return to if you feel you are getting lost in research or
wandering too far afield. Second, they will help you compare
your research practice to your research goals. At every point in

the research process, remind yourself of your answers to these
questions. It's easy to get sucked down a research rabbit hole,
pursuing leads that take you farther and farther from where you
wanted to go. This is normal, and you may even revise your
approach midstream (more on that later, in “Revising Your
Claims”), but you also want to make sure you're staying
disciplined and connected to your original plan.
Deciding Where to Go
Where should you go, virtually or physically, to look for
materials? Three kinds of resources are available to you:
1. electronic media (web-based articles, blogs, and multimedia
resources),
2. print media (newspapers, journals and books), and
3. people (informational interviews and other kinds of
conversations).
Which is best to start with? The answer depends on the topic
you have chosen.
Web-Based Search Engines The big search engines—Google,
Yahoo!, and so on—give you a useful place to start, and they
will provide you with a wide range of sources. Google has
functions for doing not only general web searches but also
searches of blogs, news sources, scholarly articles, and books.
For each of these search engines, do a general search, a blog
search, a book search, and a search for scholarly articles. There
are two good reasons to do all these searches: One, you want
your sources to be as diverse as possible; and two, for certain
topics, you might find relevant evidence in only one area. For
example, if you have chosen a current-events topic, news
sources probably are your best bet because books and scholarly
articles may be outdated, except for general and theoretical
backup. But, if you're talking about a relatively specialized
topic—for example, something scientific or something about
legal or public policy—a news search may not be your best bet.
The expansion of search engines such as Google has made

research easier than ever, but the challenge is to get the best
results from a sea of information.
Google (www.google.com) is one of the easiest and best places
to start a research project. As you've probably discovered,
however, the main challenge is not the lack of sources but,
rather, the need to narrow your search appropriately. A generic
search will give you a broader range of different kinds of
sources, linking to home pages for various organizations, news
stories, blogs, and other online content. Two more specific
functions, Google News (news.google.com) and Google Scholar
(scholar.google.com), can help target your search for materials
a bit more narrowly. Google News (as well as Yahoo! News
at news.yahoo.com) integrates news stories from many
newspapers, TV stations, magazines, and wire services. It's a
good place to search for topics that are either relatively recent
(such as an ongoing political debate) or specific to an individual
locality or event (for example, the rising crime rate in your
city).
Academic Databases for Journals and Other Periodicals
Searching in Google Scholar retrieves academic journals and
reports in a single convenient feed, and it also will link you to a
number of the major scholarly databases (such as JSTOR and
Project Muse, whose articles are accessible through your
campus library). These large collections of journals will give
you a variety of sources in most academic fields. The coverage
may not be as specific as you would like for some topics, but
academic publications can be helpful in giving you a broader
perspective.
________
databases Searchable collections of information that are stored
electronically.
________
The journal articles and reports accessible through academic
databases are peerreviewed—the gold standard for expert
commentary on a topic. So, for example, if your topic is

“climate change is induced by human carbon consumption” or
“free downloads have hurt the music industry,” or any other
topic in which some technical expertise would be useful in
sorting out a question, such databases can be extremely
useful. Peer review is important because it means that the
accuracy and fairness of the source do not rely solely on the
expertise of the person who wrote it, but it also has been
reviewed by other experts in the field. If you need help in
finding relevant scholarly articles, check the FAQ box on
databases, refer to your school library's web page, or talk to a
librarian.
________
peer review Prepublication evaluation of scholarly articles by
other scholars or researchers in the field.
________
Books Searching your library's online book catalog can point
you to resources available in extended print format. Searching
for books can be a bit more tricky than searching for online
resources because books are organized around broader themes
than the topic you're researching. This doesn't mean that you
shouldn't use books but, rather, that you may have to look at a
higher level of generality than you would otherwise. For
example, although you may find a number of good books on the
topic of marijuana legalization, you also might want to look at
more general books about drug policy that contain chapters or
sections about marijuana.
Books can be a great resource for your speeches because they
often are written for nonspecialist audiences, and their authors
have more space to explain their arguments. For each book you
think you might want to look at, take a note of the title, the
authors or editors, and the call number. You may be able to find
the full text of some older books online, but you also may have
to track down books at the library, and you'll need all this
information.
FAQWhat are the best databases for scholarly articles?

Your campus library will have a database for just about any
field that you might find helpful: America, History and Life
(history and American studies, via EBSCO), AnthroSource
(anthropology, from the American Anthropological
Association), Business Source Premier (business journals and
articles, via EBSCO), Communication and Mass Media
Complete™ (communication studies, via EBSCO), and EconLit
(economics, via EBSCO)—and that's just a sampling from the
first few letters of the alphabet!
The major general article databases include the Gale Reference
Library (for general inquiries) Academic Search Premier,
Academic OneFile (great for finding scholarly articles), the CQ
Researcher and InfoTrac (good for current events), LexisNexis
Academic and LegalTrac (law and public policy journals),
JSTOR and Project Muse (humanities), Infotrac, and Science
Direct and SpringerLink (sciences). Most college and university
library home pages have a list of the databases to which you
have access as a student, and a basic description of each.
Interviews and Conversations You may find that you want
information that isn't available online or in a library. If you
know of someone who could have that information, arrange for
an interview or conversation. You might be able to interview an
author of an article you found, an official who has experience
with your topic, or someone directly affected by your topic.
Authors and other experts are superb sources of information,
and they usually can direct you to other research resources.
Officials with day-to-day experience with your topic can both
tell you the significant arguments and issues from their
perspective and give you a sense of what directions you might
take. Finally, people directly affected by the issues you address
can add a personal perspective on what might otherwise be
fairly abstract evidence.
To interview someone, you can make initial contact via email or
phone. Published scholarly articles often are accompanied by
email contact information; if not, they usually will say where
the author works, and you typically can find an email contact

link on a department home page. Various officials typically list
their email contact information on their organization's web
page; if not, you usually can find a phone number for someone
in the organization who can direct you. If you're interested in
talking to someone who is personally affected by an issue, the
challenge is to find a person who meets your criteria—usually
by asking, emailing, or calling around.
When you contact the person you want to interview, clearly
identify yourself, say you are calling for a class assignment, and
have a list of questions prepared. You should record the
interview, if possible, for transcription after the conversation. If
this is not possible, take as extensive notes as possible while
keeping sufficient attention on the conversation. You should
also assure the person that you will send them your notes after
the interview if they would like. If you would like to quote
sources you've interviewed or corresponded with, let them know
you are going to quote them and where, and give them a draft of
the quote so they can review it for accuracy. And be sure to cite
them by name and title in your speech.
Making a Methodical Search
To ensure a solid grasp on your topic, and to convince your
audience you've done the work necessary to be a minor expert
on your topic, you'll want to read and cite evidence from as
many different kinds of sources as you can. You'll notice in
class that the best speeches seem totally complete: The speaker
has tracked down information that silences each doubt you had
in mind as you listened. You must do the same. If you don't
already feel skilled at library research, whether online or in
person, take this opportunity to participate in one of tutorials
that your college library offers and get know a reference
librarian or two; they can be extremely helpful.
Personal interviews often yield information about local issues
that you won't find anywhere else.
You also should be organized and methodical. Keep a running
list of the places you have turned to for research. Note the

search engines you have gone to, the specific versions you have
used (for example, a general Google search, a Google Scholar
search, a Yahoo! news search), and any other databases you
have consulted (compilations of academic journals, websites
that have been particularly helpful, library collections that you
have used), so you can make sure you've researched all the
resources you would like to use, and so you can return to a
resource in case you want to double-check a fact or get more
details.HOW TO CONDUCT AN ONLINE SEARCH
Once you've decided where you would like to look, think about
how to execute your searches. Online searching offers ease and
efficiency, provided you remember a couple caveats: You
shouldn't make your searches too general, because there are far
more sources on most topics than any one person could read,
and search engines are not yet very good at giving you the exact
results that will be useful to you unless you invest some thought
and effort in creating search terms and focusing your search.
Creating Search Terms
To start your search efficiently, create a list of search terms to
use on the Internet and in your library's electronic catalog. Add
to, modify, or eliminate terms as you go, based on how
productive they are. The common themes that popped up in your
initial outline about your topic can be converted into your
initial search terms. Your list can have as many subcategories
as you have themes for your topic, and if your research moves
you in a new direction, you can add new themes and search
terms.
Designing a good search requires trial and error. If your search
terms are too broad, you will waste time picking through useless
sources to find a few gems. If your terms are too narrow, you
will miss many useful sources.
Start with one of the common themes as a search term and read
the first few articles that turn up from that search. You also
could try an “and” search, such as on marijuana and law
enforcement, or marijuana and its health effects. Do “terms of

art” (that is, terms that people in the field use frequently) or
other concepts occur with any regularity? In working through a
first search about our topic example of marijuana legalization,
you would find some search terms to add to your list because
you would get a sense of what phrases people are using to talk
about the issue. For example, after scrolling through the first
few search results, you might add the following terms:
“Marijuana reform”
“Marijuana prohibition”
“Marijuana decriminalization”
You also can experiment with synonyms and subtopics. For
example, if you started with the theme of “social and economic
costs of marijuana laws,” you might try “marijuana
enforcement” and “marijuana and war on drugs” instead of
“marijuana laws.” For “social and economic costs,” you might
try “prison overcrowding,” “law enforcement resources,” “drug
use,” and “drug rehabilitation.”
Try this process with a few of your themes, substituting search
terms that appear in articles you find in your early searches.
What new terms do you find? Don't hesitate to modify your list
and return to it to brainstorm new approaches if you get stuck.
Google Like a Pro
If you were to take this course 20 years ago, a huge portion of
your time would have been spent tracking down research. There
were a few searchable electronic collections of articles, but the
use of Internet sources was in its infancy—and a lot of the
research work would have been done looking up sources,
walking around the library to locate actual hard copies, and then
maybe even using a copier or a microfilm to reproduce them.
Before then, you might have even had to consult a card catalog
or an actual paper index.
Thank heavens for the Internet, and specifically for search
engines such as Google that allow you to search, retrieve, and
look at digital resources without leaving the comfort of your
chair. Whereas in the past the problem for student researchers
was finding materials, these days the primary problem is having

too many resources. You can easily become overwhelmed with
the number of hits you get when composing many searches.
Sorting through pages of results is not only tiring, but if you
aren't careful, it's easy to get a bit lazy and just grab the first
couple of hits that seem relevant to your topic. One way to deal
with this problem is to be smart about how you tailor a search.
Here's a list of advanced search techniques on Google (and
some of these techniques are applicable on other search engines
as well) that will help you create better, more narrowly targeted
searches:
• If you want to search for a specific phrase, put it in quotation
marks: Google will often look for terms that appear together
without quotation marks, but including the quotation marks
directs Google to look for an exact phrase. Exact phrases can be
useful in limiting the number of results that you get, and in
making sure that the results are germane to your topic.
• Learn how to exclude results: one great technique is to include
a minus sign (–) before some words. Typing a minus sign before
a term tells Google to leave out results that include the word
you choose.
• If you want to search for variants of a word, including an
asterisk is a helpful tool. So, if you're searching for variants of
the term “night,” such as “nightly,” “nighttime,” and so on, just
add the asterisk to the truncated version of the word: night⋆ ,
• Try using the search tools button just below the box where you
type in your search on a Results page. It will pull up drop-down
menus that help you limit your search in useful ways, including
limits by date and location. Of course, if you want to produce a
really narrow search, the Google advanced search function can
be incredibly helpful. To find it, google: “advanced search,” or
search at https://www.google.ca/advanced_search
For more information see:
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en
Focusing Your Search

To provide yourself with a good introduction to the material but
not get lost in a multitude of sources, you will have to narrow
the focus of your search terms continually, moving from more
general to more specific searches. If you simply type
“marijuana legalization” into a search engine, you will get many
sources—indeed, far too many to manage (there were more than
9,910,000 hits on Google for that search term at the time of this
writing). You may want to skim a page or two of the results of
this search, but the search term is way too broad for your
purposes.
In your first general searches, look for any political advocacy
organizations, think tanks (advocacy organizations for specific
topics that produce materials for the public to use), or other
groups that have a specific interest in your topic. Make a note
of these websites and organizations and return to them later;
they are often a treasure trove of good, though partisan,
information. (See the FAQ box for more about think tanks and
advocacy organizations.)
FAQWhat are some go-to think tanks and advocacy
organizations?
There are so many think tanks and advocacy organizations that
it isn't feasible to list them all. Here are a few examples,
organized by area of expertise and political persuasion, that will
give you an idea of where to start.
Generally
Conservative
Generally
Progressive
Foreign Policy
The Heritage
Foundation
Brookings
Institution
Domestic Policy

The Cato Institute
Pew Research
Center
Economic Issues
American Enterprise
Institute
Center for American
Progress
Higher Education
Foundation for
Individual Rights in
Higher Education
American Association
of University
Professors
As you continue to narrow your searches, you will find
interesting new angles and arguments on your topic, and you
can begin to revise and refine your outline accordingly. Your
goal is to have a good quotation or statistic to back up each of
the major claims in your speech. (Chapter 7 will discuss more
details about creating an outline of your speech.)
Ai-jen Poo is the director of the National Domestic Workers
Alliance. When she speaks, should she be impartial about the
issues?GATHERING YOUR MATERIALS
If you have followed a research strategy patiently, you should
be compiling a number of interesting leads for research. At this
point in the process, however, you should not be reading your
sources closely, nor should you be taking detailed notes on their
contents. At this stage, you should simply be gathering
materials in an organized way and getting ready to engage them
more fully
You can gather materials electronically or in printed form. If
you gather them electronically, you can download the materials
(articles, news stories, blogs, and so on) to a folder and then
open them individually when you decide to read them. Or you
can cut and paste all the materials into a Word document.

Compiling one big document of research materials has a couple
of advantages: You can easily search your entire research
results for key terms using the Find command. You also can
move quickly between individual documents once you have
combined them into a single document.
If you prefer to collect materials in printed form, you will need
a system for physically organizing the materials (a set of folders
or an accordion file works well), and you probably will have to
pay for copying or printing the files. Although collecting in
hard copy may be a necessity for various reasons, it also
increases the amount of work you will have to do later, because
you will have to transcribe quotations and statistics you would
like to use into the body of your speech.
Regardless of your method, make sure that you have the
complete citation data available for later use. This includes
• the title of the piece,
• the author,
• the journal or book title,
• the publication date,
• the Web address,
• and page range of the piece, if available.
If you download your research materials, this information
usually is part of the package. If you are cutting and pasting
into a single document, be sure to include this
source information or enter it manually. If you are working with
hard copies, write the citation data directly on the hard copy or
keep a running document that is easy to cross-reference with the
hard copyREADING YOUR MATERIALS AND TAKING
NOTES
Now that you have a good-sized pile of materials, dozens of
files, or a long research document, you can turn to reading and
taking notes. Here your challenge will be to read efficiently and
to make your reading count by ending up with good notes that
you can use for your speech. You will want to be able to locate
the quotes, facts, and figures you pulled from the individual
documents without having to spend time rereading everything.

To begin, let's talk about reading strategies. Of course you have
to read carefully, but you also have to read efficiently. Here are
some tips:
• For journal articles, first read the abstract, the first few
paragraphs, the section titles, and the concluding paragraphs.
Use the same approach for long news articles, except they won't
have an abstract. Reading in this way will give you a sense of
the overall argument, and it will clue you in to which sections
are most relevant for your purposes. You may even choose to
skim or skip a few sections on the basis of this preview.
• For news articles, read the first four or five paragraphs
carefully. Because news articles typically begin with the most
important information, these paragraphs usually will give you
the basics of the story. You can skim the later paragraphs to see
whether they might have any useful information.
• For a book, reading the introduction or preface and the table
of contents usually will save you work. Introductions typically
walk you through the organization of the book, and you can
choose to ignore the portions of the book that are not relevant
for your purposes. If the book has an index, use it to look for
specific pieces of information.
• Blog entries do not have a standard format—so there are not
as many reliable techniques for reading them efficiently.
________
abstract Summary at the beginning of a scholarly article.
________
Newspaper articles usually answer the questions “who, what,
when, where, why, and how” in their opening paragraphs, so
when researching newspaper articles, pay special attention to
the beginning.
As you read, take notes that will remind you how the research
will be relevant for your speech and make it easy for you to fit
it into your speech. What kinds of information will be relevant?
• Arguments that directly support points in your original outline
are obviously helpful, perhaps to quote directly.
• Background information can provide context for your speech.

In an informative speech, you might note general information
about the object, process, or event you are talking about. In a
persuasive speech, you might note information that describes
current thinking about the problem you are addressing.
• Facts, statistics, and data can show the significance of your
issue or be memorable because they are unexpected or make a
particularly apt comparison. In an informative speech, you
might note data that describe how widespread or significant an
object, event, or process is. In a persuasive speech, you might
note facts and data that speak to the scope and implications of a
specific problem.
• Quotations from notable people with whom the audience might
connect or regard as important can give you or your argument
credibility. Other quotations are worth noting because they
provide a rhetorically powerful justification for a major point or
add explanatory value by using just the right words.
You can manage this part of the process several ways. One
efficient method is to compile a working document, or a running
list of important facts, quotes, stories, and other arguments that
might fit into your speech. There is no need to organize these
entries yet.
Another method is to identify each note with a tagline. The
tagline is a short phrase describing the role the fact, figure, or
quote might play in your speech. It precedes the actual fact,
quote, or paraphrase of an argument, followed by a page number
and other relevant source information so you can find it in the
original document. It's useful to separate the tagline from the
material you're borrowing by putting one of them in boldface if
you're keeping a Word document, or using two columns if
you're compiling your list by hand. To reiterate, at this point the
entries only have to be distinct from one another; they don't
have to be organized yet; that part comes later. Figure
6.1 shows what a typical tagline note might look like.
In this smaller, more usable research document, keep a running
list of arguments, facts, and quotes distilled from your
collection of research materials As long as your taglines are

clear, succinct, and worded consistently, you'll be able to
retrieve the information you need by using the Find function if
you are working in Word.
Your goal should be to produce 5 to 10 pages of arguments for
the average speech, with each entry containing a small fraction
of the total words in the original research documents.
FIGURE 6.1
The tagline method of taking notes
If you make good choices, once you work all the way through
your collection of research materials, you should be able to
write your speech from the smaller, more distilled research
document.
Of course, there are other ways to take notes. Some people use
note-taking software such as Evernote. Others use an index card
system or more elaborate written notes. However you choose to
distill your reading into a more usable form, the same
requirements apply: You have to be able to access arguments
quickly, find individual items so you can quote or paraphrase
them in your speech, and have all the necessary information to
cite each piece of material properly.EVALUATING SOURCES
As you distill your research into more usable form, you will be
making a number of choices, including the arguments you would
like to use in your speech and the evidence you would like to
muster to prove them. But you should not choose quotes, facts,
or arguments just because they confirm the case you would like
to make. You must consider the credibility of the source. You
may have found some powerfully worded, on-topic, quotations,
but if they aren't from a credible source, you'll use them at your
peril.
Let's take a look at how to evaluate the credibility of different
kinds of sources.
MindTap®
Watch a video, and do an interactive activity.
Blogs

Blogs can be helpful sources of information, but only if the
contributors are knowledgeable and trustworthy. You will want
to find out what the blogger's qualifications are before you
decide to quote from a posting. If evidence of the blogger's
expertise is not included in the About section of the blog, you
can try a web search for the author's name. A world of
difference exists between a blog conversation among qualified
academic or public policy sources and one among random
members of the public. Because blogs are not edited or peer-
reviewed, you should treat the information and arguments you
find there with some skepticism; blogs often represent a specific
point of view.
________
blog A web log, or personal journal, by an individual or a group
of authors.
________
News Articles
News sources can range from highly credible to extremely
biased. Nationally recognized, award-winning newspapers and
magazines usually have experienced reporters, excellent
research staff, dependable fact checkers, and skilled editors.
Some examples are The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune,
The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. But journalists are
not necessarily experts in every area they cover. Staff writers
for local newspapers and wire services may not have expertise
in every topic they have to write about. Once again, you can go
online to research the journalist's background. If he or she is not
a specialist, let the article guide you to research done by more
qualified writers.
Opinion or Advocacy Pieces
Editorials, position papers, and other opinion or advocacy
pieces can give you someone's take on a topic, but you have to
be careful about two issues here: bias and qualification. If you
cite a really powerful article about legalizing marijuana

from www.blazed.com or www.Iheartpot.org, you are not only
potentially citing a poorly qualified author, but you also might
undermine the perception that you are presenting balanced
research on your topic.
FAQWhat is bias?
Bias usually is contrasted with objectivity: The source is either
“interested” or “disinterested.” Interested means that the source
has a stake in the outcome and would like to see things turn out
a certain way. Disinterested means that the source is neutral and
will accept whatever conclusions to which the evidence points.
Even if neither bias nor objectivity exists in a pure form, we can
examine whether a source, an expert, or an institution has a
bias, relatively speaking, toward one side or another of a
controversy. For example, a source may be biased if it has a
significant financial, personal, or other incentive to make a
particular argument.
Bias does not mean that the position of the source must be
dismissed as wrong, but it does mean that you should pay extra
close attention to the evidence that supports its arguments,
because an interest in one side or conclusion can (often
unintentionally) cause people to misrepresent arguments and
evidence.
Majora Carter claims to be an expert in environmental justice
issues. Can you determine from looking at her website or an
online biography whether that claim is justified?
Scholarly, Peer-Reviewed Articles
Peer-reviewed articles by scholars and researchers are available
on general Internet search engines and in databases such as
Gale, InfoTrac, and Academic Search™ Elite, available at your
local library or on your college or university library's web page.
As mentioned earlier, Google has a specific search portal for
academic publications (Google Scholar).
Peer-reviewed articles can be great sources because they have
been subjected to a rigorous editorial process and are likely

written by people with strong qualifications. Even though they
are highly credible, however, they may be too abstract or
specialized to be useful for a general audience. You'll need to
consider your audience when you consider presenting
information for a scholarly publication.
Research studies usually are presented in peer-reviewed articles
and generally are good sources of information. Empirical data
on your position can help answer questions and provide solid
real-world evidence for your claims. Be careful to cite the
conclusions of the study appropriately; if you are either
mischaracterizing or exaggerating a study's conclusion, you can
run into problems.
Wikis
Wikis, such as Wikipedia, are websites whose content is written
and edited by the general public. These can be helpful for an
introduction to a topic and sometimes can point you to other,
more credible sources. Because wikis can be written and
modified by anyone, however, they can't be relied upon, by
themselves, to present accurate information.
________
wiki A website whose content can be created and edited by its
users.
________
In general, Wikipedia is not a reliable source except as a
possible starting point for your research. Citing it in your
speech can damage your credibility by making it seem that
you have taken the easy way out and that you didn't bother to
find more authoritative information to support your claims.
Websites and Web Pages
Websites and web pages can provide a useful source of
information and evidence, depending on the objectivity and
expertise of their author or sponsor.
• Web pages maintained by faculty, research groups located at
universities, and think tanks (such as the Cato Institute and the

Brookings Institution) are generally reliable.
• Websites of nonprofit organizations such as the American
Cancer Society and government research organizations such as
the National Institutes of Health also are generally reliable.
• Corporate web pages often are full of promotional material.
Don't use them as your only source about a product or a
corporation.
• Personal or private web pages can have links to an immense
amount of information on a topic, or they can be one person's
ranting. Cite these as a source only after you have checked the
author's credentials.
See the FAQ box for some additional insights about researching
online.
FAQResearching online is just like going to the library, isn't it?
No. The first rule of Internet research is always this:
Consider the source. Anybody can post anything.
Unlike book and journal publishing, in which a professional
system of editing and fact checking ensures the quality of
what's published, Internet publishing is cheap and private. What
people post is limited only by their time and imagination.
Although many print publications have an editorial stance (The
New York Review of Books is somewhat liberal, The
Economist somewhat conservative), they still have to adhere to
standards of evidence and argument to maintain their readers'
trust. Internet materials don't have to meet these standards, and
their authors don't have to respond to criticism.
This is not to say that all corporate or personal pages are
dubious or irresponsible, just that it's up to you to figure out
which ones are. Let the researcher beware! Be suspicious of
what you find online, especially if it seems too good to be true.
For example, if you go to www.townhall.com, you might think,
“Oh, town halls, OK, this should be a good, neutral source of
information on public debate and discussion of political issues.”
You'd be wrong, however; this site is a portal to many
ultraconservative websites. Nothing is wrong with one-sided

sites—unless you think you're getting a balanced view from
them.REVISING YOUR CLAIMS
Now that you've begun to read the research you collected, you
may want to refine your argument. If you've researched
effectively, you may want to modify your claims, or maybe even
change your opinion on the basis of the work you've done. You
may need to go back and forth between your arguments and your
research several times. Your research may suggest new or better
arguments, or you may find that some of your arguments require
a little more research.
Sometimes when you've collected and read all the sources you
planned to, you can declare victory and say that you've found
enough good support for your original proposition to write a
speech. At other times, the evidence doesn't cooperate—either
because you don't find as much information as you'd like, or
because the majority of your research points in a different
direction from what you originally intended. These bumps in the
road don't represent a failure; they represent the success of your
research: You looked and couldn't find good, credible support
for the case that you wanted to make.
FAQWhat If I Change My Mind Mid-Topic?
The big-picture answer (though not the comforting one if you
have a deadline) is that changing your mind based on your
research is a good thing. It means that you learned something,
and writing a speech should be easy now because you have a
good understanding of both sides of the argument. You still can
use many of your first ideas by introducing them and then
explaining why the research or force of a better argument means
that you, and therefore the audience, should think about the
topic in another, better way.
If this happens, ask yourself what speech you could write on the
basis of the research that you've already collected. You may be
able to write a solid outline for a slightly different speech than
you originally intended. If you have to go back to the beginning
with a revised research plan, though, write a new projected

outline with the arguments you are finding, and look in some
new places, using new search terms. By being persistent,
methodical, and flexible enough to change your plans a bit, you
should be able to create a nice base of research in quick order
and arrive at a robust, well-argued case for your
speech.ORGANIZING YOUR RESEARCH INFORMATION
Once you have a selection of quotes, facts, and data that you are
comfortable with, you can decide how to integrate them into
your speech. The easiest way to do this is to look at all your
taglines and group them into like categories. Take note of the
most frequent themes and group them into sets of similar
arguments. If you've been consistent with your taglines, you
should even be able to write a new outline with your taglines
serving as the specific points. So, for the hypothetical
marijuana legalization topic, the organization outline might
look something like this:
I. Basic facts about existing marijuana laws
a. Tagline/Quote
b. Tagline/Fact
II. Social costs of criminalized marijuana
A. Overloads the criminal justice system
1. Prison overcrowding
a. Tagline/Quote
b. Tagline/Fact
2. Takes up law enforcement resources
a. Tagline/Fact
B. Increases criminality
Tagline/Quote
III. Economic costs of criminalized marijuana
Obviously, such an outline will put you ahead of the curve in
terms of writing an outline for your speech (see Chapter 7). But
don't be concerned if organizing your research doesn't
automatically produce a speech outline or if your speech outline
doesn't end up exactly matching the organization you chose for
your notes. Your goal here is to organize all your research

materials so you can access them quickly when you start writing
your speech.
You should have a number of facts, quotes, and other pieces of
supporting materials for any given point you plan to make.
Order the supporting materials from most useful to least useful,
so you can easily pick and choose between them. What makes
supporting evidence good? The quality of the source, the extent
to which it supports your claim, and other considerations
including, for example, how good the quote sounds, or how
robust the study data are. To choose the supporting material for
your speech, ask whether the individual fact, quote, or piece of
data advances your goals, given the specific audience and
situation. Let's look at this question in a bit more
detail.CHOOSING THE SOURCES FOR YOUR SPEECH
You don't want to cram all your research into your speech. You
have to decide which pieces of information will make the cut
and appear in your speech. When you write a rough draft for a
paper, for example, you do so realizing that you aren't going to
keep all of it. Some material will be fine as is, some will be OK
but in need of improvement, and some will be destined for the
recycle bin. In the same way, you have to gather a large enough
body of research so you can make some good choices about
what to include in your speech and what served only as
background information helping you to understand the topic.
(Your instructor might want this material to appear in the
bibliography you turn in, however.)
How do you choose? For each piece of evidence you're
considering for your speech, ask yourself three questions.
1. What purpose does the information serve for your overall
goal? What will your audience understand about the topic if you
include this quotation, fact, or statistic? Would the audience
miss the information if you did not include it? If the material
advances an argument crucial to your speech, use it. But if it's
on a side issue, even if it's a great quotation, it will distract
listeners from your argument.
2. What kind of evidence is it? You probably will serve your

purpose best if you have an appropriate balance of facts, quotes,
and statistics, because audiences tend to get bored if you
include too many of one kind. A speech that is all quotes or all
statistics can be difficult to listen to.
3. How good is the evidence? This is not only a question of
whether the information helps you prove a point or convince
your audience. Evidence is only as good as its source, and, as
you've seen, not all sources are strong ones.
When you have polished your research skills, you will find that
you will easily discover more sources than you can possibly cite
in your speech, so it's important to choose carefully, and cite
the sources that best help you make your case to your audience.
Championships by local teams are exciting for the audience, but
are they relevant to every sportsrelated topic?CITING YOUR
SOURCES AND AVOIDING PLAGIARISM
One of the essential choices in research is to give credit where
credit is due. There are two reasons. First, showing that
qualified people support your claims helps to prove the
credibility of your case. Second, giving the audience the
necessary information to track down your sources shows that
you're confident in your claims and allows the audience to
continue the conversation you've started. Perhaps most
important, academic life is based on the principle that everyone
should get credit for the ideas that they introduce, giving us
strong practical and ethical reasons to avoid plagiarism.
In Chapter 2, we made the case for not plagiarizing other
people's work. That rule affects you most directly when you're
turning your research into a speech. Because the audience
usually won't receive a written copy of your speech, it can be
easy to plagiarize.
To avoid this potential problem, give credit in two different
places. First, you should say, in the body of the speech, where
you got the fact, quote, statistic, or argument. This is as simple
as naming the person, publication, or organization that produced
the information. For example, you might say in your speech:
“The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws

said in a 2004 report that….” The main thing is to give your
audience a cue that you're relying on someone else's hard work.
Second, you should list the sources that you cite in your speech
in a bibliography. A bibliography is record of all the sources
where you found your information. Think of it as a way for
somebody to look up and verify your information, making sure
that you represented it accurately. Your bibliography has to be
complete enough to allow someone to go to a computer or the
library and look up whatever he or she doubts.
________
bibliography A record of all the research sources for a speech.
________
A common style for organizing the information in a speech's
bibliography is the American Psychological Association (APA)
format, which is standard in the social sciences. (See the FAQ
box for some examples.) You can think of a bibliography
citation as answering four of the journalist's “W questions”:
FAQWhat does APA citation style look like?
Here are some examples of APA citations for different types of
materials you may find in your research.
Book (one author): Larson, Erik. (2014). Dead Wake: the last
crossing of the Lusitania. New York: Crown.
Book (two authors): Keith, W. M., & Lundberg, C. O.
(2008). Essential guide to rhetoric. New York, NY: Bedford/ St.
Martin's.
Book (edited volume; entire book): Sullivan, J. J. (Ed.).
(2014). The best American essays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Book (chapter in edited volume): Chao, P. S. (2006). Tattoo and
piercing: Reflections on mortification. In L. J. Prelli
(Ed.), Rhetorics of display (pp. 327–343). Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press.
Journal Article (one author): Zigarovich, J. (2015). Illustrating
Pip and the terrible stranger. Dickens Quarterly, 32(1), 21–43.
Journal Article (two authors): Arendt, F., & Northrup, T.
(2015). Effects of long-term exposure to news stereotypes on

implicit and explicit attitudes. International Journal of
Communication, 9, 61–81.
Journal Article (three to five authors): Foulger, T. S., Ewbank,
A. D., Kay, A., Popp, S. O., & Carter, H. L. (2009). Moral
spaces in MySpace: Preservice teachers' perspectives about
ethical issues in social networking. Journal of Research on
Technology in Education, 42, 1–28.
Magazine Article (no author, accessed online): Laughter is an
effective catalyst for new relationships. (20015, March
25). Science Daily. Retrieved
from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150316160
747.htm
Newspaper Article (one author, accessed online): Morgenson,
G. (2009, November 11). From an idea by students, a million-
dollar charity. The New York Times. Retrieved
from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/giving/12STREET.ht
ml
Blog Post: Robert Hariman. (2015, March 4). When war is a
memory that won't go away [Blog post]. Retrieved
from http://www.nocaptionneeded.com/2015/03/war-memory-
wont-go-away/
Video Blog Post: UW Madison LGBTCC. (2010, November 22).
Stop the silence [Video file]. Retrieved
from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFW63cjN6xk
Author = who?
Year = when?
Title = what?
Publication = where?
Your instructor may prefer a different style for your
bibliography, but whatever style you use, be consistent, so all
the entries are formatted in the same way Make sure your
citations are complete, so your audience won't have trouble
tracking them down if they choose to do so. If you have more
questions about how to compile a bibliography, talk to your
instructor or a research librarian, or take advantage of the
online research and citation resources at Purdue University's

Online Writing Lab (OWL)
at http://owl.english.purdue.edu/GETTING HELP FROM A
RESEARCH EXPERT
Sometimes when you're conducting your research, impressive
materials seem to be falling off the page or computer screen.
Other times, some additional searching and revision may be
necessary to come up with a well-researched speech. No matter
what, keep trying! If you don't give up the first time you hit a
snag, and if you're flexible enough to revise your speech based
on the research you find, you'll be in solid position to give a
well-supported speech. Obviously, you can go to your
classmates or instructor to compare notes, strategize, and look
for more solutions.
But going to the library and talking to a research librarian is
one of the easiest ways to get over a research hump. Most
college and university libraries have a dedicated staff of people
who are eager to help you compile research. Don't be afraid to
take advantage of this easy and free way to hone your research
strategy. You may save a substantial amount of time and effort
by consulting a research expert early in the process, and the
skills you gain by doing research alongside a qualified
instructor will have benefits for the remainder of your academic
career.
The librarian is one of your best resources for helping you
efficiently find the information you need.Summary
Research requires you to make a number of choices about how
to support the claims in your speech and to make the speech
persuasive and useful for your audience. Saying what you think
in a clear, organized, and persuasive manner is crucial, but you
also have a responsibility to make sound arguments that are
well supported by facts, figures, statistics, and expert opinion.
If you're organized and persistent, you'll eventually find what
you need or make a reasonable revision of your initial
hypothesis.
MindTap®
Reflect, personalize, and apply what you've learned.

Engage in research with a strategy in mind, combining the
knowledge you already have about the topic and techniques for
learning new information, balanced against the time you have
and the research demands of the project. Decide where you will
go for information and how you will execute and refine your
search. Next, make choices about how you will gather, evaluate,
and organize materials and how you will translate them into
notes, or usable chunks of information that you can transform
into a speech. After reading the research you've collected,
consider whether you need to revise the arguments you intended
to make. Finally, choose the quotes, facts, and data to include in
your speech, and make sure you properly credit the work of
others that you have used.
One last reminder: Take advantage of the many resources on
campus for helping you learn to research more effectively.
Seeking them out early in the research process will pay off.
Questions for Review
1. What are your research responsibilities?
2. Describe the process for researching a speech topic. Why is it
essential to have a strategy?
3. How will you generate search terms for your research?
4. How should you keep track of your research?
5. How do you properly cite a source, both in a speech and in a
bibliography?
Questions for Discussion
1. What are the various ways you might use research in your
speech? What, for example, determines whether you need to
directly quote someone? When do quotations distract, and when
do they help?
2. What makes a good source? What makes a poor source? What
are some ways you can tell the difference?
3. What are the biggest roadblocks to research in your
experience? What strategies have you used to overcome them?
Key Concepts

MindTap®
Practice defining the chapter's terms by using online flashcards.
abstract
bibliography
blog
database
peer review
wiki
Chapter 10
Organizational Performance and
Change
OVERVIEW
Formal organizations are, presumably, created for some
purpose; hence, at the end of the day, one key
outcome involves the evaluation of an organization’s
performance in terms of its achievement of this
purpose. Moreover, if the performance is deemed inadequate,
another outcome is change, “righting” the
organization to achieve its purpose. Although on the surface
these issues seem straightforward, a long line of
theoretical and empirical studies provide testimony to how
complicated they really are. In this chapter, we
review this literature to help you understand why both
assessment of organizations’ performance and efforts
to bring about intended, significant changes in organizations are
so difficult.
Many if not most definitions of formal organizations include the
concept of “goal” or “purpose” as a key

element. For example, Blau and Scott (1962:5) assert:
In contrast to the social organization that emerges whenever
men are living together, there are organizations that have
been deliberately established for a certain purpose. If the
accomplishment of an objective requires collective effort,
men set up an organization designed to coordinate the activities
of many persons and to furnish incentives for others to
join them for this purpose.
The idea of a shared goal as a defining feature of organizations
is consistent with commonsense notions of
organizations as being deliberately created to accomplish some
task collectively that individuals, acting alone,
cannot. Barnard’s classic epitome of an organization as five
people trying to move a large rock also reflects this
notion. In line with this, it seems reasonable to step back, at
various points in an organization’s life, to assess
how well it’s performing with respect to its goals. This idea
underlies the definition of organizational
effectiveness as the degree to which “an organization realizes
its goals” (Etzioni, 1964:8). It did not take long,
however, for organizational theorists and researchers to
recognize the problems inherent in conceptualizing
effectiveness this way and in trying to use this approach in
assessing organizational performance (Simon,
1964). Below, we discuss some of the problems of specifying
exactly what the goals of an organization are, and
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some of the ways this is dealt with in different proposals for
assessing organizational performance.
PROBLEMS OF DEFINING ORGANIZATIONAL GOALS
Let’s begin by thinking about how we might determine what the
goals of an organization are. One tack we
could take would be to examine the mission statement or some
other document that offers a formal statement of
the organization’s key objectives. The plural term, “objectives,”
should signal one potential problem here: most
organizations have multiple and, not infrequently, conflicting
aims. ExxonMobil’s Financial and Operating
Review section of their 2006 annual report (pp. 4–5) provides
one example of this. The company’s focal
business operations involve the production and sale of gas and
oil, and you might assume that its goal is to
maximize profits in this business. However, its list of key
objectives includes the following
(http://exxonmobil.com/corporate/files/corporate/xom_2006_SA
R.pdf):
Promoting safety, health, and the environment
Demonstrating sound corporate governance and high ethical
standards
Capturing quality investment opportunities
Maintaining one of the strongest financial positions of any
company
These goals are not necessarily inconsistent, but it is not hard to
imagine circumstances under which the aim of
ensuring individuals’ health and the maintenance of the natural
environment in this industry might be at odds
with that of maintaining a strong financial position. Thus, in
gauging the extent to which the organization has
realized its goals, one problem is: Which goal should be used?

Along with the multiplicity of goals that characterize most
organizations, this list also serves to highlight
another common problem in defining goals, the difference
between what Perrow (1961:855) refers to as
“official” and “operative” goals. He defines official goals as
“the general purposes of the organization as put
forth in the charter, annual reports, public statements by key
executives and other authoritative
pronouncements.” Official goals are usually stated in very
abstract, broad, and hard-to-measure terms, such as
those shown above from ExxonMobil. Operative goals, on the
other hand, “designate the ends sought through
the actual operating policies of the organization; they tell us
what the organization actually is trying to do,
regardless of what the official goals say are the aims.”
Examining the operative goals entails examining the
allocation of organizational resources: to what kinds of
activities is the organization devoting relatively more of
its money, time, and personnel? Operative goals may be linked
directly to official goals, but the fact that they
are defined by the relative allocation of organizational
resources means that they probably reflect choices
among competing values embodied in the latter. Thus, they
could contribute to one official goal, while
subverting another. An illustration of this is provided by an
early study of two state employment agency units
by Blau (1955), who found that although the agencies had the
same official goals, they were clearly
differentiated in terms of what they really were attempting to
accomplish. One unit was highly competitive,
with members striving to outproduce each other in the numbers
of individuals placed, regardless of whether the
placements resulted in a good “fit” for individuals and thus job
retention. In the other unit, cooperation among
the members and quality of placement for job seekers was

stressed.
To make matters even more complicated, operative goals may
develop that are unrelated to official goals.
Perrow (1961) goes on to note:
Unofficial operative goals, on the other hand, are tied more
directly to group interests, and while they may support, be
irrelevant to, or subvert official goals, they bear no necessary
connection with them. An interest in a major supplier
may dictate the policies of a corporate executive. The prestige
that attaches to utilizing elaborate high speed
computers may dictate the reorganization of inventory and
accounting departments. Racial prejudice may influence
the selection procedures of an employment agency. The
personal ambition of a hospital administrator may lead to
community alliances and activities which bind the organization
without enhancing its goal achievement. On the other
hand, while the use of interns and residents as “cheap labor”
may subvert the official goals of medical education, it
may substantially further the official goal of providing a high
quality of patient care. (p. 856)
•
•
•
•
Thus, another issue in defining the goals of an organization is

whether to take the official or operative goals as
the “real” ones.
Even if we were able to construct a reasonable rationale for
making the choice between using official or
operative goals and for assigning primacy to one or two as the
critical goals, we would encounter yet another
definitional problem—specifying the temporal boundary of the
goals. Attaining a particular goal in the short
run, such as maximizing stock price, could be disastrous for a
company in the long run if it achieved this by
failing to invest sufficient resources in technology or basic
staffing. Not making such investments might raise
profits and lead investors and analysts to increase the stock
value in the short run but create serious functional
problems at a later date. This is a key limitation of the classic
economic definition of business organizations’
goals, which is simply to “maximize shareholder value” (Davis,
2005). A rather ironic illustration of the
importance of considering time in the context of defining goals
and assessing goal achievement is provided by
the once-popular management book In Search of Excellence
(Peters and Waterman, 1982). In the early 1980s,
the authors identified a number of companies as high achievers
and sought to define the common properties of
the companies that contributed to this position. Within five
years of the book’s publication, however, a
substantial number of the companies were in very serious
financial trouble. Thus, it may be difficult to decide
what the appropriate time frame for assessing goal attainment
should be.
Apart from examining documents that specify official goals, or
examining the allocation of resources to
ascertain the operative goals, another tack to take in
determining what the goals of an organization are might

simply be to ask current members. You could even ask them to
specify what the single most important goal is.
This approach, however, would likely lead to the identification
of another, rather different problem with the
concept of organizational goal, one summed up by Cyert and
March (1963:26), who assert, “People (i.e.,
individuals) have goals; collectives of people do not.” This
distinction partly reflects concern over the potential
confounding of individuals’ motivation for cooperating in an
organizational context with the outcomes of that
cooperative effort. To go back to Barnard’s favorite example of
five people trying to move a stone, each person
may have a different reason for wanting the stone moved (e.g.,
to make it easier to travel some route, to provide
a dam in a stream, to test a theory of how to move stones with
minimal effort). Thus, if you asked them what
the goal of the enterprise is, each might well provide you with a
different answer.
One way that Cyert and March (1963) propose to deal with this
issue is to conceive of the goals of an
organization as the intersection of the goals of key participants,
or what they call “the dominant coalition” (pp.
30–31). The goal in Barnard’s example (the intersection of the
five individuals’ personal goals) would be
moving the rock to some particular spot. Given this objective,
other individuals may be recruited to participate
in the enterprise in exchange for “side payments,” or
inducements that the key participants provide; in
exchange for these, individuals agree to contribute their
activities to achieve the goals as defined. (You may
remember this model of organizations being discussed in
Chapter 6 on decision-making.) This doesn’t quite get
us out of the thicket of trying to define goals by asking
members, however, since members are still apt to have
different perceptions of what “the organization’s goals” are, and

these will probably be closely allied to what
their main duties are in the organization (Barnard, 1968:231).
Thus, the members of the research and
development group at ExxonMobil might be expected to
perceive the development of new technology as the
key goal of the organization, members of the legal department
might see maintaining safety and health (thus
avoiding crippling lawsuits) as the key goal, and so forth.
Temporal boundaries are also a problem with this approach,
since subjectively defined organizational
goals may also shift over time. This can be the result of a
number of forces, including environmental changes
that lead to new emphases within the organization as well as
changes in members of the dominant coalition
(i.e., turnover in top executives) who set new priorities for the
organization. Michels’s (1949) classic study of
the development of oligarchy in political parties and labor
unions is illustrative of this. As an oligarchical elite
becomes entrenched, the goals that the elites once shared with
the rank and file tend to be displaced by other
goals among elites—such as perpetuating themselves in office
(Tolbert and Hiatt, forthcoming).
There are other sources of shifts in goals, of course.
Organizations may begin to emphasize goals that are
easily quantifiable, at the expense of those that are not so easily
quantified. Universities look at the number of
faculty publications rather than at the more-difficult-to-measure
goal of classroom teaching; business firms
look at output per worker rather than at “diligence, cooperation,
punctuality, loyalty, and

responsibility” (Gross, 1968:542). If organizations do begin to
emphasize that which is easily quantifiable,
then there is a shift of goals in that direction. Goal shifts are
also possible when there is slack in the
organization and it is secure. A study of the National Council of
Churches found that staff interactions guided
by a new professional ideology and strong purposive
commitments contributed to major and radical goal shifts
within the organization (Jenkins, 1977). This study also
suggests that threats to the organization’s domain
would probably lead to a more conservative stance. Finally, an
additional source of goal shifts lies outside the
organization and involves indirect pressures from the general
environment. Economic conditions lead to
expansion or contraction of operations; technological
developments must be accommodated; core social values
and legal requirements shift. Organizational goals are adjusted
to these environmental conditions.
A classic study of changing goals is provided by Sills’s (1957)
analysis of the March of Dimes
Foundation, which had been created to raise funds for the
treatment of individuals who suffered the crippling
effects of polio and for research on this disease. A technological
development, the discovery of an effective
vaccine, essentially eliminated the need for the continued
existence of the organization. You could say that its
effectiveness created the conditions for the organization’s
demise. Since the organization had grown very large
at this point, with a regular, salaried staff that ran it, as well as
legions of volunteer workers, closing down the
organization was not viewed as a desirable option. Hence it

shifted its goals, to raising funds for research on
and ultimately elimination of all kinds of birth defects; this is
not a goal that is likely to be achieved any time
soon.
APPROACHES TO ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS
The preceding discussion of the nature of organizational goals
has convinced you, we hope, that the seemingly
straightforward approach to assessing organizational
performance in terms of goal achievement is fraught with
problems (Campbell, 1977). Nonetheless, the desire of
investors, government agencies, charitable foundations,
and others to be able to evaluate the performance of
organizations spurred efforts to develop other ways of
assessing effectiveness, leading to a variety of proposed
approaches, or models (Georgiou, 1973; Pennings and
Goodman, 1977; Seashore and Yuchtman, 1967; Steers, 1977;
Yuchtman and Seashore, 1967). We describe
some of these below.
System-Resource Approach
One approach advocated by Seashore and Yuchtman (1967),
labeled as the system-resource model, defines an
effective organization in terms of its “ability to exploit its
environment in the acquisition of scarce and value
resources to sustain its functioning” (p. 393). Implicitly, this
approach assumes that the key goal of an
organization is to survive; this is, in the authors’ terminology,
the ultimate criterion of effectiveness, which can
only be assessed over a long period of time. However, they
suggest that there are also penultimate criteria,
whose level of attainment at given points in time will affect the
ability of the organization to achieve the
ultimate goal. In their conception, penultimate criteria have a

number of defining characteristics:
[T]hey are relatively few in number; they are “output” or
“results” criteria referring to things sought for their own
value; they have trade-off value in relation to one another; they
are in turn wholly caused by partially independent sets
of lesser performance variables; their sum in some weighted
mixture over time wholly determines the ultimate
criterion. (p. 379)
These penultimate criteria, in turn, are determined by a large
number of short-term performance measures;
Seashore and Yuchtman refer to these as “subsidiary variables.”
Thus, the conception of effectiveness reflects
the idea that the long-run performance of an organization
depends on how well it performs overall on a variety
of dimensions, even though performance on any single
dimension at any given point in time may be unrelated
(or even inversely related) to its performance on another.
They applied these ideas in a study of seventy-five insurance
companies, from whom they collected all
kinds of financial and other information (over two hundred
variables!) for an eleven-year time period, 1952–
1962. They reduced the number of variables to seventy-six
based on redundancy, missing or poor-quality
information, and so forth, and conducted a factor analysis to
determine which variables “hung together” as

indicators of performance. This resulted in a set of ten factors,
such as business volume (e.g., number of
policies written), new member productivity (relative number of
policy sales by new sales staff compared to
those of older staff), and manpower growth. Some of these
factors, such as business volume, were very stable
over time, whereas others, such as new member productivity,
varied considerably across time—that is, the level
of new member productivity at one point in time was not related
to the level of the same factor at a later point.
Moreover, the strength of the relations among the different
factors was not very consistent. They conclude:
These sales organizations are maximizing their ability to get
resources when they optimize, as an interdependent set,
the ten performance factors isolated. This optimizing process
involves balancing off some exploitative strategies
against others; for example, increased market penetration
against temporarily higher production costs; short-run gains
against deferred gains; exploiting the manager for current sales
as against exploiting him for staff growth and
development. The optimum pattern of performance for each of
the organizations may be unique to the extent that their
histories and environments differ, and they may fall into a
limited number of types of alternative general strategies
that are equally effective as long as each type maintains its own
internal balancing principle. (p. 394)
From the standpoint of thinking about how to assess the
effectiveness of an organization, the primary
implications of this approach are that the conclusions one draws
will depend on what measures are chosen and
at what point in time the data are collected on these measures
(since not all measures of performance at a given
point in time are positively related), and the autocorrelations of
a given measure over time may not be very

high, or even negative. Thus, it offers important caveats, though
not necessarily clear directions for how to
assess effectiveness.
Participant-Satisfaction Approach
Barnard (1968) set the tone for participant-satisfaction models
in his discussion of efficiency, which he defined
in terms of the ability of the organization to attract
contributions from members that were needed for the
organization to continue to exist. (Note that Barnard used the
term efficiency in a way that is a little confusing,
given contemporary definitions of efficiency as the ratio of
inputs to outputs—that is, maximizing outputs with
minimal inputs.) Thus, organizational success was not viewed as
the achievement of goals but rather as
survival of the organization through securing contributions by
providing sufficient rewards or incentives.
Georgiou (1973), building on the work of Barnard, argues:
[T]he emergence of organizations, their structure of roles,
division of labor, and distribution of power, as well as their
maintenance, change, and dissolution can best be understood as
outcomes of the complex exchanges between
individuals pursuing a diversity of goals. Although the primary
focus of interest lies in the behavior within
organizations, and the impact of the environment on this, the
reciprocal influence of the organization on the
environment is also accommodated. Since not all of the
incentives derived from the processes of organizational
exchange are consumed within the interpersonal relations of the
members, organizational contributors gain resources
with which they can influence the environment. (p. 308)
The implication of Georgiou’s argument for effectiveness is that
incentives within organizations must be

adequate for maintaining the contributions of organizational
members and must also contain a surplus for
developing power capabilities for dealing with the environment.
A basic problem with this argument is that it
does not disclose how the incentives are brought into the
organization in the first place. If a major incentive is
money, the money must be secured. To be sure, money is
brought into the organization through exchanges with
the environment, but it appears that the system-resource
approach or a goal model dealing with profit is
necessary before considering individual inducements.
Cummings (1977) approaches effectiveness from a related
perspective. He states:
One possibly fruitful way to conceive of an organization and the
processes that define it is as an instrument or an
arena within which participants can engage in behavior they
perceive as instrumental to their goals. From this
perspective, an effective organization is one in which the
greatest percentage of participants perceive themselves as
free to use the organization and its subsystem as instruments for
their own ends. It is also argued that the greater the
degree of perceived organizational instrumentality by each
participant, the more effective the organization. Thus, this
definition of an effective organization is entirely psychological
in perspective. It attempts to incorporate both the
number of persons who see the organization as a key instrument

in fulfilling their needs and, for each person, the
degree to which the organization is so perceived. (pp. 59–60)
According to this approach, factors such as profitability,
efficiency, and productivity are necessary conditions
for organizational survival and are not ends in themselves. The
organization must acquire enough resources to
permit it to be instrumental for its members. A loosely related
approach argues that more effective
organizations are those in which the members agree with the
goals of the organization and thus work more
consistently to achieve them (Steers, 1977).
Approaching organizational effectiveness from the perspective
of individuals and their instrumental gains
or their goals has three major problems. The first problem,
which is particularly the case for Steers’s approach,
is that individuals have varying forms of linkages to the
organizations of which they are a part. People’s
involvement in organizations can be alienative, calculative, or
moral (Etzioni, 1961, 1975). These different
forms of involvement preclude the possibility of individual and
goal congruence in many types of
organizations. A second, and more basic, problem in these
psychological formulations is that their focus on
instrumentality for individuals neglects the activities or
operations of the organization as a whole or by
subunits. Although the instrumentality approach is capable of
being generalized across organizations, it misses
the fact that organizational outputs do something in society. The
outputs may be consumed and enjoyed by
some, but they also could be environmentally harmful in
general. The outputs may affect people in other
organizations as much as people within a focal organization.
The psychological approach also downplays the
reality of conflicts among goals and decisions that must be

made in the face of environmental pressures. The
problem is basically one of overlooking a major part of
organizational reality. For example, some research
indicates that there is a positive relationship between workers’
commitment to the organization and some
effectiveness indicators such as adaptability, turnover, and
tardiness. No such relationship was found with the
effectiveness indicators of operating costs and absenteeism,
however (Angle and Perry, 1981). Reducing
effectiveness considerations to the individual level misses the
point that there can be conflicts between
desirable outcomes, such as lowered operating costs and
lowered turnover.
A third problem with this individualistic approach is that it
misses the fact that individuals outside the
organization are affected by what organizations do. A study of
the juvenile justice system found that the
“clients” of a juvenile justice system network had clearly
different views of the effectiveness of organizations
such as the police, courts, and probation departments from those
of the members of those agencies (Giordano,
1976, 1977). That is hardly surprising, of course, since the
clients in this case were juveniles who had been in
trouble with the law. Nonetheless, a client perspective on
effectiveness would seem to be a critical component
of any comprehensive effectiveness analysis.
Stakeholder Approach
Inherent in many of these models and in the debates surrounding
them is the idea that it is folly to try to
conceptualize organizations as simply effective or ineffective
(Campbell, 1977). Some (e.g., Pennings and
Goodman, 1977; Perrow, 1977) began to suggest that the
concept of effectiveness requires a referent: you need

to specify for which set of interests an organization can be said
to be effective. This view underlies what has
come to be called a stakeholder approach (or sometimes,
multiple constituency approach) to assessing
effectiveness (Cameron and Whetten, 1981; Connolly, Conlon,
and Deutsch, 1980; Tsui, 1990). This approach
recognizes that different sets of people who contribute to and
are important for the organization are apt to have
differing objectives they seek to satisfy through the
organization and that these differences should be explicitly
recognized (Donaldson and Preston, 1995). Although work in
this tradition shares the recognition that there are
different (and probably conflicting) organizational goals
associated with different (and also possibly
conflicting) groups, it differs in terms of the relative weight
that is assigned to the preferences of different
groups in coming up with an overall assessment of the
organization. Zammuto (1984) identified four distinct
stakeholder approaches on this basis, what he terms relativistic,
power, social justice, and evolutionary.
A relativist approach entails identifying key constituencies,
collecting information from each set of
constituents about the effectiveness of the organization based
on their own criteria, and then presenting the
results to whatever audience seeks it (e.g., Connolly, Conlon,
and Deutsch, 1980). According to Zammuto
(1984), in this approach

an overall judgment of organizational effectiveness is viewed as
being neither possible nor desirable because the
approach does not make any assumptions concerning the
relative primacy of one constituency’s judgments over those
of any other constituency. Instead the relativist evaluator takes
the position that overall judgments should be made by
someone else, preferably the consumer of the evaluative
information. (p. 607)
While the agnosticism of this approach to the question,
“effective for whom?” has some appeal, it’s worth
noting that it provides little or no guidance for possible
organizational change, unless of course all
constituencies converge in a common assessment—intuitively,
an unlikely outcome (Meyer and Zucker, 1989).
It also ignores the likelihood that the constituency that
commissions such collection of data is very likely to be
one controlling critical resources.
A power approach, on the other hand, explicitly uses assessment
criteria based on the goals of the group
that is most critical to the organization, or what has been
referred to as the “dominant coalition.” One way to do
this, presumably, is to let the organizational members negotiate
the criteria to be used in assessing an
organization’s performance; the outcome of such negotiation
can be assumed to reflect the preferences of the
most powerful internal constituents of the organization
(Pennings and Goodman, 1977). Pennings and
Goodman recognize that there are requirements set by both
internal and external stakeholders that must be met
if an organization is to survive, but just meeting these
constraints does not imply that an organization has a high
degree of effectiveness. Rather, effectiveness is indicated by the
degree to which an organization meets or
exceeds the objectives defined by the dominant coalition. If an

organization is a publicly traded firm, many
economists would argue that effectiveness is indicated very
simply in the stock price of the firm (Jensen,
2002); this is the logic behind the notion that “maximizing
shareholder value” should be the goal of all publicly
held businesses. Of course, this ignores the fact that
shareholders are not an undifferentiated group with a
single objective. Employee shareholders, small investors, and
large investors may have very different time
frames for their investments and thus different values at any
given point. In this context, a power approach is
consistent with making “maximize shareholder value” equate to
“maximize the current goals of a few large
investors.” A logical problem with this approach is that
achieving these goals may result in the demise of the
organization, insofar as keeping current stock value high results
in inability of the organization to function in
the long run, as it did at Enron (McLean and Elkind, 2004).
Interestingly, partly in response to the power of
external shareholders, many corporations have in recent years
launched stock repurchase plans, allowing
business firms to buy back stock. Although this practice runs
counter to the logic of “market discipline,” it may
have acquired increased legitimacy as a result of some of the
failures of market discipline, as exemplified by
Enron (Zajac and Westphal, 2004).
The exact opposite of a power approach is what is referred to as
the social justice approach, as advocated
by Keeley (1978, 1984). Building on the work of the social
philosopher John Rawls, Keeley suggests that a
guiding principle for organizational evaluation should be
“maximization of the least advantaged participants in
a social system” (1978:285). Keeley proposes that this approach
could be operationalized by minimizing the
regret that participants experience in their interactions with the

organization. Keeley’s (1984) later work shifts
to the idea of minimizing organizational harm but retains the
same flavor. He recognizes the difficulties
associated with the actual application of the approach but
claims that the approach contains an optimization
principle that goal models do not contain. He argues that it is
possible to specify the manner in which group
regret or harm can be minimized across organizations, though it
is not possible to specify how goal attainment
can be optimized across organizations, given the diversity of
goals. Although this seems hopelessly idealistic at
first blush, Keeley argues for its essential pragmatism in the
long run:
It may seem perverse to focus on regretful organizational
participants rather than on those, possibly more in number,
who enjoy the outcomes of cooperative activity. But the point is
that generally aversive system consequences ought
not, and, in the long run, probably will not, be tolerated by
some participants so that positive consequences can be
produced for others. Systems that minimize the aversive
consequences of interaction are, therefore, claimed to be
more just as well as more stable in the long run. (p. 290)
Finally, an evolutionary approach, as described by Zammuto
(1982), takes into account the possibility that
the relative power and the importance of different
constituencies will change over time and that constituencies’

preferences may change as well. Thus, this approach downplays
the utility (and even underscores the potential
harm) of attempting to evaluate the effectiveness of
organizations at a single point in time. This is certainly
consistent with the cautionary example offered by In Search of
Excellence, which we discussed in the
preceding paragraphs. It suggests that organizations that can
adapt to best meet the demands of an
organization’s most important constituents as these change over
time should be considered to be most effective.
While a stakeholder approach in general seems to be more
sensible than a simple goal-based approach,
one implication of this review is that a stakeholder approach in
fact requires analysts to prioritize stakeholders
on the basis of some underlying values or goals that they
ascribe to the organization—whether this be
satisfaction of the needs of powerful members, realization of
social justice values, or long-term survival of the
organization. Recognizing that such choices need to be made
explicit is a useful contribution of a stakeholder
approach.
Although the ambiguities and problems in assessing
organizational effectiveness have led some to argue
that effectiveness as an overall concept has little or no utility
(e.g., Hannan and Freeman, 1977a), we think that
it would be a serious mistake simply to ignore issues and
findings that have been developed in regard to
organizational effectiveness. As we noted, the perceived need to
evaluate organizations as part of deciding
whether to transact with them—whether by investors,
government agencies, private charities, or others—
remains as strong today as it ever was. If organizational
researchers throw up their hands in the face of
problems involved in assessment, this is not going to mitigate

this pressure. Instead, we advocate the
importance of recognizing issues that have been raised in our
review of previous efforts to help guide efforts to
conduct performance assessment, and to interpret (with due
caution) the outcomes of these efforts. In this light,
let us summarize issues that any effectiveness study should take
into consideration, both in terms of design and
in terms of drawing conclusions.
EVALUATING ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE: KEY
ISSUES
1. Organizations face multiple and conflicting environmental
constraints. These constraints may be
imposed on an organization; they may be bargained for; they
may be discovered; or they may be self-imposed
(Seashore, 1977). Imposed constraints are beyond
organizational control. They involve our familiar
environmental dimensions such as legal requirements and
economic pressures. To be sure, organizations lobby
for legal and regulative advantage, but taxes and regulations are
essentially imposed on organizations. This
imposition is not just from government. A computer or software
manufacturer, such as Microsoft, that develops
new systems is imposing this environment on users, if those
users must adopt the new system to stay “state of
the art.” Bargained constraints involve contractual agreements
and competitive pressures in markets.
Discovered constraints are environmental constraints that
appear unexpectedly, as when a coal company finds
that its vein of ore has run out. Self-imposed constraints involve
the definitions of the environment that
organizations utilize. For example, a study of newspaper
coverage of an oil spill documented the fact that
newspapers differed markedly in the amount of space given to
the spill (Molotch and Lester, 1975).

Organizational policy thus defines the importance of
environmental elements.
Regardless of the source of the constraints, the fact that they
frequently conflict must be stressed, since
efforts to deal with one constraint may operate against the
meeting of another. Indeed, organizational units
facing multiple contingencies are more prone to face design
misfit and lower performance than those in simpler
situations (Gresov, 1989). As a general rule, the larger and more
complex the organization, the greater the
range and variety of constraints it will face. Organizations have
to consider their environments, recognize and
order the constraints that are confronted, and attempt to predict
the consequences of their actions—all within
the limitations on decision-making and rationality we have
considered.
2. Organizations have multiple and conflicting goals. This point
has been beaten to death, but one more
pass is necessary here. A case from the University at Albany is
instructive. It involved a threatened budget cut,
which is an annual event that sometimes results in real cuts and
sometimes does not. In the case being
described, the threatened cuts were severe. Each vice president
had to make up a list of “target” positions in his
or her area. We know that decisions that are made in such
situations are the result of power coalitions. At the

same time, goals do not just disappear. Issues such as the
emphasis on research, needs for the continued
recruitment and retention of high-quality students and faculty to
achieve the goal of being a high-quality
university, and reiterations of the importance of having a safe
and attractive campus were voiced and were
much more than rhetoric. When the cuts were made, they were
based on goals and power coalitions. Both
contained contradictions that were played out in actions.
3. Organizations have multiple and conflicting internal and
external stakeholders, a point that is partly
related to the preceding one. By stakeholders we mean those
people affected by an organization (Marcus and
Goodman, 1991; Tsui, 1990). They may be employees,
members, customers, clients, or the public at large.
Stakeholders can also be other organizations such as suppliers
and customers. Individual and organizational
stakeholders obviously can have different and contradictory
interests (Harrison and Freeman, 1999; Somaya,
Williamson, and Zhang, 2007). Although it may be necessary to
draw conclusions about organizations’
performance, prioritizing the objectives of one set of
stakeholders is very likely to create problems and
pressures from other stakeholders in response.
4. The outcomes of any assessment effort will almost certainly
depend on the time frame that it used.
There are intraorganizational variations in the time frames that
may affect efforts to understand the
performance of the organization as a whole (Lawrence and
Lorsch, 1967). The degree and mix of
environmental constraints also vary over time. Constraints that
were critical at one point may disappear as
threats. New problems arise. Time also plays a role in the
history of an organization, since new organizations

are more vulnerable. How to incorporate the temporal
dimension in assessing effectiveness is essentially one of
judgment. Decisions must be made with regard to the time
frame of reference for analyzing goal attainment, the
nature and phasing of environmental constraints, and the
historical situation of the organization. Failing to
recognize this can lead the analyst and the practitioner to real
problems. For the analyst it is only a poor study;
for the practitioner it is organizational decline or death.
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AND TRANSFORMATION
There is another key outcome for organizations, one that is
often a corollary of efforts to assess performance:
change. With the exception of population ecology, most
organizational research is predicated on the
assumption that change is a pervasive aspect of organizations.
Child and Kieser (1981), for example, assert:
Organizations are constantly changing. Movements in external
conditions such as competition, innovation, public
demand, and governmental policy require that new strategies,
methods of working, and outputs be devised for an
organization merely to continue at its present level of
operations. Internal factors also promote change in that
managers and other members of an organization may seek not
just its maintenance but also its growth, in order to
secure improved benefits and satisfactions for themselves. (p.
28)
But how do such changes take place? Many changes may occur,
if not completely haphazardly, in a
piecemeal fashion that doesn’t reflect consideration of long-
term direction but simply immediate solutions to
immediate problems as they are perceived. At some point,
though, members of an organization may stop to

take a longer-term view of how it is functioning (either
voluntarily or because circumstances—e.g., imminent
failure—dictate this) and decide that some significant
alterations in operations are needed. There are a number
of different lines of work that address the challenges of
bringing about change in organizations, ranging from
problems of organizational learning to those of large-scale
organizational transformation. Below, we review
some of the main ideas from these literatures.
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE: LEARNING AND
TRANSFORMATION
Closely aligned with work on organizational decision-making,
research and theory on organizational learning
has examined how organizations get, interpret, and act on
information that leads to changes that are designed to
improve their functioning. Glynn, Lant, and Milliken (1994)
distinguish two different strands of research and
theory on this topic. One, referred to as adaptive learning, is
very directly tied to work from the Carnegie
School on processes of decision-making (Cyert and March,
1963; March and Simon, 1958; Simon, 1957). This
work focuses on linking the cognitive processes of individuals
to structural properties of organizations (Argote
and Greve, 2007). The other, referred to as the knowledge
development approach, comes out of research on
small groups in social psychology and focuses primarily on

factors that affect communication and patterns of
interaction among members of a group.
An Adaptive Learning Approach
The adaptive learning approach is predicated on the view of
organizations as a series of programs, or sets of
rules, for making decisions that lead to the accomplishment of
various tasks. Routine use of these programs
economizes on individuals’ decision-making efforts and
contributes to the efficiency and reliability of
organizations’ outcomes. However, when programs fail to yield
outcomes that are at or above some standard
that has been set (e.g., the organization’s revenues drop below
the past quarter’s or those of the past year), a
search for new programs, or a nonroutine revision of the
existing programs, is set in motion. March and Simon
(1958:174–175) suggest that the beginning of a round of
learning in organizations entails the “devising and
evaluation of new performance programs that have not
previously been a part of the organization’s repertory
and cannot be introduced by a simple application of
programmed switching rules.” (Their view of programs
includes the notion that organizations may have established
rules for changing programs; when the programs
yield unsatisfactory results and the established rules for
changing the programs also fail to yield satisfactory
results, search processes—and learning—begin.) This approach
assumes that organizational search is usually
relatively limited, in part because choices for new programs are
shaped by existing programs because these
create cognitive frameworks and categories for analyzing
problems (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990). Thus,
learning (and hence change) in organizations is viewed as
occurring incrementally and as being reflected in the
systematic alteration of standard sets of decision rules, or

programs. This latter point is important because
“organizational learning” connotes more than the acquisition of
knowledge by individuals; for individuals’
knowledge to become part of the knowledge of an organization,
it must be embedded in rules and common
procedures that enable it to persist (Carley, 1992; Levitt and
March, 1988).
An illustration of research in this tradition is provided by a
study of accidents among U.S. commercial
airlines by Haunschild and Sullivan (2002). The question the
authors address is whether organizations are more
likely to learn from accidents that have complex, more
ambiguous causes (what they call heterogeneous
accidents) or clearer, easier-to-diagnose causes (homogeneous
accidents). Heterogeneous accidents often
involve a series of events (e.g., a warning light coming on
indicating engine problems, a pilot’s failure to notice
and/or notify anyone of this, a lack of required maintenance
checks by the crew), thus requiring a deeper
analysis of a broad range of possible underlying sources of
problems. They note that this complex analysis is
likely to generate debate among people charged with evaluating
the causes, entailing more a carefully
developed articulation of suspected problems and possible
solutions. In this light, heterogeneous accidents
might be expected to produce greater organizational learning.
On the other hand, they also make the case that
homogeneous accidents, especially when they occur repeatedly,
may make a particular problem more salient
and increase the perceived need to address it. Hence, the
opposite prediction, that learning will increase as the
number of homogeneous accidents increases, could be seen as
plausible. Using reduction in the rates of
accidents over time (between 1983 and 1997) as an indicator of
organizational learning, Haunschild and

Sullivan found that, in general, heterogeneous accidents were
more likely to lead to organizational learning.
However, the impact of this depended partly on whether the
organization was a generalist (indicated by having
a variety of types of airplanes in its fleet) or a specialist
(having only a single type of airplane). They argue that
the complexity of generalist organizations makes processing of
information more difficult, and this makes
learning from heterogeneity more difficult as well. In line with
this, they found that heterogeneous accidents
led to greater learning among specialist airlines, but not among
generalists. However, unlike specialists,
generalists also seemed to learn from others’ experiences as
well as from their own. This may be because
generalists are often larger and are apt to have the resources to
engage in more intensive monitoring of
what is happening in the industry in general. Thus, this research
focuses on the link between structural
conditions (organizational complexity) and processes involved
in organizational learning (drawing causal
inferences), which is characteristic of an adaptive learning
approach. Because the authors use archival data,
they could not directly examine the creation or modification of
programs that presumably underpin the
reduction of accidents. (For a more close-grained analysis of
such processes, see the interesting observational
study of product development teams in two firms conducted by
Miner, Bassoff, and Moorman, 2001.)

There is a separate line of studies of innovation in organizations
(e.g., Damanpour and Evan, 1984; Hage,
1980, 1999; Moch, 1976; Moch and Morse, 1977; Pennings,
1987; Zaltman, Duncan, and Holbek, 1973) that
could also be viewed from an adaptive learning approach,
although the connections are not always drawn
between these studies and the latter approach. Part of the reason
for this is that many studies of innovation do
not explicitly focus on the interaction between the cognitive
properties of individuals and structural properties
of organizations, as an adaptive learning approach does.
Instead, much of the work on innovation has been
concerned with identifying characteristics of innovations that
make them more “adoptable” and characteristics
of organizations that make them more “adopting.” An
innovation is defined as a significant departure from
existing practices or technologies (Kimberly and Evanisko,
1981). (The parallels between this concept and that
of March and Simon’s notion of changing performance
programs, as we described above, are worth noting. To
repeat, March and Simon defined change as involving “new
performance programs that have not previously
been a part of the organization’s repertory and cannot be
introduced by a simple application of programmed
switching rules.”) Zaltman, Duncan, and Holbek (1973)
proposed a long list of factors that make innovations
more likely to be adopted, including lower cost, compatibility
with the existing organizational systems, the
ability to be modified later, a lack of complexity. On the other
side, Hage and Aiken (1970) proposed a list of
organizational characteristics that were posited to increase the
propensity to adopt innovations. These included
greater decentralization, less formalization, greater emphasis on
quality (versus volume) in production, and
higher levels of training among organizational members. There

was, over a period, some debate in this
literature over the relative importance of the characteristics of
the innovation, organizational characteristics,
and characteristics of decision-makers in determining the
propensity of organizations to adopt innovation (e.g.,
Hage and Dewar, 1973 versus Baldridge and Burnham, 1975),
which ultimately concluded that all factors
interacted as influences (Damanpour, 1991).
In general, work from the adaptive learning tradition, in
combination with some of the older studies of
innovation, suggests a number of factors that often impede
organizational learning. One is that individuals’
cognitive preferences for stability and the use of routine
programs often lead to a lack of recognition of
“failures” in the programs (Milliken and Lant, 1991). This is
consistent with the findings of a study by Manns
and March (1978) of university departments, that under
conditions of financial constraint, more powerful
departments were less likely to innovate, in terms of offering a
wider variety of courses, changing the number
of credits assigned to courses, and so forth, than weaker ones.
One way to interpret this finding is that increased
power and resources enable members to indulge their cognitive
preferences for stability. Another impediment
to learning is organizational structure, particularly structure that
contributes to the perpetuation of existing
programs. This notion is consistent with the findings of Hage
and Aiken, that greater formalization leads to less
innovation. In other words, encoding performance programs in
writing makes them less likely to be targeted by
“problemistic search” (Cyert and March, 1963) and thus less
likely to be modified. Interestingly, another
barrier to learning, suggested by March (1991), is incremental
learning itself. Incremental learning, in March’s
terms, involves “exploitation” of an organization’s existing

knowledge base—members become used to making
small alterations in organizational practices and procedures and
viewing this as the right way to go about
changing the organization. This typically limits what he calls
“exploration,” the search for very different
knowledge and ideas that might call the organization’s existing
knowledge base into question. Thus, when the
conditions facing organizations change dramatically, those
organizations that have acquired the greatest
competence in operating in previous conditions are apt to find it
most difficult to adapt and are most vulnerable
to failure.
A Knowledge Development Approach
Although adaptive learning and knowledge development
approaches overlap, a distinguishing feature of work
that we would characterize as part of the latter tradition is the
attention given to relational influences and social
processes that affect knowledge transfer—the understanding,
sharing, and accepting (or not) of information and
ideas that lead to different ways of doing things in
organizations. Researchers have examined a variety of group
characteristics that may affect such transfer processes. For
example, Edmondson (1999) studied the impact of
culture, in particular, a culture that fosters a sense of
psychological safety, “confidence that the team will not
embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.” Using
data collected from a number of independent

teams in a manufacturing company, she concluded that
psychological safety led to enhanced team performance,
as measured by self-reports from members of each team and her
own observations of each team’s performance.
On the basis of her research, she attributes this relationship to
the greater efforts of team members in
psychologically safe groups to engage in learning behaviors
such as discussions about how to improve the
team’s operations and collection of data relevant to the team
from a wide variety of sources. Another example
is provided by a study by Darr and Kurtzberg (2000), who
considered the impact of similarity among
franchises (including location, customer base, and strategy) on
franchisees’ propensity to adopt ideas and
practices from each other. They found that firms were most
attentive to others that were pursuing similar
business strategies and were more likely to learn from them,
indicated by the relationship between a given
firm’s changing production costs and those of other firms.
One last example that we’ll offer comes from an experimental
study examining the impact of shared social
identity on the transfer of knowledge (Kane, Argote, and
Levine, 2005). Following a line of studies that have
suggested personnel changes as an important mechanism for
transferring ideas and information across groups
and organizations (e.g., Boeker, 1997), participants in the
experiment were divided into sets of two teams, each
containing three members, and each team was given the task of
assembling origami sailboats. To manipulate a
sense of shared social identity, some pairs of teams were given
a common superordinate team name along with
name tags of the same color and were intermixed around a table
while the general task was explained to them.
The pairs of teams without a shared identity were not given a
common name, each team had different colored

name tags, and the teams were seated on opposite sides of the
table while the task was explained. The teams
were then separated into two rooms, where one team was
provided with a set of instructions for constructing
the sailboats very efficiently, while the other team was provided
with instructions that were less efficient. After
the teams had worked for awhile, one member of each team was
rotated into the other team. The researchers
were interested in seeing whether having a superordinate team
identity would affect the ability of the rotated
member to influence the methods the team used in constructing
the sailboats. They hypothesized that when the
rotated member had been trained using the more efficient
method (had superior knowledge), the team would be
more likely to change their method than when the rotated
member had been trained with the less efficient
method (had inferior knowledge), but this would only occur
when the two teams had a superordinate identity.
The results of the study supported their hypotheses. When teams
shared a superordinate identity, they adopted
the superior method 67 percent of the time in the first trial, and
75 percent of the time in the second.
(Surprisingly, teams with a superordinate identity adopted an
inferior method brought by the rotating member 8
percent of the time!) In contrast, when the teams did not share a
superordinate identity, they only adopted the
superior method brought by the rotating member 25 percent of
the time. Thus, this study provides strong
evidence of the influence of social relationships on groups’
willingness to accept ideas and information and
thus to learn.
Percentage of Teams Adopting Methods of Rotated Team
Member
Adapted from Aimee A. Kane, Linda Argote, and John M.

Levine, “Knowledge Transfer between Groups via Personnel
Rotation: Effects
Trial Rotating Member Has Superior Knowledge Rotating
Member Has Inferior Knowledge
Superordinate Identity Condition
1 67 8
2 75 0
No Superordinate Identity Condition
1 25 0
2 25 0
of Social Identity and Knowledge Quality,” Organizational
Behavior and Human Decision Processes 96 (2005): 62.
In general, work in this tradition, like that of adaptive learning,
also indicates that there are many barriers
to organizational learning (Argote, 1999), although, as noted,
the barriers underscored by the knowledge
development literature involve relational influences rather than
the sorts of cognitive tendencies and limitations
emphasized by work in the adaptive learning tradition.
In combination, the two traditions suggest that there are
substantial barriers to incremental organizational
learning and, hence, to organizational change. To make matters
worse, there are occasions when even

incremental learning and incremental organizational change are
not sufficient, when organizational survival
requires major transformational changes. This brings us to the
debates and research on organizational
transformation.
TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE
Although bringing about incremental change in organizations
may not be easy, particularly change that truly
improves organizational functioning, both research and
everyday observations of organizations attest that this
sort of change does occur with some frequency. On the other
hand, there is much more debate about both the
frequency of occurrence and the general efficacy of
transformational change. The concept of transformational
change connotes a significant alteration in some core property
of organizations, such as official goals and
mission, basic technology, or other aspects that are central to
their identity. By identity, we mean features that
members and nonmembers use to “distinguish the organization
from others with which it might be
compared” (Albert and Whetten, 1985:265; see also Dutton,
Dukerich, and Harquail, 1994). As we noted in our
discussion of population ecology in Chapter 9, two key premises
underlying this theoretical framework are that
fundamental change in organizations is extremely rare
(excluding death as a type of change, of course) and that
efforts to bring about transformational change are almost
always fatal. A huge practical management literature
on how to change organizations certainly provides strong
testimony to arguments of powerful inertial forces in
organizations and the difficulties inherent in bringing about
significant organizational change. This was also
acknowledged by an early analyst of organizational change,
Herbert Kaufman (1971), who noted:

In short, I am not saying that organizational change is
invariably good or bad, progressive or conservative, beneficial
or injurious. It may run either way in any given instance. But it
is always confronted by strong forces holding it in
check and sharply circumscribing the capacity of organizations
to react to new conditions—sometimes with grave
results. (p. 8)
Kaufman went on to describe the factors within organizations
that contribute to resistance to change. These
include the “collective benefits of stability” or familiarity with
existing patterns, “calculated opposition to
change” by groups within the organization that may have
altruistic or selfish motivations, and a simple
“inability to change” (p. 3). The last point refers to the fact that
organizations develop “mental blinders” that
preclude change capability. This happens as personnel are
selected and trained to do what was done in the past
in the manner in which it was done in the past.
However, whether the likelihood of transformational change in
organizations is quite as miniscule as
suggested and whether such change is likely to do mortal harm,
especially, are subject to contention.
Case Studies of Organizational Transformation
There is a venerable tradition in sociology of case studies that
have examined instances of transformational
change. We’ve discussed some of these, such as Sills’s (1957)
study of the March of Dimes Foundation, the
organization that redefined its key mission to be the eradication
of birth defects after its original mission,
eradication of polio, was accomplished through the discovery of
a vaccine. As described in Chapter 9, the case

of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)—the organization that
was founded to provide services for the
desperately impoverished farmers of the Deep South during the
Great Depression, but that ended up serving
primarily the wealthier farmers in the region as a result of co-
optation—is another example (Selznick, 1966).
This is a case where the operative goals, as we discussed in a
preceding section, were substantially changed,
though the official goals remained the same. Clark (1972)
compared three cases of private colleges, Reed,
Antioch, and Swarthmore, each of which underwent major
transformations in its curricular emphases and
academic orientations. Still another case of transformational
change is provided by a study by Zald (1970) of
the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) (see also Zald
and Denton, 1963). Zald’s analysis provides
very useful insights into factors that affect organizational
transformation, so we’ll describe this in a little more
detail.
Founded in London in the mid-1800s, the YMCA was originally
created to recruit young men who had
migrated from the country to urban areas in pursuit of new
industrial jobs to evangelical Christianity. In
exchange for cheap meals and information on “wholesome”
boarding houses and jobs, the migrants were
expected to attend missionary church services and ultimately to
become members of evangelical churches

associated with the YMCA. In the United States, new
immigrants to the country were often the targets of the
organization’s outreach efforts. However, as the flood of
immigrants in the late 1800s turned into a small
stream by the early 1900s and as secularization became a
prominent trend, the emphasis of the organization on
religious conversion shifted to developing the “whole man” by
providing an array of physical, social, and
intellectual activities. In addition to changing the primarily
goal, the organization also changed its primary
client group as well, from exclusively young Protestant men to
include women and members of other religious
denominations as well.
Zald’s analysis focuses on the characteristics of the
organization that enabled it to undertake this
transformation successfully. One is the broad formulation of the
organization’s initial goal, which was to
contribute to members’ development of strong moral character.
As he points out, this goal permits enormous
potential diversification, since a wide range of activities can be
viewed as being perfectly consistent with that
objective; it also does not limit the set of target clients served
by the organizations’ activities. In addition, the
organization’s primary means of financing, through the dues
paid by members, encouraged it to pay close
attention to changing environmental conditions—that is, to the
wants and interests of potential members. As he
suggests, dependence on a single constituent, such as a
particular church or charity, would almost certainly
have muted the impact of changes in societal preferences and
attitudes on organizational decision-makers’
choices of services to provide. Adaptation to the environment
was also facilitated by the federated structure of
the organization, in which local associations were provided with
considerable autonomy, allowing them to

make changes that were consistent with local conditions. More
recent research suggesting the importance of
“interconnected organizational forms,” such as franchises and
strategic alliances (e.g., Baum and Ingram, 1998;
Powell, Koput, and Smith-Doerr, 1996), in helping spread ideas
and information (Argote et al., 2000) supports
the idea that this structure may also have facilitated
organizational learning among different parts of the
organization.
All of these studies provide fascinating insights into processes
that promote and accompany organizational
transformations. As a set, they suggest that transformations are
apt to occur when major environmental changes
take place that limit organizations’ ability to continue to get
resources without changing (e.g., technological
advances in the March of Dimes Foundation, changes in
demographics and dominant cultural values in the
YMCA). Clark’s (1972) study of the three colleges, in
particular, underscores the key role played by
organizational leaders in selecting and promoting a specific
response to changing environmental conditions.
This is consistent with the popular management literature on the
importance of transformational leaders (Bass,
1985; Burns, 1978; Judge and Piccolo, 2004). It’s worth noting,
however, that Lipset’s (1960) study of the way
in which the efforts by socialist party leaders, swept into office
by Canadian elections in the 1930s, to
transform provincial governance were effectively sabotaged by
lower-management civil servants sounds a
cautionary note for this literature. Zald’s study suggests the
importance of diversified resource dependencies,
rather than more concentrated dependence, in enabling
organizations to undertake transformational efforts.
However, there is one important point to note here: because
they are all studies of organizations that undertook

and survived the transformation process, we are limited in
drawing conclusions from these cases about the
kinds of organizations that are likely to undertake
transformations (since we have no comparative information
on organizations that faced similar conditions and did not seek
to transform themselves), or the conditions that
allow transformations to be successful (since we lack
information on organizations that tried to transform
themselves and failed). However, a number of more recent
studies coming out of the tradition of population
ecology, based on comparative data from organizations
undergoing transformational change, provide more
systematic insights.
Comparative Studies of Organizational Transformation
As we discussed, population ecologists’ arguments for selection
as the key mechanism in producing observed
shifts in organizational populations rest on the assumption that
organizations rarely undergo significant change
and that when they do, it’s likely to be fatal to their survival
(Hannan and Freeman, 1984). The latter
assumption, in particular, has been put to test by a number of
studies in this tradition, with less than
overwhelming support for it.
For example, Kelly and Amburgey (1991) studied the impact of
going from a specialist airline (carrying

only one type of product—mail, passengers, cargo, and so on) to
a generalist airline (carrying mixed types of
products) and vice versa, using data from the airline industry
between 1962 and 1985. This industry was
affected by a significant environmental jolt (Meyer, 1982) in
1978, in the form of deregulation. A rapid
increase in the foundings of new airlines in the wake of this
change increased competition among airlines
enormously and led many of the airlines to make key shifts in
their strategy, reflected in changes from
specialists to generalists and the reverse. This is notably
inconsistent with the argument that organizations tend
toward inertia; moreover, Kelly and Amburgey’s findings
indicate that neither a shift toward specialism nor
one in the opposite direction, toward generalism, had any
significant impact on the airlines’ chances of
survival. Likewise, Kraatz and Zajac (1996) found that the
adoption of business and other professional
programs by liberal arts colleges—a shift that sharply
contradicted their identity as generalist educational
institutions—had no significant negative effect on their survival
chances. Research by Haveman (1992) on
savings and loan organizations (thrifts), members of an industry
that was also significantly shaken up by the
wave of deregulations that swept the United States in the 1980s
as well as by rapid computerization during this
decade, also challenges the notion that transformational changes
generally raise rates of organizational failure.
As deregulation and other economic changes made the two key
traditional activities of thrifts, maintaining
savings account for small investors and providing fixed-rate
residential mortgages, less and less profitable,
many attempted to move into new domains, such as
nonresidential (commercial) mortgages, various types of
investment activities, and other consumer loans (e.g., credit
cards, automobile loans). Haveman examined the

impact of these kinds of domain shifts on thrifts’ financial
performance and their survival chances. She found
evidence of substantial change in these organizations over time:
the average level of firm assets invested in
residential mortgages dropped from nearly 80 percent in 1977 to
just about half in 1986. Moreover, the more
thrifts diversified into other financial domains, generally, the
better their financial performance, at least in the
short term. Not all domain changes had a positive effect in
terms of enhancing survival; most had no effect on
this, although a few actually increased the likelihood of
survival. Again, as with the Kelly and Amburgey
study, these results run counter to arguments that selection is
almost inevitably the primary motor of population
change. Other studies, however, have provided some evidence
that core changes in organizations have negative
consequences (e.g., Amburgey, Kelly, and Barnett, 1993).
As Baum (1996) cautions, much remains to be understood about
the conditions under which
organizational transformations will yield successful outcomes
or the opposite. Older and larger organizations,
for example, may have the resources and the reputation to invest
in making significant changes and to ride out
the difficulties in operations that are apt to occur with change,
whereas smaller, younger organizations may
lack these. This is in contrast to the usual image of the latter
sorts of organizations as being more flexible and
more adaptive; perhaps this holds for smaller changes, but not
transformational ones. Some evidence along
these lines is provided by another study of the thrift industry by
Haveman (1993a). In this study, she examined
how size affected the organization’s propensity to shift
domains. Her results suggested that for some types of
domain changes, both very large and very small organizations
were at a disadvantage. Her proposed

explanation is that small organizations lack the resources to
undertake significant change, whereas the largest
organizations tend to be the most bureaucratized; thus, it takes
much more effort to bring about significant
alterations in practices. For some types of domain changes,
though, it appeared that the larger the
organization, the more likely it was to make the change. It may
be that entry into some markets, or some kinds
of transformation, simply requires such concentrated efforts and
large expenditures of resources that only very
large organizations can undertake them. In other cases, the level
of resources required may be high, but not so
high as to make it out of reach of more medium-sized
organizations, who are less held back by high levels of
formalization, complexity, and other correlates of size.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
In this chapter, we have considered two basic outcomes for
organizations: evaluation of performance and
change. We assume that generally the latter outcome reflects the
former, although performance evaluations
may not be conducted as fully as the literature that we discussed
on effectiveness and performance suggests
they should be. The absence of regular, full-blown assessments
of effectiveness in many organizations is
understandable, in light of our discussion of the complexities
involved in this task. However, as we argued,

awareness of such complexities may be useful and shouldn’t
necessarily lead to abandoning these efforts in
despair. As some of the literature on adaptive learning suggests,
organizations may undertake changes with
little sense of what the nature of the problem to be solved is,
which of course stymies efforts to produce
outcomes that have real benefits (Cohen, March, and Olsen,
1972). And there is an underlying theme in much
of the practical management literature, at least, that
organizational change is inherently desirable. We suspect
that acting on this assumption is very conducive to garbage-can-
model processes. Moreover, as a sterling
example of contemporary organizational malfunctioning and
mismanagement, the case of the Enron
Corporation should highlight the dangers of undertaking change
without careful reflection of where this might
lead. This corporation embodied, in many ways, current
prescriptions for changing organizations: strong,
charismatic leaders who imbued members with a sense of
complete commitment to the organization, the
creation of a strong culture through careful selection of
members to fit with the organization’s values and
through rituals that embodied these values, alignment of the
reward system with that culture and the
organization’s objectives, and so on. These features did in fact
result in the transformation of a relatively small
organization operating routinely in the business of selling gas
and oil properties into a mammoth investment
corporation and, to the dismay of many stockholders and
employees, into a fraudulent operation on a scale not
witnessed within the last century or more (McLean and Elkind,
2004). Periodic evaluations of organizational
performance may be fraught with ambiguities and difficult
choices, but they do have the advantage of
encouraging reflection on what the organization is doing.

This brings us to the point of departure for this book.
Organizations are powerful members of our society;
their actions and outcomes affect not just those directly
involved in day-to-day operations—employees,
stockholders, suppliers, customers and clients—but whole
societies and international communities. They are
very complex actors indeed, and many puzzles about how and
why they operate the way that they do and under
what conditions they change or refuse to change remain. By
surveying research and theory, we have tried to
provide you with insights into their functioning that we hope
will prove useful to you both as a member of
organizations and as a member of society who will participate
in shaping the rules and environments that
govern these powerful actors.
EXERCISES
Discuss the goals, environments, and stakeholders of your two
organizations. To what degree are
contradictions or conflicts present?
Pick a change that occurred within your organizations that you
witnessed, or heard about. What were
the factors that led to the change, and what was the process
through which change occurred (how did the
search take place, what solutions were considered, why was a
given solution chosen)? Were the changes
successful, would you say?
1.
2.

Chapter 7
Communication
OVERVIEW
This chapter deals with a topic that has been implicit and
explicit throughout the preceding chapters. Power
is exercised, leadership is attempted, and decisions are made on
the basis of communication. Organizational
structure shapes communication. The chapter starts with the
obvious fact that individuals are at the core of
the communication process. Individuals perceive or
misperceive. Organizational factors are then introduced.
Both individual and organizational factors contribute to
communication problems. The problems are
omission, distortion, and overload. Finally, possible solutions to
communication problems are presented.
Organizations are information-processing systems. A vivid
metaphor portrays the organization as a brain
(Morgan, 1986). This imagery captures the idea that
organizations receive and filter information, process it in
light of what they have already learned, interpret it, change it,
and finally act on it. Organizations also have
memory lapses. To take the imagery even further, there are
mind-altering stimulants and depressants—
organizational highs and lows.
The communication process in organizations contains elements

that are strongly organizational and
strongly individual. At the individual level, consider the simple
example of classroom examinations. If there
were not individual differences in cognition and interpretation,
everyone would give the same answer to an
essay question. That obviously does not happen, as every
student and faculty member knows. The
organizational input into the communication process comes
from the structured communication channels and
the positions that people occupy. Organizational positions
strongly influence the interpretation of
communications by individuals. In this chapter, the factors that
affect the sending, receiving, perception, and
interpretation of communications will be examined.
THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNICATION
Organizational structures, with their varying sizes,
technological sophistication, and degrees of complexity and
formalization, are designed to be or evolve into information-
handling systems. The very establishment of an
organizational structure is a sign that communications are
supposed to follow a particular path. Power,
leadership, and decision-making rely upon the communication
process, either explicitly or implicitly, since
they would be meaningless in the absence of information.
Organizational analysts have ascribed varying degrees of
importance to the communication process.

Barnard (1968), for example, states: “In an exhaustive theory of
organization, communication would occupy a
central place, because the structure, extensiveness, and scope of
the organization are almost entirely determined
by communication techniques” (p. 91). This approach
essentially places communication at the heart of the
organization. More recently, Stinchcombe (1990) made
communication the essence of his analysis. Other
theorists, however, pay scant attention to the topic (e.g.,
Aldrich, 1979; Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980). Instead of
declaring that communication is either at the heart or at the
periphery of organizational analysis, a more
reasonable view is that communication varies in importance
according to where one is looking in an
organization and what kind of organization is being studied.
Communication is crucial for organizational managers and their
work. Managers spend an overwhelming
proportion of their time in communications (Kanter, 1977).
These communications usually involve face-to-face
interactions with subordinates, superiors, peers, and customers.
There are also meetings of one kind or another.
E-mail and telephone messages have to be answered. In short,
the business of the managers is communication.
It is estimated that 80 percent of managers’ time is spent on
interpersonal communications (Klauss and Bass,
1982). The work of clerical personnel is overwhelmingly
concerned with information processing. Changing
information technology is having a major and unfinished impact
on managerial and clerical work and thus on
organizations.
These intraorganizational differences are important. Equally
important are interorganizational differences.
Communication is most important in organizations and

organizational segments that must deal with
uncertainty, that are complex, and that have a technology that
does not permit easy routinization. Both external
and internal characteristics affect the centrality of
communication. The more an organization is people and idea
oriented, the more important communication becomes. Even in a
highly mechanized system, of course,
communications underlie the development and use of machines.
Workers are instructed on usage, orders are
delivered, and so on. At the same time, the routineness of such
operations leads to a lack of variability in the
communication process. Once procedures are set, few additional
communications are required. Although
communications occur almost continuously in such settings,
their organizational importance is more limited
unless they lead to severe distortions in the operations.
The communication process is by definition a relational one;
one party is the sender and the other the
receiver at a particular time. The relational aspect of
communication obviously affects the process. The social
relations occurring in the communication process involve the
sender and the receiver and their reciprocal
effects on each other as they are communicating. If a sender is
intimidated by a receiver during the process of
sending a message, the message itself and the interpretation of
it will be affected. Intimidation is just one of a
myriad of factors that have the potential to disrupt the simple
sender-receiver relationship. Status differences,
different perceptual models, sexual attraction, and so on can
enter the picture and lead to distortions of what is
being sent and received.
These sources of distortion and their consequences will occupy
a good deal of attention in the subsequent
discussion. Ignorance of the potentiality for distortion has been

responsible for the failure of many
organizational attempts to improve operations simply by
utilizing more communications. Once the importance
of communications was recognized, many organizations jumped
on a communications bandwagon, believing
that if sufficient communications were available to all members
of the organization, everyone would know and
understand what was going on and most organizational problems
would disappear (Katz and Kahn, 1978:430).
This communications bandwagon was at the heart of the flurry
of interest in organizational “culture” as the
cure-all for organizational problems that appeared in the 1980s
(Mohan, 1993). Unfortunately, organizational
life is not that simple, and mere reliance on more and better
communications cannot bring about major, positive
changes for an organization.
Before we turn to a more comprehensive examination of
communication problems and their consequences
in organizations, a simple view of optimal communications will
be presented. The view is simple because it is
complementary to the earlier discussion of rationality and
decision-making.
Communications in organizations should provide accurate
information with the appropriate emotional
overtones to all members who need the communication content.
This assumes that neither too much nor too

little information is in the system and that it is clear from the
outset who can utilize what is available.
It should be evident that the above scenario is an impossible
condition to achieve in a complex
organization. Indeed, organizations gather more information
than they use but also continue to ask for more
(Feldman and March, 1981). This is attributed to decision-
makers’ need for legitimacy. In addition, the
communication process is inherently paradoxical and
contradictory (Brunsson, 1989; Manning, 1992).
Paradoxes and contradictions permeate organizational life.
In the sections that follow, the factors contributing to the
impossibility of perfect communication systems
will be examined. These factors range from those that are
apparently inherent (through learning) in any social
grouping to those that are peculiarly organizational. The focus
will be primarily on communication within
organizations. Communication with the environments of
organizations will be considered later.
INDIVIDUAL FACTORS
Since communication involves something being sent to a
receiver, what the receiver does with or to the
communicated message is perhaps the most vital part of the
whole system. Therefore, the perceptual process
becomes a key element in our understanding of communications
in organizations.
The perceptual process is subject to many factors that can lead
to important differences in the way any two
people perceive the same person or message. Even physical
objects can be perceived differently. Perceivers
may respond to cues they are not aware of, be influenced by

emotional factors, use irrelevant cues, weigh
evidence in an unbalanced way, or fail to identify all the factors
on which their judgments are based. People’s
personal needs, values, and interests enter the perceptual
process. Most communications take place in
interaction with others, and how one person perceives the
“other” in the interaction process vitally affects how
a person will perceive the communication, since other people
are more emotion inducing than physical objects
are. For example, research has shown that a person’s
interactions, and thus perceptions, are affected even by
the expectations of what the other person will look like (Zalkind
and Costello, 1962).
These factors are common to all perceptual situations. For the
analysis of perceptions in organizations,
they must be taken as basic conditions in the communication
process. So it is obvious that perfect perception—
that is, perception uniform across all information recipients—is
impossible in any social situation. The addition
of organizational factors makes the whole situation that much
more complex.
Communications in organizations are basically transactions
between individuals. Even when written or
broadcast forms are used, the communicator is identified as an
individual. The impression that the
communication receiver has of the communicator is thus crucial
in the interpretation of the communication.
Impressions in these instances are not created de novo; the
receiver utilizes his or her learned response set to
the individual and the situation. The individual’s motives and
values enter the situation. In addition, the setting
or surroundings of the act of communication affect the
impression. A neat, orderly, and luxuriously furnished
office contributes to a reaction different from the one given by

an office that looks and smells like a locker
room. Since the perceptual process itself requires putting ideas
and people into categories, the interaction
between communicators is also subject to “instant
categorization,” that is, you cannot understand other people
unless they are placed in some relevant part of your learned
perceptual repertoire. This is often done on the
basis of a very limited amount of evidence—or even wrong
evidence, as when the receiver notes cues that are
wrong or irrelevant to the situation in question (Zalkind and
Costello, 1962:221).
Organizational position affects how communications are
perceived or sent. In almost all organizations,
people can be superordinates in one situation and subordinates
in another. The assistant superintendent of a
school system is superordinate to a set of principals but
subordinate to the superintendent and the school board.
Communications behavior differs according to one’s position in
a role set. If the individual is in a role in which
he or she is or has been or feels discriminated against,
communications are affected. A study found that women
who had suffered discrimination in their roles had a lower
feeling of autonomy than others in the same role.
This in turn was related to distortions in the information that
they communicated upward in the organization
(Athanassaides, 1974).
All of these factors are further complicated by the well-known
phenomenon of stereotyping. This
predisposition to judge can occur before any interaction at all
has taken place. It can involve the labels “labor,”

“management,” “minority group,” and any other group
membership. The individuals involved are
assumed to have the characteristics of the group of which they
are members; in probably the vast majority of
cases, however, the characteristics attributed to the group as a
whole are distortions of reality. In the sense
being used here, stereotyping is the imposition of negative
characteristics on the members of the
communication system. The reverse situation—attributing
socially approved characteristics—can also occur, of
course, with an equally strong potential for damage to the
communication process.
Other factors that enter the communication process in somewhat
the same manner are the use of the “halo
effect,” or the use of only one or a few indicators to generalize
about a total situation: “projection,” or a
person’s assuming that the other members of a communication
system have the same characteristics as the
person’s own; and “perceptual defense,” or altering inconsistent
information to put it in line with the
conceptual framework already developed. All the factors that
have been mentioned here are part of the general
literature on perception and must be assumed to be present in
any communication system. They are not peculiar
to organizations.
The characteristics of the perceived person affect what is
perceived. Here are four conclusions from
research on the perceiver:
Knowing oneself makes it easier to see others accurately.

One’s own characteristics affect the characteristics that one is
likely to see in others.
The person who is self-accepting is more likely to be able to see
favorable aspects of other people.
Accuracy in perceiving others is not a single skill (Zalkind and
Costello, 1962:227–229).
These findings are linked to the more general considerations,
such as tendencies to stereotype or project. It
is when the characteristics of the perceived are brought into the
discussion that organizational conditions
become important. Factors such as age affect how a person is
perceived (Zenger and Lawrence, 1989). The
person may be labeled a sales manager (accurately or not) by a
production worker, and the entire
communication system is affected until additional information
is permitted into the system. The situation in
which the communication takes place also has a profound
impact on what is perceived. This is particularly vital
in organizations, since in most cases the situation is easily
labeled and identified by the physical location.
Organizations are full of all kinds of information, including
gossip. There is a great deal of variance in the
degree to which people are in social networks and receive
information, whether it is gossip or not. Thus,
information itself and individuals are part of the paradoxical
ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS
It has already been noted that organizations develop their own
cultures, with language, rituals, and styles of
communications. It is clear that organizations attempt to
socialize their personnel so that communication
problems are minimized (Pascale, 1985). Despite the presence

of a common culture and socialization efforts,
however, organizations contain the seeds of communication
problems when their vertical and horizontal
components are considered.
VERTICAL COMMUNICATION
Patterns of vertical communication have received a lot of
attention, primarily because they are so vital in
organizational operations. From our discussions of
organizational structure, power, and leadership, it should be
evident that the vertical element is a crucial organizational fact
of life. Since communication is also crucial, the
vertical element intersects in a most important way. Vertical
communications in organizations involve both
downward and upward flows.
Downward Communication
1.
2.
3.
4.
There are five elements of downward communication (Katz and
Kahn, 1978:440–443). The first is the simple
and common job instruction, in which a subordinate is told what
to do through direct orders, training sessions,
job descriptions, or other such mechanisms. The intent of job

instructions is to ensure reliable and consistent
job performance. The more complex and uncertain the task, the
more generalized the instructions. As a rule, the
more highly trained the subordinates, the less specific the
instructions are, because it is assumed that those
individuals will bring with them an internalized knowledge of
how to do the job, along with other job-related
knowledge and attitudes.
The second element is more subtle and less often stressed. It
involves the rationale for a task and its
relationships to the rest of the organization. It is here that
different philosophies of life affect how much this
sort of information is communicated. If the philosophy is to
keep the organizational members dumb and happy,
little such information will be communicated. The organization
may feel either that the subordinates are unable
to comprehend the information or that they would misuse it by
introducing variations into their performance
based on their own best judgment of how the task should be
accomplished. Even apart from the philosophy-of-
life issue, this is a delicate matter. All organizations, even those
most interested in the human qualities of their
members, have hidden agendas of some sort at some time. If the
total rationale for all actions were known to all
members, the potential for chaos would be high, since
communication overload would quickly occur. The
danger of too much communication is matched by the opposite
danger—too little communication—which also
has strong potential for organizational malfunctioning. If the
members are given too little information, and do
not and cannot know how their work is related to any larger
whole, there is a strong possibility that they will
feel alienated from the work and the organization. Obviously,
the selection of the best path between these
extremes is important in the establishment of communications.

The third element of downward communication is information
regarding procedures and practices within
the organization. Like the first element (job instruction), it is
relatively straightforward and noncontroversial.
Here again, whether or not this is linked to the second element
is problematic.
Feedback to individuals regarding their performance is the
fourth element of the downward
communication system. This is almost by definition a sticky
issue, particularly when the feedback is negative.
If the superior has attempted at all to utilize socioemotional ties
to his or her subordinates, the issue becomes
even more difficult. It becomes almost impossible when the
work roles are so thoroughly set in advance by the
organization that the worker has no discretion on the job at all.
In these cases, only a totally conscious deviation
would result in feedback. In the absence of deviation, there will
probably be no feedback other than the
paycheck and other routine rewards. Where discretion is part of
the picture, the problem of assessment deepens,
because feedback is more difficult to accomplish if there are no
clear criteria on which to base it. Despite these
evident problems, feedback is a consistent part of downward
communications.
The final element of downward communication involves
attempts to indoctrinate subordinates into
accepting and believing in the organization’s (or the subunit’s)
goals. The intent here, of course, is to get the
personnel emotionally involved in their work and add this to the
motivational system.
Downward communication takes place at all levels, from the top
down. At each level it is interpreted by

individuals, so that individual factors reenter our picture as
information flows and is interpreted downward.
Upward Communication
Contrary to the law of gravity, communication in organizations
must also go up, even when nothing is going
down. According to Katz and Kahn (1978):
Communication up the line takes many forms. It can be reduced,
however, to what people say (1) about themselves,
their performance, and their problems, (2) about others and their
problems, (3) about organizational practices and
policies, and (4) about what needs to be done and how it can be
done. (p. 446)
The content of these messages can obviously range from the
most personal gripe to the most high-minded
suggestion for improving the organization or the world; and the
messages can have positive or negative
consequences for the subordinate, from a promotion or a bonus
to dismissal. Whistle-blowers are constantly in
fear of dismissal. The most obvious problem in upward
communication is again the hierarchy.
People are unlikely to pass information up if it will be harmful
to themselves or their peers. Thus, the
amount and kind of information that is likely to be passed
upward is affected by hierarchy. Anyone who has

been in any kind of organization knows that discussions with
the boss, department head, president, supervisor,
or other superior are, at least initially, filled with something
approaching terror, regardless of the source of the
superior’s power in the organization.
Another facet of upward communication is important: whereas
communications downward become more
detailed and specific, those going up the hierarchy must become
condensed and summarized. Indeed, a major
function of those in the middle of a hierarchy is the filtering
and editing of information. Only crucial pieces of
information are supposed to reach the top. This can be seen in
clear relief at the national level, where the
president of the United States receives highly condensed
accounts of the huge number of issues of national and
international concern. Regardless of the party in power, the
filtering and editing process is vital in the
hierarchy, since the basis on which things are “edited out” can
have enormous repercussions by the time the
information reaches the top. Here, as well as in downward
communication, the perceptual limitations we noted
earlier are in operation, so there is a very real potential for
distorted communications and, more important, for
decisions different from those that would have been made if
some other editing process were in force
(Halberstam, 1972; Wilensky, 1967).
There is an interesting technological twist here. Computer-
based information technology is increasingly
important in the organizational communication process. The
twist is that top executives, especially older, more
senior ones, may leave the handling of computer-based
information to their staff and subordinates (March and
Sproul, 1990). Only time will tell if this situation will change.

Dysfunctions of Hierarchy and Some Positive Outcomes
There are three specific dysfunctions of hierarchy for the
communication process. In the first place, hierarchical
divisions inhibit communications. There is a common tendency
for people at the same status level to interact
more with one another than with those at different levels. At the
same time, there is a tendency for those in
lower-status positions to look up to and direct friendship
overtures toward those in higher-status positions. This
increases the flow of socioemotional communications upward,
but at the same time it leaves those at the
bottom of the hierarchy in the position of receiving little of this
type of input. This situation is further
complicated by the fact that those in higher-status positions also
direct such communications upward rather
than reciprocating to their subordinates, thus reducing the
amount of satisfaction derived for all parties.
A second dysfunction is that approval is sought from superiors
rather than from peers in such situations.
Nonperformance criteria enter the communication system, in
that respect from peers, which can be earned on
the basis of performance, can become secondary to approval-
gaining devices that may not be central to the
tasks at hand. The plethora of terms ranging from apple-
polishing to more obscene expressions is indicative of
this.
A third dysfunction has to do with the error-correcting function
of normal social interaction. Interaction
among peers tends to sort out errors and at least provides a
common denominator through the interaction
process. This is much less likely to happen in upward
communication. Subordinates are unlikely to tell a
superior that they think an order or an explanation is wrong,

fearing for their own positions. Criticism of one’s
superior is clearly not the most popular form of communication
in organizations (Blau and Scott, 1962:121–
124).
These problems associated with upward communication in
organizations are compounded by the factors
affecting individual perception, which we discussed earlier.
Since rank in an organization is a structural fact, it
carries with it a strong tendency toward stereotyping. The very
terms management, worker, student, general,
and so on are indicative of the value loadings associated with
rank. Status differences are necessary and do
have their positive side; but the negative connotations attached
to many of the stereotypes, and the likelihood
that communications will be distorted because of real or
assumed differences between statuses, build in
difficulties for organizational communications.
In keeping with the earlier discussion in which it was noted that
complex organizations contain paradoxes
and contradictions, there are also beneficial aspects to
hierarchical patterns for the communication process. The
studies by Blau and his associates (Blau, 1968; Blau,
Heydebrand, and Stauffer, 1966), cited earlier, are a
case in point. It will be recalled that in organizations with
highly trained or professionalized personnel, a tall or
deep hierarchy was associated with effectiveness. The

explanation was that the hierarchy provided a continuous
source of error detection and correction. The presence of
experts in an organization also increases the extent of
horizontal communications (Hage, Aiken, and Marrett, 1971).
These can take the form of scheduled or
unscheduled committee meetings or more spontaneous
interactions. Communications are a vital source of
coordination when organizations are staffed with a diverse set
of personnel offering different forms of expertise
(Brewer, 1971). If a tall hierarchy is found in an organization
with a low level of differentiation in expertise, it
is apparently because of the need for extensive downward
communications. There is an additional aspect of
hierarchy that is important. Unless one assumes that people
always rise to a level just above that of their
competence (Peter and Hull, 1969), the superiors may in fact be
superior; that is, they may actually have more
ability than their subordinates since they have more experience.
If this is recognized and legitimated by the
subordinates, some of the hierarchical problems are again
minimized.
The most obvious contribution of a hierarchy is coordination
(Hage, 1980). If one accepts the common
model of communications spreading out in more detail as they
move down the hierarchy, then the role of the
hierarchy becomes clear. It is up to the superior to decide who
gets what kind of communication and when. The
superior becomes the distribution and filtering center. Given the
vast amount of information that is potentially
available for the total organization, this role is crucial.
HORIZONTAL COMMUNICATION
Communications in organizations go in more directions than up
and down. Horizontal or lateral communication

is a regular and important facet of organizational life. The focus
of most analyses of communication has been
the vertical axis. The horizontal component has received less
attention, even though a greater proportion of the
communication in an organization appears to be of this type. A
study of a textile factory indicates that the
lower the level in the hierarchy, the greater the proportion of
horizontal communication (Simpson, 1969). This
is not surprising, if for no other reason than that in most
organizations there are simply more people at each
descending level. This fact and the already noted tendency for
communication to be affected by hierarchical
differences make it natural for people to communicate with
those at about the same level in the organization.
And those at the same level are more apt to share common
characteristics, making horizontal communication
even more likely.
Communication within an organizational subunit is quite
different from communication between subunits.
Within-unit communication is “critical for effective system
functioning” (Katz and Kahn, 1978:444). In most
cases, it is impossible for an organization to work out in
advance every conceivable facet of every task assigned
throughout the organization. At some point, there will have to
be coordination and discussion among a set of
peers as the work proceeds; therefore, this interplay between
individuals is vital in the coordination process.
Communication within subunits contains much richer content
than organizational task coordination materials.
Katz and Kahn state:
The mutual understanding of colleagues is one reason for the
power of the peer group. Experimental findings are clear
and convincing about the importance of socio-emotional support
for people in both organized and unorganized

groups. Psychological forces always push people toward
communication with peers: people in the same boat share the
same problems. Hence, if there are no problems of task
coordination left to a group of peers, the content of their
communication can take forms which are irrelevant to or
destructive of organizational functioning. (p. 445; italics in
the original)
The implication here is clear. It is beneficial to leave some task-
oriented communications to work groups
at every level of the organization so that the potentially
counterproductive communications do not arise to fill
the void. This implication must be modified, however, by a
reference back to the general model that is being
followed here. Organizational, interpersonal, and individual
factors are all part of the way people behave in
organizations. If the organizational arrangements are such that
horizontal communications are next to
impossible, then there is little likelihood of any communication.
Work in extremely noisy circumstances or in
isolated work locales would preclude much interaction. (These
situations, of course, contain their own
problems for the individual and the organization.) On the other
side of the coin, too much coordination and
communications responsibility left to those who, through lack
of training or ability, are unable to come to a
reasonable joint decision about some matter would also be
individually and organizationally disruptive.

Although it is relatively easy, in abstract terms, to describe the
optimal mix of vertical and horizontal
communications, another element of communications among
peers is important. Since the communications
among peers tend to be based on common understandings, and
since continued communications build up the
solidarity of the group, work groups develop collective
responses to the world around them. These collective
responses are likely to be accompanied by collective
perceptions of communications passed to or through the
work groups. These collective perceptions can be collective
distortions. It is clear that work groups (as well as
other interest groups) can perceive communications in a totally
different light from what was intended. A
relatively simple piece of information, such as a memo about
possible reorganization, can be interpreted to
mean that an entire workforce will be eliminated.
Interaction among peers is only one form of horizontal
communication. Another form, obviously vital,
occurs between members of different organizational subunits.
There is little research on this subject. The
principal reason seems to be that such communications are not
supposed to occur. In almost every conceivable
form of organization, communications are supposed to go
through the hierarchy until they reach the
“appropriate” office, at the point where the hierarchies of the
two units involved come together. That is, the
communications are designed to flow through the office that is
above the two departments or units involved, so
that the hierarchy is familiar with the intent and content of the
communications. In a simple example, problems
between production and sales are supposed to be resolved
through either the office or the individual in charge
of both activities.

In reality, such a procedure occurs in only a minority of such
lateral communications. There is a great deal
more face-to-face and memo-to-memo communication
throughout the ranks of the subunits involved, primarily
because the communication system would be totally clogged if
all information regarding subunit interaction
had to flow all the way up one of the subunits and then all the
way back down another. The clogging of the
system would result in either painfully slow communications or
none at all.
Therefore, the parties involved generally communicate directly
with each other. This saves time and can
often mean a very reasonable solution worked out at a lower
level with good cooperation. However, it may also
mean that those further up the hierarchy are unaware of what
has happened, and that can be harmful in the long
run. A solution to this problem is to record and pass along the
information about what has been done, but that
may be neglected; even if it is not neglected, it may not be
noticed.
Although the emphasis in this discussion has been on
coordination between subunits, much of the
communication of this sort is actually based on conflict.
Professional departments are a good example. When
professionals or experts make up divisions of an organization,
their areas of expertise are likely to lead them to
different conclusions about the same matter (Hage, 1974:101–
124). For example, in a petroleum company it is
quite conceivable that the geological, engineering, legal, and
public relations divisions could all come to
different conclusions about the desirability of starting new oil-
well drilling in various locations. Each would be
correct in its own area of expertise, and the coordination of top

officials would obviously be required when a
final decision had to be made. During the period of planning or
development, however, communications
between these divisions would probably be characterized as
nonproductive, since the specialists involved
would be talking in their own language, one that is unfamiliar to
those not in the same profession. From the
evidence at hand, each division would also be correct in its
assessments of the situation and would view the
other divisions as not understanding the “true” meanings of the
situation.
This type of communication problem is not limited to
professionalized divisions. Communications
between subunits inevitably contain elements of conflict. The
conflict will be greater if the units involved
invest values in their understanding and conceptualizations.
Horizontal communications across organizational
lines thus contain both the seeds and the flowers of conflict.
Such conflict, by definition, will contribute to
distortion of communications in one form or another. At the
same time, passing each message up the line to
eliminate such distortion through coordination at the top has the
dangers of diluting the message in attempts to
avoid conflict and of taking so much time that the message
becomes meaningless. Here again, the endemic
complexities of an organization preclude a totally rational
operation.

Both horizontal and vertical aspects of organizations create
complications for communication. At the same
time, there are situations in which these obstacles are overcome.
An excellent example is an analysis of aircraft
carrier flight decks (Weick and Roberts, 1993). When aircraft
are landing, the work pace is furious, the noise
overwhelming, and the possibility for tragic error great. Despite
these conditions, flight decks operate very
effectively. Communication works across ranks and
organizational divisions. Weick and Roberts believe that
this is based on “heedful interrelating” and a “collective mind”
(p. 357). Everyone is extremely focused.
Everyone is well trained. Similar situations certainly exist with
successful sports teams and in other spheres of
life. At the same time, the flight-deck example is striking
because it is so different. In the more mundane
spheres of organizational life, the vertical and horizontal factors
intrude on communication.
Communication Networks
Before we turn to a more systematic examination of the
consequences of all these communication problems in
organizations, there is a final bit of evidence regarding the
manner in which communications evolve. The
communication process can be studied in laboratory situations;
among organizational characteristics, it is
perhaps the most amenable to such experimentation. There has
been a long history (Bavelas, 1950; Leavitt,
1951) of attempting to isolate the communication system that is
most efficient under a variety of circumstances.
These laboratory studies are applicable to both the vertical and
the horizontal aspects of communications, since
the manner in which the communication tasks are coordinated is
the major focus. Three primary

communication networks between members of work groups have
been studied: (1) the “wheel” pattern, (2) the
“circle” pattern, and (3) the “all-channel” system. The wheel
pattern requires all persons at the periphery of the
wheel to send their communications to the hub. This is an
imposed hierarchy, since those at the periphery
cannot send messages to each other; it is the task of the hub to
do the coordinating. The circle pattern permits
each member of the group to talk to those on either side, with
no priorities. The all-channel system allows
everyone to communicate with everyone else.
Using success in arriving at a correct solution as the criterion of
efficiency, repeated investigations have
found the wheel pattern to be superior. The other patterns can
become equally efficient if they develop a
hierarchy, but that takes time, and meanwhile efficiency is
reduced. The more complex the task, the more time
is required for the communication network to become
structured. The importance of these findings for our
purposes is that whether the communications are vertical or
horizontal, hierarchical patterns emerge. In the
vertical situation, the hierarchy is already existing, although the
formal hierarchy can be modified through the
power considerations of expertise or personal attraction. In the
horizontal situation, a hierarchy will emerge.
Communication takes place on the basis of organizational
structure; it also contributes to the development of
structuring.
COMMUNICATION PROBLEMS
It should be clear that communications in organizations are not
perfect. The basic consequence of existing
communication systems is that messages are transformed or
altered as they pass through the system. The fact

that they are transformed means that the ultimate recipient of
the message receives something different from
what was originally sent, thus destroying the intent of the
Omission
Omission is one of two major forms of transformation, the other
being distortion (Guetzkow, 1965). Omission
involves the “deletion of aspects of messages” (p. 551), and it
occurs because the recipients may not be able to
grasp the entire content of the message and receive or pass on
only what they are able to grasp. Communication
overload can also lead to the omission of materials, since some
messages may not be handled because of the
overload. Omission may be intentional, as when certain classes
of information are deleted from the information
passed through particular segments of the organization.
Omission is most evident in upward communications,
since more messages are generated by the large number of
people and units lower in the hierarchy. As the
communications are filtered on the way up, the omissions occur.
When omissions are intentional, it is vital to
know the criteria for omitting some kinds of information.
Omission can occur simply as a removal of details,
with the heart of the message still transmitted upward. This is
the ideal, of course, but is not usually achieved,
since part of the content of the message is usually omitted also.

Distortion
Distortion refers to altered meanings of messages as they pass
through the organization. From the earlier
discussion of perceptions, it is clear that people are selective,
intentionally or unintentionally, about what they
receive as messages. Guetzkow (1965) states:
[B]ecause different persons man different points of initiation
and reception of messages, there is much assimilation of
meanings to the context within which transmission occurs.
Frames of reference at a multitude of nodes differ because
of variety in personal and occupational background, as well as
because of difference in viewpoint induced by the
communicator’s position in the organization. (p. 555)
Distortion is as likely to occur in horizontal communications as
in vertical, given the differences between
organizational units in objectives and values. Selective
omission and distortion, or “coding,” are not unique
properties of organizations. They occur in all communication
systems, from the family to the total society.
They are crucial for organizations, however, since organizations
depend upon accurate communications as a
basis for decision-making.
Overload
The communication problem that is perhaps more characteristic
of organizations than of other social entities is
communication overload. Overload leads to omission and
contributes to distortion. It also leads to other coping
and adjustment mechanisms on the part of the organization.
There are adaptive and maladaptive adjustments to
the overload situation. Omission and distortion are maladaptive.

They are also normal.
Another device used when overload occurs is queuing. This
technique lines up the messages by time of
receipt or by some other such criterion. Queuing can have
positive or negative consequences. If the wrong
priority system is used, less important messages may be acted
upon before those that are really crucial reach the
recipient. At the same time, queuing does allow recipients to act
on messages as they come in without putting
them in a state of inaction because of total overload. An
example of this is an anecdote from a disaster
following a major earthquake. Organizations dealing with the
earthquake were besieged with messages. Some
organizations allowed victims to plead for help face-to-face,
letting them crowd into an office and all talk at
once; this quickly brought the organizations involved to a halt.
The overload was so great that the
communications could not be filtered in any way. Another
organization received its messages by telephone, a
device providing an arbitrary queuing mechanism based on an
operating telephone and the luck of finding an
open line. This organization was able to keep functioning,
because the messages came in one at a time. In such
a queuing situation, of course, there are no real criteria to
determine which messages get through and which do
not, other than time phasing and luck in getting a telephone
line.
A useful modification of queuing is the previously mentioned
filtering process, which involves setting
priorities for messages. The critical factor here is the nature of
the priorities. Many organizations utilize a
modified triage system in which the most important messages
are permitted to come into the system if it is
perceived that the organizations can take relevant actions. Less

important messages are then taken in as time
permits. This sort of filtering system must be set up in advance.
The question always is, What is the principle
on which filtering takes place?
All the communication problems discussed derive from the fact
that communications in organizations
require interpretation. If there is a case of extreme overload, the
interpretive process becomes inundated with so
much material that it becomes inoperative. Queuing and
filtering are techniques designed to sort messages into
priorities. Any priority system established in advance means
that an interpretation of messages has already
been made, with some deemed more important than others.
Thus, interpretation occurs regardless of whether
priorities are set in advance or simply as messages are received.
Organizations generate and receive a vast amount of material. If
we think of an organization as a pyramid,
the huge mass at the base is the information entering an
organization’s communication system. As information
moves up and through the organization, it is filtered and
condensed. It arrives at the top in the form of an
“executive summary.” The amount of information, like the
pyramid, keeps getting smaller as it rises in the
organization. Here the pyramid analogy must be abandoned,
since the determination of which information
moves up is subject to the types of human and organizationally

based interpretations we have been considering.
COMMUNICATION TO AND FROM OUTSIDE THE
ORGANIZATION
The focus thus far has been internal organizational
communication. The complications and problems that have
been identified appear even more severe when we realize that so
much of what is really important for an
organization comes into it from its environment—competitors,
creditors, customers, regulators, taxers,
constituents, and so on. In addition, there are the more general
environmental messages that are sent to and
from an organization, such as changes in prime interest rates,
demographic shifts, or petroleum price increases.
Communications with the environment greatly compound the
communication problems that have already been
identified.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
With all the problems, potential and real, in the communication
process, it is obvious that a “perfect”
communication system is unlikely. But although perfection, like
rationality, will not be achieved, organizations
do have mechanisms by which they attempt to keep the
communication system as clear as they can. There are
several devices that are available to reduce the distortions and
other complications in the communication
process (Downs, 1967). Redundancy, or the duplication of
reports for verification, though adding to the flow of
messages and paper in an organization, allows more people to
see or hear a particular piece of information and
respond to it. This is a correction device. There are several
ways to create redundancy, including the use of
information sources external to the situation—such as reports

that are generated outside the organization—thus
ensuring that reporting units and individuals coordinate their
communications.
A common solution to at least some communication problems is
the ubiquitous meeting. Meetings have
the potential for yielding common meanings among participants,
particularly when the intent of the meetings is
to achieve consensus. Although meetings are quite valuable, it
is obvious that time spent in meetings is time
not spent on other activities. Research indicates that people
vary in their perceptions of the usefulness of
meetings (Rogelberg et al., 2006), and this may affect whether
meetings are effective in helping solve
communication problems.
Another way in which communication problems can be reduced
is through matrix-like systems. A study of
a psychiatric hospital found committees or teams that were
composed of personnel from the various
occupational specialties in the hospital and from the established
departments in the hospital (Blau and Alba,
1982). The teams were designed to deal with various issues and
programs of the hospital, and hospital
personnel served on multiple teams. In addition, traditional
ranks were eliminated. For example, a team could
have a nurse as the team leader and psychiatrists as team
members. Blau and Alba report that these overlapping
circles of weak ties inhibited segmentation and sustained
participation because participants were rewarded for
participating. Their data indicate that there was extensive
interunit communication. There are limitations to this
approach, of course. Its applicability in other forms of
organizations is uncertain, and the approach requires the
commitment of all the participants up through the head of the
organization.

Some organizations have turned to “project groups” as a means
of solving communication problems.
These groups, or task forces as they are sometimes called, are
typically composed of personnel from a variety
of organizational units. Their usual purpose is to develop a new
product or service for the organization. They
may be isolated from the rest of the organization in the hope
that this will enable them to think and work
together. One analysis of research and development project
groups composed of scientists and engineers found
that such groups became increasingly isolated from key
information sources within and outside their
organizations (Katz, 1982). Over time, their productivity
decreased, with the communication process
increasingly focused inward. Such project groups or task forces
are probably better off with a short span of
existence and a sunset clause specifying a termination date.
A major mechanism for achieving consensus about the meaning
of communication is putting things in
writing, such as contracts. Even though communication in
writing is subject to interpretation, lawyers and
accountants make much of their living by negotiating consensus
in meanings between parties. This is not the
answer for all problems, of course, but it is one way to avoid
communication chaos.

The nature of, problems in, and suggested solutions for
communications all point to the centrality of this
process in much of what happens in an organization. But it is
evident that the communication system is vitally
affected by other structural and process factors.
Communications do not exist outside the total organizational
framework. They cannot be over- or underemphasized. More
and more accurate communications do not lead
inevitably to greater effectiveness for the organization. The key
to the communication process in organizations
is to ensure that the correct people get the correct information
(in amount and quality) at the correct time. All of
these factors can be anticipated to some degree. If
organizations, their members, and their environments were
all in a steady state, communication tasks would be easier.
Since obviously they are not, the communication
process must be viewed as a dynamic one, with new actors, new
media, and new definitions constantly entering
the scene. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, ambiguities
and paradoxes are to be anticipated.
The media of communication in organizations have received
little attention in our analysis here.
Breakthroughs in the forms of information and word processing,
faxing, electronic message sending and
receiving, and the Internet continue. Advanced communication
technology itself is not the cure for
organizational communication problems. The problems are
rooted in the nature of organizations, their
participants, and their interactions with their environments.
The communication process in organizations in itself is a
complicated one because of individual idiosyncrasies,
biases, and abilities and is further complicated by

organizational characteristics such as hierarchy or
specialization. Nonetheless, communications within
organizations are central for the other processes of power,
leadership, and decision-making. Communications are shaped
by organizational structure and continue to
reshape structure.
The “perfect” communication system is yet to be devised and
probably never will be. Technological
changes in various forms have contributed to more rapid
processing of information, but the issues and problems
considered in this chapter are not erased by advanced
technology; in fact, in some instances they are
exacerbated.
EXERCISES
Describe the extent to which communication omission,
distortion, and overload take place in your two
organizations. Why does this happen?
When communications take place in your two organizations,
how are they affected by vertical and
horizontal factors?
1.
2.

Chapter 6
Decision-Making
OVERVIEW
In this chapter, we consider decision-making processes—in
many ways, these processes lie at the very heart
of understanding organizations. We begin by describing a line
of work that has emphasized a view of
organizations as systems of decision-making. In this context, we
consider research that has identified some
of the organizational and environmental factors that shape
decision-making. We focus in particular on
strategic decisions, those made at the top of organizations, since
these decisions usually have the most
profound effects on organizations. Decision-making is not easy,
nor is predicting the outcomes of decision-
making efforts.
The aspect of organizations dealt with in this chapter can be
illustrated best with two cases: the tragic launch of
the space shuttle Challenger, which exploded so dramatically in
1986, killing all on board, and the similar
deadly explosion of the second space shuttle, the Columbia,
seventeen years later. Both launches were the
result of complex organizational decision-making processes that
were purposively designed to prevent such
tragedies, but which were affected by three important biasing
factors (Vaughan, 1996,1999):
different units’ struggle to obtain scarce resources in a
competitive environment;
an organizational culture in National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA) that contributed to

the censoring of information;
a regulatory environment that was insufficient for the decision-
making task.
No one intended for these tragedies to occur. The launch
decisions were not made by stupid or uncaring people.
They were made by people like you and me, who were trying to
do the best they could. To understand how
these decisions were made and why, we first need to understand
generally the nature of decision-making in
organizations.
ORGANIZATIONS AS SYSTEMS OF DECISIONS
The broadest and most systematic efforts to analyze how
decisions get made in organizations are represented in
1.
2.
3.
work by Herbert Simon and his students and colleagues. This
tradition is sometimes referred to as “the
Carnegie School” because much of the work was done at
Carnegie-Mellon University, where Simon was a
long-time faculty member.

Bounded Rationality and Organizations as Hierarchies of
Decisions
Simon’s (1957) early efforts to conceptualize decision-making
in organizations grew, in part, from his
skepticism toward prescriptive models of decision-making
processes offered by economists. He argued that
such models rested on a conception of “homo economicus” (or
economic man) that had little basis in reality.
Homo economicus is characterized by the following: acting only
in his self-interest, possessing full information about
the decision problem, knowing all the possible solutions from
which he has to choose as well as the consequences of
each solution, seeking to maximize utility, having the ability to
rank alternatives in order of likelihood of maximizing
outcomes. (Zey, 1992:11)
As Simon (1957) pointed out, in contrast to these assumptions,
real individuals have a very constrained
cognitive capacity—that is, a limited ability to think of the
range of possible options in a decision-making
situation, to accurately anticipate what the consequences of
those options will be, and to know how much
they’ll actually value one consequence versus another. Thus,
rather than being fully rational, as economic
models assumed, Simon argued that individuals were
characterized by “bounded rationality.” This concept
implies that individuals typically are able to consider only a
limited number of options in making decisions,
and often select the first one that meets some minimal criteria,
that are “good enough,” rather than searching
for the very best option. Simon labeled this approach to
decision-making “satisficing,” in contrast to the
economic notion of optimizing. His explication of this view of
decision-making contributed to his winning the

Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978.
Given bounded rationality, Simon argued, individuals could
achieve a greater degree of rationality in
decision-making in an organization than they could if they acted
on their own. This argument rests on a
conception of organizations as a hierarchy of means-and-ends
decisions. Individuals at the top of the hierarchy
make broad decisions about general courses of action to be
taken; these decisions define the ends that
individuals at the next level will seek to achieve by making
their decisions about more specific actions to be
taken, actions that will become the means to achieving higher-
level ends. A brief example may make this
clearer. Suppose a person decides to make a profit by
manufacturing widgets and that two main units need to
be created to achieve this objective: manufacturing and
marketing. The person recruits two others to be the
heads of these two units and charges them with making
decisions about how to efficiently manufacture the
widgets and market them, respectively. The head of
manufacturing decides that there are three tasks that need
to be taken care of for efficient manufacturing: (1) obtaining
supplies, (2) carrying out production, and (3)
inspecting for quality. Thus, she gives three individuals under
her command responsibility for making
decisions about how to carry out each of these tasks. Each
higher-level individual’s decisions define the ends
that the subordinates will concentrate on in making their
decisions, and their decisions will provide the means
for accomplishing the objectives of the higher-level members.
The process of breaking broad decisions into a
series of progressively narrower decisions and assigning these
to different individuals or subunits is related to
increases in the complexity of organizations, as we discussed in
Chapters 2 and 3.

Because of this type of division of labor in decision-making,
Simon believed that the decisions made in
organizations are likely to reflect a broader and more thoughtful
consideration of factors than if a single
individual had to think through these alone—that is, to be more
rational. Note that this conclusion rests on the
assumption that all members of the organization share the
general aim of making a profit through the
manufacture and marketing of widgets. When one refers to
rationality, it’s necessary to specify the referent—
that is, for whom or what something is rational (Storing, 1962).
Organizational Structure and Decision-Making
Simon followed Chester Barnard’s (1968) arguments that when
individuals join an organization, they agree to
accept the inducements that the organization offers them in
exchange for which they will make contributions to
the organization. This includes allowing the organization to
dictate their behavior within some broad limits, or
within their “zone of indifference,” and using the criteria and
standards set by the organization in making
decisions on behalf of the organization. In this context, the
aspects of formal structure discussed in Chapter 3
are important because they provide the mechanisms through
which organizations shape and control individuals’
decision-making (Perrow, 1986). In a series of analyses, Simon

and his colleagues (Cohen, March, and Olsen,
1972; Cyert and March, 1963; March and Simon, 1958)
elaborated on the impact of formal structure on
decision-making processes in organizations.
They note that the formal division of labor defines the relevant
issues that an individual is expected to
attend to in making decisions. For example, when the head of
manufacturing makes decisions, she focuses on
their impact on the production of widgets, rather than on their
impact on marketing and distribution. This
illustration suggests that as horizontal complexity increases,
individuals generally will take a narrower, more
specific set of issues into account in decision-making. Such
specialization may allow them to be more efficient
in making decisions, or more thorough in terms of considering
specific factors, but it is likely to lead them to
neglect other issues that may bear on the ultimate decision.
Hence, there is a need for persons at higher
hierarchical levels to review and to coordinate among the
decisions made at lower levels.
Likewise, rules and regulations are important because they
direct individuals’ attention to certain criteria
and considerations in making decisions. March and Simon
(1958) discuss “performance programs,” collections
of rules that guide decision-making in particular areas. For
example, a performance program for inventory
decisions might contain the following rules: When inventory
reaches a certain point, more stock should be
ordered; to decide how much to order, the rate of sales over the
past thirty days should be checked and used as
a guide; at least three suppliers should be contacted to get
competitive prices; and so forth. Higher levels of
formalization thus allow individuals at lower levels of an
organization to “make” decisions, leading to a greater

degree of decentralization, because the criteria to be used are
clear and help ensure standard outcomes.
Similarly, the hierarchy of the organization is relevant to
decision-making because it defines which decisions
are directly related to other decisions.
Politics, Conflict, and Decision-Making
Resting on more realistic notions of individuals’ cognitive
capabilities than economic models that assume full
rationality, this portrayal of organizational decision-making
provides an important and useful way of thinking
about the connection between individual-level choices and
actions, on the one hand, and organizational-level
characteristics, on the other (Perrow, 1986). One drawback,
though, is that it does not give much attention to
the possibility that different members of the organization will
have different aims and that an agreement to
allow the organization to define the premises of their decisions
does not imply that they completely ignore their
particular aims and interests. Recognition of this point has led
scholars to give more attention to the role of
politics and conflict in decision-making.
Consistent with the notion that decision-making in
organizations is affected by individuals’ bounded
rationality, political considerations are assumed to come into
play because there is often uncertainty
surrounding decision-making processes—uncertainty about
which objectives are most important to an
organization and what means should be used to pursue a given
objective. These core types of uncertainties
were highlighted in the framework for thinking about different
types of organizational decisions presented by
Thompson (1967). As he noted, “decision issues always involve
two major dimensions: (1) beliefs about

cause/effect relationships and (2) preferences regarding possible
outcomes” (p. 134). “Beliefs about
cause/effect” refers to whether there is certainty about the
outcome of an action choice. If we decide A, we are
sure that B and only B will be the result—this is high certainty
about cause and effect. “Preferences regarding
possible outcomes” refers to the degree to which there is
consensus about what the organization is or should be
trying to achieve. (You may note the similarity between
Thompson’s conception of factors that affect decision-
making and Perrow’s conception of factors that affect
technological uncertainty; we discussed the latter in
Chapter 3.)
FIGURE 6-1 Decision Processes
Source: James D. Thompson, Organizations in Action (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 134.
These basic variables in the decision-making process can
operate at the conscious or the unconscious
level. As an aid in understanding the process, Thompson
suggests that each variable can be (artificially)
dichotomized, as indicated in Figure 6-1. In the cell with
certainty on both variables, a “computational”
strategy can be used. In that case the decision is obvious. For
example, in simple inventorying, when the supply
of a particular item dwindles to a particular level, a computer
reorders it automatically. Obviously, there is not
likely to be conflict surrounding these decisions. The other cells

present more problems and are thus more
crucial for the organization.
When outcome preferences are clear, but cause and effect
relationships are uncertain, Thompson suggests
that organizational decisions require what he calls a judgmental
strategy. This typically involves bringing a
group of experts together to share their knowledge and to make
recommendations. Where the situation is
reversed and there is certainty regarding cause and effect but
uncertainty regarding outcome preferences,
decision-making requires a compromise strategy. This is
exemplified by political arrangements where the
members representing different interests and views make
decisions by voting. Finally, when there is
uncertainty on both dimensions, Thompson argued that an
inspirational strategy for decision-making is needed,
if indeed any decision is forthcoming. Although Thompson
doesn’t precisely specify what is involved in an
inspirational strategy, it presumably entails a significant effort
to forge agreements between parties with
different views—that is, skilled and diplomatic leadership
(Thompson, 1967:134–135).
STRATEGIC DECISION-MAKING
The higher one goes in an organizational decision-making
hierarchy, the greater the uncertainty surrounding
both cause and effect relations and preference outcomes. As
Cyert and March (1963) and Perrow (1967) point
out, high-level goals of an organization are usually so broadly
stated—“providing the highest quality education
for students,” “enhancing community health and well-being,”
even “maximizing profits”—that it is difficult to
get consensus on what they entail, let alone how best to achieve
them. Consequently, decisions that would be

described as strategic—big, high-risk decisions made at high
levels of organizations that significantly affect
organizational outcomes—are often fraught with uncertainty
and, hence, potential conflict.
Uncertainty and Strategic Decisions
Although we have a tendency to assume that decisions made at
high levels of organizations reflect high levels
of rationality, or careful consideration of the best means to
achieve some given end, evidence suggests that this
assumption is very problematic. A good example of this comes
from an analysis of General Motors (GM) in the
United States. GM was one of the first organizations to adopt a
formal structure known as the “M-Form” (for
multidivisional); in this form, separate divisions are created for
different product lines and divisional heads are
given responsibility for running these, much like independent
organizations. Classic accounts suggested that
this form was chosen for its high level of efficiency (Chandler,
1962). Instead, a more recent analysis suggests
that, for most of its history, decisions about structure in GM
were driven not so much by efficiency concerns as
by efforts to obtain consensus among its managers (Freeland,
1997). This and other detailed accounts of
strategic decision-making in organizations (Beamish, 2000;
Clarke, 1989; Tickner, 2002) suggest that
considerations other than efficiency and effectiveness often
influence strategic decisions.

One approach to thinking about how such decisions are made is
provided by the “garbage can” model of
decision-making (Cohen, March, and Olsen, 1972). This model
begins with the points noted by Thompson, that
preferences and technology (cause and effect relations) are
often unclear. In this context, Cohen and his
colleagues argue that decisions are shaped by four more or less
independent factors:
perceptions of current problems facing the organization;
potential “solutions,” ideas or actions that individual members
of an organization wish to champion
(e.g., the adoption of a new computer system, creation of a new
office or function);
decision-making opportunities, meetings or committees that are
assigned to make a recommendation for
action;
participants, individuals who are present at decision-making
opportunities.
The model suggests that, in an organization, decisions result
from random combinations of these factors—
conceived of as a large garbage can in which the factors are
mixed. In other words, decisions are made in the
context of particular decision-making opportunities (e.g.,
meetings) that may have been called to address a
particular problem (which is nevertheless subject to
redefinition), which are attended by certain individuals (but
perhaps not all who were invited, because of scheduling
difficulties), and the members may or may not bring
current pet projects with them. Needless to say, this approach
suggests that decision outcomes are very
unpredictable. Other research, though, suggests some structural

constraints that “put a lid on the garbage
can” (Levitt and Nuss, 1989) and make decision-making
somewhat more predictable than the image of
garbage-can decision-making suggests.
Constraints on Decision-Making
One constraint on decision-making, and thus on potential
conflict surrounding decisions, is the existence of
previous decisions that commit organizational resources to
certain courses of action (Cyert and March, 1963).
Such decisions are often embodied in organizational budgets
and are psychologically as well as legally binding.
By limiting options, these commitments serve to limit conflict
over choices of action.
Although having the benefit of reducing conflict, such
commitments can have negative consequences for
organizational decision-making. Organizations committed to
losing courses of action are apt to continue to
make decisions that make matters even worse. These are called
escalation situations. Escalation situations
occur when organizational projects have little salvage value,
when decision-makers want to justify their past
behavior, when people in a project are bound to each other, and
when organizational inertia and internal
politics combine to prevent a project from being shut down
(Staw and Ross, 1989). A classic example is the
process by which a power company on Long Island, New York,
persisted in a decision to construct a nuclear
power plant in the face of fierce opposition. The power
company “stuck to its guns,” or escalated, for twenty-
three years. The cost of the project went from $75 million in
1966 to $5 billion when the project was
abandoned in 1989 (Ross and Staw, 1993).

The concept of social embeddedness (Granovetter, 1985)
suggests another factor that often constrains
organizational decisions and thus limits conflict. The concept
calls attention to the fact that organizations (as
well as individuals) have enduring relationships with other
actors and are part of ongoing social networks.
These relations shape decisions both because they are an
important source of information about different
choices that may be made and because, in order to maintain the
relations, organizations may have to take
certain actions.
There are a number of studies that document the ways in which
network ties shape the flow of ideas
between organizations and thus affect organizational decisions
(e.g., Beckman and Haunschild, 2002; Budros,
2002; Guler, Guillen, and MacPherson, 2002; Westphal, Seidel,
and Stewart, 2001). For example, a study by
Davis (1991) of business firms’ adoption of poison pills (legal
arrangements that make it difficult for other
firms to acquire a given firm without the consent of its board)
indicated that such adoptions were strongly
affected by whether members of the board of a firm considering
adoption were also on boards of other firms
that had already adopted this arrangement. Davis (1991)
concludes:
1.
2.
3.
4.

Part of the impact of ties to adopters can be explained with
reference to the nature of boards as decision-making
groups. When the board is faced with a decision, such as
whether to adopt a poison pill, the opinions of those with
relevant previous experience naturally will be given more
weight. … Yet the evidence presented here indicates that
the more a firm was tied to others that had adopted a poison
pill, the more likely it was to adopt a pill itself (up to a
point), a finding that suggests a normative element: The
knowledge that several interlock partners had adopted poison
pills provides information above and beyond the simple pros
and cons of adoption that having one or two directors
with prior poison pill experience would give. (pp. 607–608)
As this last point indicates, apart from their informational
influence, social ties may affect organizational
decisions because they make organizations more responsive to
interorganizational norms. A study of the
semiconductor industry examined the formation of a research-
and-development consortium among highly
competitive firms and found that individuals and firms in this
consortium developed a “moral community” in
which both made contributions to the industry without regard
for immediate and specific paybacks (Browning,
Beyer, and Shetler, 1995:113). Similarly, research on alliances
between firms shows that repeated alliances
lead to trust between organizations, which then becomes the
basis for additional alliances (Gulati, 1995b).
Although such decisions may or may not be based strictly on
economic calculations, they may yield

positive economic outcomes. Research on the garment industry
in New York City found that embeddedness, in
the form of trust between and networks among garment firms,
was related to higher survival rates; firms that
relied solely on arm’s-length economic transactions were more
likely to fail (Uzzi, 1996, 1997). On the other
hand, a study of the migration of manufacturing plants from
New York State between 1969 and 1985 (and there
was a lot of migration) found that firms that had links to local
communities in the form of material, social, and
political ties were less able to make such moves, even when
production costs could be considerably reduced.
Not surprisingly, the less mobile firms were in more peripheral
industries. Firms in core industries were more
able to move (Romo and Schwartz, 1995).
Although strategic decisions in organizations may be
constrained by the considerations described above,
this is not to suggest that decision-makers are purely passive or
that these factors necessarily make decision
outcomes predictable. As the garbage-can model of decision-
making suggests, who participates in decision-
making processes is a critical factor that affects outcomes; this
is not only because different participants see
problems differently and bring different “solutions” with them
to the table, but because they also have differing
amounts of power. Thus, we need to consider how the
distribution of power influences decision-making
processes.
STRATEGIES OF POWER AND DECISION-MAKING
In Chapter 4, we discussed the nature of power in organizations
and some of the factors that influence its
distribution in organizations. Authority, typically reflected by
the positions individuals hold in an

organizational hierarchy, is an important aspect of power. Thus,
the opinions and aims of those with more
authority often carry more weight in decision-making. But there
are potential costs to making decisions under
conditions of high uncertainty: decisions that turn out badly
may affect decision-makers’ credibility and their
ability to exercise influence in later decision-making situations.
“Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
That phrase, which we have all used in our lives, also
characterizes organizational decisions. The quality of
decisions is judged over time. The forty-plus years of Soviet
rule in Eastern Europe appeared to be successful
decision-making on the part of the Soviets, until the late 1980s.
The Ford Motor Company produced both the
Mustang and the Edsel. Buying and selling subprime mortgages
appeared to be a good investment strategy to
many banks before the market collapsed in 2008. What appear
to be successful, rational decisions at time 1 are
often problematic at time 2. Because of this, those with
authority to make strategic decisions, such as chief
executive officers and high-level administrators, may resist
making the decisions by themselves and leave such
decisions to groups or committees (Jackall, 1988). Nonetheless,
those in positions of authority have a number
of ways to influence decision outcomes in ways that reflect
their preferences.
Agenda Setting

One key influence mechanism is through control of the
agenda—defining what issues will be discussed and in
what order (Bachrach and Baratz, 1962). Defining an agenda
shapes not only what issues will be discussed, but
what issues will not be discussed. Thus, in a meeting held to
make decisions about a company’s financial
situation, workers’ compensation levels may be included as an
item for discussion, but compensation levels and
pension packages for high-ranking managers may be omitted.
Moreover, research suggests that the order in which items and
issues are discussed can have strong effects
on decision outcomes. This is partly because, given a fixed
amount of time for a meeting, items that are placed
earlier on the agenda are likely to receive more time and
attention; decisions made near the end of the meeting
may be made more quickly and participants may have less
inclination to debate them. Thus, in setting the
agenda, individuals may put the issues that they wish to push
through quickly toward the end. In addition, since
decisions are made in a sequence, decisions that are made
earlier may entail commitments that affect
subsequent decisions, resulting in an escalation of commitment
to a course of action (Pfeffer, 1981). Suppose in
a college faculty meeting there are two issues to be discussed:
changing required courses and staffing. If a
department can persuade the rest of the college that a particular
course should be required, then it is in a
position to argue for additional faculty lines (for faculty to
teach this course) in the subsequent discussion of
staffing.
Controlling Information
Information is part of the communication process within
organizations. As will be seen in Chapter 7, the

communication process itself is almost guaranteed to withhold,
expand, or distort information. And as noted in
Chapter 4, control of information can be an important source of
power and have clear effects on decision-
making outcomes. Although top-level members of an
organization usually have access to more information
than lower-level members, which can provide them with more
influence in decision-making, this is not always
the case. As pointed out in Chapter 4, individuals or units that
have more contact with organizations, groups,
and individuals outside the organization that provide it with
critical resources often exercise relatively high
levels of power within an organization. By selectively providing
information about these resource providers,
those individuals or units determine what organizational actions
are deemed appropriate and necessary for the
continuation of resource support. March and Simon (1958)
discuss this aspect of information transmission in
terms of the “absorption of uncertainty.” Since securing
resources from the environment is a major source of
uncertainty in most organizations, those who broker information
about key aspects of the environment “absorb”
the uncertainty—and accrue influence within the organization.
Control of information from within the organization may also be
becoming increasingly important, as
more and more organizations employ sophisticated tools,
including complex, electronically accessible
databases containing data compiled by organizational members,
as sources of information to be used in
decision-making. Research suggests that organizational
members who limit the amount of information that they
make available through such databases, providing an appearance
of quality and selectivity, are apt to be more
influential (because the data they make available are given more
attention) than those who provide a lot of

information. This less-is-more strategy is particularly effective
when many individuals are entering information
in the database. Under these conditions, users of the database
pay more attention to sources that appear to offer
information more selectively (Hansen and Haas, 2001).
Forming Coalitions
Another way in which decision-making outcomes are influenced
is through the selection of individuals to
participate in a decision-making group (Padgett, 1980).
Selecting organizational members who are likely to
form a coalition that will support a particular choice allows top-
level managers to ensure that the decision they
favor is likely to be recommended. In addition, inclusion of
expert outsiders, such as consultants, who may
become part of the coalition, can increase the probabilities of
this outcome (Bacharach and Lawler, 1980;
Pfeffer, 1981).
Most strategic decisions are centered at the top of
organizations, since that is where the power lies. At the
same time, there are instances in which lower-level subordinates
are brought into the process. As we have seen
previously in Chapters 2 and 5, participation by subordinates
has mixed consequences for the organization and
the participants. The same is true of decision-making. Greater
participation can actually be dysfunctional if the

participants already feel satisfied or even saturated with their
role in decision-making (Alutto and Belasco,
1972). Typically, though, bringing them into the decision-
making process increases their acceptance of the
decision that is made. A useful insight into participation in
decision-making is that if a decision is important for
the organization, a nonparticipative style is likely to be used; if
the decisions are important for the subordinates
in regard to their work, a more participative approach will be
taken (Heller, 1973). If the organizational
decision-makers believe that the subordinates have something to
contribute to the decision or its
implementation, then participation is more likely.
Decision-making involves both substance and politics and both
economic and socially embedded rationality. It
also involves limited rationality in all issues. Nonetheless, we
plunge ahead. When and if we are participants in
decision-making, we do try to do the best we can. To return to
our theme, decisions rarely, if ever, provide
perfect solutions and they never last over time, but we continue
to make them.
Since information is central to decision-making, and since
communications allow information to flow, we
will now examine this process in organizations.
EXERCISES
Describe the decision-making processes in your two
organizations. What are the issues? Who
participates?
Describe the forms of rationality present in decision-making in

your two organizations.
1.
2.
Religious OppressionMaurianne Adams and Khyati Y.
Joshi*Almost daily, we read or hear news about religious
conlict and violence, globally as well as locally, including the
murder of three Muslim students in North Carolina, the
vandalism against two Hindu temples in Seattle and Virginia,
and violence against Jews and Muslims in the U.S. and Europe.
Attacks in the U.S. against non-Christian faith traditions lead us
to ask these questions: How does U.S. religious difference
impact who we are as a nation? Why do some Americans believe
that Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs pose a threat to the American
way of life? Why are atheists and agnostics considered immoral
or unpatriotic? Is this sense of threat a recent response to
religious diversity or do these issues reach back into a long
historical debate about U.S. national and religious identity, and
about the mean-ing of our Constitutional “separation of church
and state”?Christianity was integral to U.S. national identity
well before the colonial period and it remains important today.
The signiicance of Christianity in U.S. life and the challenges it
poses for minority religions is a social justice issue that
requires the kind of historical knowledge and structural/cultural
analysis we use to understand other forms of oppression that
stand in the way of social justice.In this chapter, we explore the
role of religion in U.S. cultural, social, and political life. We
consider how religion in the U.S. has served the needs of a

dominant religious, ethnic, racialized majority by ensuring their
access to institutional and cultural power. We explore the
contradictions within U.S. traditions of religious freedom. We
examine the historical legacies that survive in current
manifestations of Christian hegemony, and their intersec-tions
with other forms of oppression in the U.S. We then raise some
of the key concerns for religious pluralism as a form of social
justice going into the future. The chapter concludes with a
design for teaching about Christian hegemony and religious
oppression with some discussion of pedagogical and facilitation
issues. Materials and activities that support the design can be
found on the website for this chapter.DEFINITIONS OF KEY
CONCEPTSReligious oppression in the U.S. refers to the
systematic subordination of minority religious groups, such as
Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Native American
spiritualities, and those who are atheists, agnostics, or
freethinkers. The subordination of non-Christian religions
occurs at all levels of society through the actions of individuals
(religious preju-dice), institutional policies and practices
(religious discrimination), and cultural and soci-etal norms and
values associated with Christianity (Joshi, 2006).The social
structures, federal and local policies, and cultural practices that
maintain and reproduce Christian norms in the U.S. through
“the everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal society”
result in Christian hegemony (Young, 1990, p. 268). Hegemony
generally refers to a society’s unacknowledged and/or
unconscious adherence to a dominant world view, without any
need for external policing, through assumed cultural norms,
policies, | ADAMS AND JOSHI256and practices whose
maintenance depends not on any special effort but on “business
as usual.” Christian hegemony refers to the dominance of
Christian observances, holy days, and places of worship without
regard for those of non-Christians (Kivel, 2013, pp. 2–36). In
the U.S., Christian hegemony refers to normalized Christian
norms that are accepted as intrinsic to our national identity,
even as a test of patriotism.Christian privilege refers to the

social advantages held by Christians in the U.S. who experience
social and cultural advantages relative to non-Christians.
Having privilege with respect to normative Christianity means
participation in “the assumptions underlying insti-tutional rules
and the collective consequences of following those rules”
(Young, 1990, p. 41). Christian privilege is generally
unacknowledged by those who hold it, because it is maintained
through the pervasive but largely invisible culture of normative
religious prac-tices (Blumenfeld, 2006; Joshi, 2006; Schlosser,
2003).Whereas Christian privilege refers mainly to those who
receive advantage, Christian normativity refers to the norms,
traditions, and belief systems that characterize this advan-tage.
Examples of the norms, traditions, and assumptions behind law
and policy that ben-eit Christians but marginalize, harm, or
disadvantage non-Christians, will be discussed later in this
chapter.OUR APPROACHOur social justice approach examines
religious oppression as one of the many ways that people are
categorized in the larger society, resulting in advantage or
disadvantage. A social justice approach to religious oppression
emphasizes structural and systemic patterns of inequality based
upon religious group memberships, reproduced through
interlocking social institutions and culture.This approach to
religious oppression draws upon sociological, legal, and
historical lenses. We analyze U.S. history and current
manifestations of religious oppression to show the formative
role of mainstream Protestant Christian culture in deining U.S.
national identity and patriotism. We use a sociological analysis
to describe pervasive religious val-ues, beliefs, and institutions
within U.S. culture, institutional policies, and social systems
(Fox, 2000; Johnstone, 2004) rather than focusing on what
speciic religious beliefs might “mean” to individual believers or
examining different rituals and theologies. We explore
Constitutional protections of religion in light of the mixed
history of legal interpretations. Our historical and sociological
analyses lead us to explore the historical and current-day
manifestations of religious privilege and religious oppression at

the individual, institu-tional, and cultural/societal levels, in
order to understand how these manifestations of Christian
hegemony have historically reinforced and reproduced each
other, and persist in the present day.We also use an
intersectional approach and focus on the interactions of religion
with race, sexuality, ethnicity, national origin, and other
categories of social difference that also have justiied ongoing
inequality. To these, we add the concept of racialization or
racial formation (Omi & Winant, 2014), a term used to convey
the processes by which north-ern European ethnicities (British,
German, or Scandinavian) became “racialized” as white with
access to white privilege, as distinct from the racial
marginalization of the peoples of Asian, African, and Arab
ethnicities. In this chapter, the racialization of U.S. religions
applies to adherents of minority religions whose religious
identities are considered in the U.S. to be race-based, while the
white identity of U.S. European Christian or non-Christian
Americans goes unnoticed racially. For example, many
Americans believe that all Arabs RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION
|257are Muslim (although some are Christian or Jewish), that all
Muslims are Arab (although many are Persian or Indonesian),
that all Indians are Hindu (some are Muslim or Chris-tian), and
so on. By this process of dual religious and racial
stigmatization, the racialization of religion reinforces the
religious devaluation experienced doubly as religious and racial
marginalization (Goldschmidt & McAlister,
2004).HISTORICAL LEGACIES OF PROTESTANT
HEGEMONY AND RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION IN THE
U.S.The focus for this chapter is religious oppression in the
U.S. However, we highlight two global historical legacies that
have been instrumental in the development and perpetu-ation of
U.S. religious oppression. We will irst discuss these two global
legacies before turning to historical themes within the U.S. The
irst global historical legacy grows out of religious conlict
rooted in the Old World of European Christianity, namely
Protestant hostility and distrust toward Catholics and vice

versa, and of all Christians toward Jews and Muslims. The
second historical legacy involves the long-term negative
consequences of both Orientalism and colonialism. Both of
these global historical legacies have contrib-uted to U.S.
hegemonic Protestantism and to the oppression toward
religiously “othered” peoples.RELIGIOUS CONFLICT
ROOTED IN EUROPEAN CHRISTIANITYIn Europe,
Christianity emerged out of a small Messianic 1st century sect
of Jews in Pal-estine to become the dominant European
religious and political force by the end of the Roman Empire.
European Christianity marked Jews and Muslims as enemies of
the one true faith, asserting that Jews had rejected the deity of
Jesus and were responsible for his Cruciixion, and that Muslims
followed a false prophet. Anti-Judaism (later termed anti-
semitism) and antagonism toward Islam (now framed as
Islamophobia) were therefore intrinsic to the core beliefs and
self-deinition of a militant European Christian culture that over
many centuries shaped national identities for the Roman
Catholic and Protestant nation states of Europe (Fredrickson,
2002; O’Shea, 2006; Reston, 2009). The term antisemitism is a
19th century scientiic-sounding euphemism for Judenhass (Jew-
hatred) and relects the European racializing of “semitic,” which
was a linguistic category that included Arabic and Aramaic as
well as Hebrew. The term antisemitism is now used to convey
the cumulative force of global and historic religious, economic,
and racial oppression of Jews as a religion, an ethnicity, a race,
and a people (Cohn-Sherbok, 2002).Islamophobia is a term that
uses “phobia” to convey dread, suspicion, and aversion toward
“Islam,” the religious group against whom those feelings are
directed. The term emerged in part from early 20th-century
French colonialism (Bravo López, 2011). Although
Christian/Muslim religious conlict dates back into centuries of
territorial military conlict between Christian and Muslim
nation-states, the term Islamophobia is a relatively recent term
that conveys Western prejudice, discrimination, and devaluation
of peoples identiied as Muslim. In this chapter we emphasize

the stereotypical, prejudicial, and racist ingredients of
Islamophobia (Frost, 2008; Rana, 2007) and see it as a complex
brew of anti-Muslim religious animosity and distrust, combined
with anti-African, Asian, and Arab racism.In a single word,
Islamophobia essentializes the diversity of Islamic nationalities,
lan-guages, religious sectarian afiliations, ethnicities, and
cultures into a single undifferentiated | ADAMS AND
JOSHI258and racialized religious group (Rana, 2007). Like
antisemitism, Islamophobia conveys reli-gious as well as racist
fears and hostility, in this case largely against peoples of North
African and Arab and Asian countries who are living in or
migrating to Europe and North America. Also like antisemitism,
Islamophobia is deeply rooted in Christian religious (and
colonialist) assumptions of the superiority of the West over the
East; this is described by Edward Said as “Orientalism” (1998)
and by others as racism directed against Asians and Arabs, most
speciically Muslims, through the racialization of religion (Joshi,
2006, 2009). Rana (2007) captures these complexities by
describing how “[the] Muslim is constructed through a racial
logic that crosses the cultural categories of nation, religion,
ethnicity, and sexuality” (p. 148).The religious cohesion of
early Christian Europe was fueled in part by Papal-sanctioned
military and religious Crusades against Muslims from 1095 to
1291, and legal restrictions or expulsion of Jews from the 4th to
the 16th centuries (Fredrickson, 2002; Gilbert, 2003; Hilberg,
2003). Roman Catholicism was hegemonic throughout Europe
until 17th cen-tury Protestantism challenged its dominance in
what became a violent and brutal conlict between competing
forms of Christianity, which affected the entirety of Europe and
other continents colonized by Catholics or
Protestants.Antisemitism preached from both Catholic and
Protestant pulpits blamed the Jews for the Cruciixion, accused
them of poisoning wells, and demonized and dehumanized them
as the anti-Christ. In Europe, it was widely believed that Jews
murdered Christian boys (the “blood libel”), desecrated the
Holy Sacrament, and caused bubonic plague (the “Black

Death”). The hysteria about “blood libel” followed Jews to the
New World, with docu-mented accusations in upper New York
State in the mid-20th century (Laqueur, 2006; Romero Castello
& Macías Kapón, 1994; Weinberg, 1986).In early Christian
Europe, Jews were stigmatized for loaning money at interest, a
prac-tice (“usury”) that was forbidden by Christian doctrine but
was needed to fund Christian ventures, such as the Crusades, or
to bankroll local authorities. The negative association of Jews
with money comes from Christian attitudes toward “usury,” and
as Christian Europe developed a capitalist inancial system based
on the (now secularized) practice of usury, led to the
scapegoating of Jews for the economic recessions built into
European capitalism. Even more dangerous was the
unquestioning acceptance of the belief that Jews were plot-ting
global economic control, as capitalism became a global force.
This view, propagated by the ictional Protocols of the Elders of
Zion written by Russian anti-Semites, was trum-peted as
historical truth in the European and U.S. press, and republished
and distributed by Henry Ford in The Dearborn Independent in
the 1920s (Bronner, 2000; Laqueur, 2006; Perry & Schweitzer,
2008).Jews within Christian Europe were viliied on religious
grounds as Christ-killers, and on economic grounds as money-
lenders, tax-collectors, and landlords. They were also ostracized
on racial grounds as an impure, “mongrel” people. This view of
Jewish “racial impurity” grew out of the Jewish diaspora, as
Jews looked like the people they settled among and had
phenotypical differences that relected 19th century “racial
typologies”— Ashkenazy Jews (in Europe), Sephardic Jews (in
Spain and the Americas), and Mizrachi Jews (in the Middle East
and South Asia) (Fredrickson, 2002; Laqueur, 2006). Nonethe-
less, “the Jew” was stereotyped with dark hair, swarthy skin,
and a big nose, features that had become racialized as
“Semitic.”Jews were driven out of Christian communities and
blamed for denying Jesus as the Mes-siah. They also were
proselytized and at times absorbed into Christian society if they
agreed to renounce Judaism. They were segregated in ghettos to

prevent mixing the inferior racial group (“Semites”) with the
superior Aryan stock; they were expelled or murdered if they
refused conversion, and tortured if suspected of maintaining
secret Jewish observance. By RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION
|259the 18th and 19th centuries, these religious differences were
becoming racialized based on the emerging pseudo-science of
racial superiority that classiied Aryans (whites) as supe-rior
peoples, and Jews (along with Africans, Arabs, and Asians) as
inferior and impure (Laqueur, 2006; Perry & Schweitzer, 2008;
Wistrich, 1991). Nineteenth-century eugenics movements in
Europe as well as the U.S. were vigorously antisemitic
(Michael, 2005). It is the recurrent “essentialism” of Jewish
“differentness” that links the religious and economic
antisemitism of the Middle Ages to the antisemitic racism
behind the Holocaust of the 20th century.The year 1492 is
celebrated for European exploration and the discovery of the
Ameri-cas. It is also the year in which Jews were expelled from
the Iberian Peninsula, speciically those who did not hold
“certiicates of birth” to document their genealogical blood
purity as Christian (Fredrickson, 2002). The requirement for
documented “blood purity” as a test of religious and national
identity in 15th century Spain suggests an early instance of the
intersection of racial, genealogical, and religious identities that
later came to characterize race-based antisemitism and other
forms of racism (Fredrickson, 2002).While antisemitism was
taking root within Europe, the Crusades drove the Muslim
“inidel” from the Holy Lands of Palestine and from Christian
Spain into North Africa (O’Shea, 2006; Reston, 2009). In Spain,
there had been a brief period of coexistence among Christians,
Jews, and Muslims, until Christianity was forcibly established
as an expression of national identity, and Muslim armies were
driven out of Spain into North Africa.It is important to note that
Christian antagonism toward Islam was economic as well as
religious, a function of intense competition for territory
surrounding the periphery of Europe—in Spain, in Palestine,
and in North Africa. But the relationships between Mus-lims

and Jews, forged as trading partners across Europe, Asia, and
Arabia, enabled Jews to live in Muslim countries across North
Africa, central Asia, and the eastern Mediterranean for 1400
years as a subordinated, although legally protected, religious
minority—not with-out violence, but also not with the
unremitting patterns of forced conversion, expulsions, and
genocide that characterized European antisemitism (Gilbert,
2003; Weinberg, 1986).COLONIALISM AND
ORIENTALISMThe colonial expansion of Europe by the 16th
century came on the heels of the persecution of European Jewry
and the Crusades waged against Muslims, positioning both as
inferior to Christians. One long-term consequence of the
situation in Europe was that Muslims and Jews were explicitly
excluded from political roles in the English colonies, including
colo-nial America. Indeed, the tactics and ideology that drove
the expulsion of Jews from parts of Europe and the recurrent
wars against Muslims at its fringes were precursors to the tac-
tics Europeans later took against the indigenous peoples of the
Americas (Winant, 2001).The European powers’ race to
colonize Africa, Asia, and the Americas globalized the military
and political basis for Christian hegemony and the
marginalization and exclusion of non-Christians. This colonial
legacy offers valuable insight into the racialization of reli-gion
in the United States as well.Orientalism refers to the idea that
European ways were superior to the cultures, people, and
religions associated with Middle East, African, and Asian
nations. “Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality
whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar
(Europe, West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East,
“them”)” (Said, 1978, p. 43). European encounters with the
Orient (Africa, Arabia, Islam, India, Southeast Asia) were
understood in Europe to be encounters with peoples inferior to
and potentially antagonistic to European civilization (Said,
1978). Orientalism was combined with the | ADAMS AND
JOSHI260developing pseudoscience of scientiic racism—that is,
the 18th and 19th century use of the term “race” to designate a

genetic, intrinsic, and essentialized hierarchy based on bogus
“racial” differences—to justify the European seizures and
imperial management of South Asian civilizations, together with
seizures of land, appropriation of mines, and enslavement of
peoples from Africa, Arabia, Asia, and the Americas (Kapila,
2007).Whereas for European travelers and adventurers,
Orientalism was the term for race, color, civilization, and
language linked to a supposed South Asian (“Orientalist”)
philoso-phy and world view, by the 1820s race intersected with
religion as its co-accomplice (Kap-ila, 2007). Beliefs,
ideologies, and theologies that were not Christian were distorted
and essentalized. For example, religions that were not
“revealed” in the way that Christianity was thought to be
revealed—Hinduism, for example—were considered morally
question-able. Other religions—Islam, for example—were
considered morally questionable because the source of
revelation was not Christian. As a colonizing legacy,
Orientalism against peoples from “the Orient” (Arabia, Asia)
intersected with U.S. racism (initially against indigenous
peoples and enslaved African blacks), as well as a deeply rooted
belief in Chris-tian divine purpose. These beliefs and practices
were used to justify the distrust and hatred expressed by
generations of white U.S. Christians against those who were not
white or Christian, and who, for those reasons, were considered
incapable of the self-government required to become U.S.
citizens.Spanish, Portuguese, and English explorers on their
voyages of discovery carried with them an ideology of Christian
religious superiority which, also conceptualized as “blood-
based,” could be conlated with and mutually reinforce racial
domination (Fredrick-son, 2002; Smedley, 1999). Racism,
Orientalism, and Christian entitlement reinforced the emerging
racial hierarchies and provided a self-serving European colonial
history—a history in which “the West” constructed “the East”
as well as the South as different and inferior, and whose people
would beneit from Western intervention and religious “rescue”
(Rana, 2011).The colonial mindset drew on multiple

justiications—cultural, racist, religious—to rationalize the
superiority of a Western civilization based on Christian faith
over native and African indigenous religions, Buddhism,
Hinduism, Islam, or Judaism. Thus, the colo-nial/orientalist
encounters resulted in produced distortions, stereotypes, and
patterns of misrepresentation about the multiple “others.”
Orientalism contributed to Christian hege-mony and normativity
by providing a way of looking at peoples, cultures, and
religions as collectively superior (Christians) or inferior (all
others). These religious/cultural attitudes fed into the arguments
against naturalization of Asian and Arab immigrants, discussed
later in this chapter.European colonialism became a worldwide
enterprise involving the taking of lands, minerals, and peoples
in Africa, Asia, and the Arabian subcontinent as well as the
Americas. Colonialism was justiied by the presumed racial and
religious superiority of the conquer-ing peoples, a religious
rationalization for their military conquest and economic exploi-
tation. Because colonialism “in God’s name” often went hand-
in-hand with Catholic or Protestant missions to so-called
heathen peoples, colonial exploitation could be explained away
by the assumption that uncivilized, heathen peoples would
beneit by the imposition of the presumed gifts of a superior
white Christian culture and the “good news” of the one true
gospel (Rana, 2011; Shohat, 2006).Racism and religious
oppression became mutually reinforcing, virtually indistinguish-
able tools of colonialism in the Americas as well as in Africa
and Asia, where indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa
were classiied both as heathen and as racially inferior. As
European explorers and adventurers encountered different
“others,” race irst rein-forced, but ultimate gradually replaced
religion as a way to distinguish among people, although in many
contexts race and religion remained interchangeable.
RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION |261Policies predicated on the
inherent superiority of western Christianity impacted geograph-
ically dispersed areas at the same points in history. For
example, the persecution, marginal-ization, and

disenfranchisement of Jews in Europe (Middle Ages through
1940s) and Native peoples in the Americas (15th century into
the 20th century) were concurrent, although geographically
distinct. Although it is dificult to hold the two in mind as
parallel processes of Christian oppression, both can be
summarized by the historian Raul Hilberg’s vivid summary of
the long history of antisemitism (see Hilberg, 3 vols., 2003):
“Since the fourth century after Christ there have been three
anti-Jewish policies: conversion, expulsion, and annihilation”
(Hilberg, 1961, p. 3). Hilberg understood that this was in itself
a cyclical, historical trend:The missionaries of Christianity had
said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The
secular ruler who followed had proclaimed: You have no right
to live among us. The German Nazis at last decreed: You have
no right to live.(Hilberg, 1961, pp. 3–4)The ethnic cleansing
justiied by Christian antisemitism in Europe parallels an ethnic
cleansing that justiied Christian massacres and relocations of
Native peoples in the U.S. Both happened in the same historical
timeframes, and both were rationalized by Christian entitlement.
The deadly sequence from forced conversion, to expulsion and
relocation, to genocide and extermination, is the same for
Native peoples in the U.S. as for Jews in Europe: “You can’t
live among us as Indians” (forced conversions), “You can’t live
among us” (relocations), and “You can’t live”
(massacre).United States anti-Muslim stereotypes are similarly
rooted in Christian exceptionalism that assumed Christian
capacity for democratic self-government but denied such capac-
ity to Muslims (Feldman, 1996; Murray, 2008). Colonizing
settlers had anti-Muslim as well as antisemitic stereotypes in
their baggage from the Old World. Stereotypes against Muslims
included the view that Muslims were intrinsically violent, that
Sharia law was bar-baric, and that Muslim loyalties undermined
their capacity for democratic self-regulation or loyalty to a
Christian nation—a view expressed in John Locke’s highly
inluential 1689 “Treatise Concerning Toleration” that the
“Mahometan . . . acknowledges himself bound to yield blind

obedience to the Mufti . . . who himself is entirely obedient to
the Ottoman Emperor” (quoted in Murray, 2008, p. 91). These
views justiied the denial of citizen-ship to Muslims in the
1920s. They have also motivated the current-day desecration of
mosques, the burning of the Qur’an by self-righteous
Evangelicals, and the attacks on U.S. citizens who appear to be
Muslim by virtue of head-coverings, beards, or dark skin (Alva-
rez & Don, 2011; Haiz & Raghunathan, 2014; Mamdani, 2004;
Rana, 2011).RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION AND CHRISTIAN
HEGEMONY IN U.S. HISTORYPROTESTANT HEGEMONY
IN THE U.S.The dominance of Protestantism in U.S. history
relects the English victory in the struggle between empires in
which Protestant (English) and Catholic (Spanish and French)
armies wrestled for control of the colonies. The English
colonies established along the Eastern seaboard were Protestant,
although they belonged to different sects and
denominations.Although U.S. history generally portrays the
colonies as religious havens for peoples persecuted elsewhere,
we now know that most early U.S. religious communities were
themselves theocratic and exclusive, with their own church
establishments that persecuted | ADAMS AND
JOSHI262members of other faiths as well as dissenters viewed
as “heretics” (Ahlstrom, 2004; Fraser, 1999). The legal
foundation for the U.S., the world’s irst secular government,
was based upon “an uneasy alliance between Enlightenment
rationalists and evangelical Christians” (Jacoby, 2004, p. 31).
The Salem witch trials in colonial Massachusetts offer an
especially vicious example of religious cleansing, during which
citizens accused of heresy and pre-sumed Satanism were
hanged, burned, or drowned, using religious justiications for
accu-sations based on neighborhood feuds, class antagonism,
and misogyny, and presided over by church-empowered
magistrates (Adams, 2008; Boyer & Nissenbaum, 1972; Butler,
Wacker, & Balmer, 2003).United States history has numerous
examples of religious persecution in the name of Protestant
sectarianism: Against Quakers in Plymouth Colony, against

Catholics and Jew-ish immigrants in the late 19th century, and
against Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses (Ahlstrom, 2004;
Butler, Wacker, & Balmer, 2003; Wills, 2005). Missions to
native peo-ples were federally supported by land grants to
strengthen their role in “civilizing” and preparing the way for
forced relocation, although these land grants and funds violated
Constitutional prohibitions against political support for
religious institutions (Echo-Hawk, 2010; Philbrick, 2004).
Distrust of non-Protestants (including non-believers) showed up
in state law: Massachusetts required that Catholics in public
ofice renounce papal author-ity, and Pennsylvania allowed Jews
but not atheists to hold ofice. Protestant domination lay behind
the 19th century creation of a nationwide network of Protestant
“common [public] schools” to maintain Protestant cultural
homogeneity in the face of substantial Catholic and Jewish
immigration (Fraser, 1999). For Protestants born in the U.S.,
these other faith traditions seemed incompatible with U.S.
citizenship because of their presumed dual or split loyalties:
Catholics to the Pope in Rome, Muslims to their Imams or an
Islamic Caliphate, and Jews to Israel.The religious freedom of
the early U.S. Republic meant freedom for Protestants, which
included Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Dutch Reformed,
Presbyterians, French Huguenots, Baptists, and Moravian
churches as well as Quakers, Amish, and Mennonites. The small
Shearith Israel congregation (Sephardic Jews from Spain) was
tolerated. The narrowly prescribed 18th century ecumenical
toleration also left room for the free-thought and Enlightenment
rationalism associated with the educated elite, and with their
prized traditions of political freedom and free individual
conscience—core U.S. values associated with this Protestant
consensus.Thomas Jefferson, a prominent Deist and freethinker,
proposed a bill “Establishing Reli-gious Freedom” (1779,
passed in 1786) that granted complete legal equality “for
citizens of all religions, and of no religion” in Virginia (Jacoby,
2004, p. 18). This bill became the prototype for the religious
protection clauses added as a 1st Amendment to the new U.S.

federal Constitution. The text of the Constitution itself was
explicit about religion only in its assertion that no religious test
be required for holding public ofice, a clear break from English
precedent (Jacoby, 2004).RACIALIZATION OF
RELIGIONEnglish, French, and Spanish colonizers became
“white” in the same cultural and ideo-logical process through
which colonizers understood Native peoples to be racialized as
“red,” or African peoples as “black,” although explicit and
legalized racial segregation and inequality took a century or
more to formalize (Lipsitz, 2006; Roediger, 1991). Thus, the
foundational Protestant communities along the eastern seaboard
were understood to be white communities, and their relocations
of Native American Indians as well as their enslavement of
Africans were justiied by their presumed religious as well as
racial superi-ority (Harvey, 2003; Loewen, 1995; Wills, 2005).
RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION |263For native peoples whose
ancestry predated white colonizing settlers, for African peoples
brought involuntarily into the U.S., and for immigrants from
Arab and Asian countries, the religious traditions of their
ancestral communities established a foundational role in “mak-
ing and preserving those very social boundaries that we call
‘races’ and ethnicities’ ” (Pren-tiss, 2003, p. 1). For the
dominant Protestant federal and state power structures in the
U.S., the presumed religious and racial inferiority of indigenous
peoples became intersecting and mutually supportive
justiications for their massacre throughout the Americas, and
for expulsion from their ancestral lands and forcible removal of
their children to vocational schools in preparation for menial
work (Ballantine & Ballantine, 2001; Chavers, 2009; Grinde,
2004). Also, with the immigration of Arabs and Asians, religion
and race became conlated and interchangeable markers of the
religious and racial “Other.”United States Protestant churches
were racially segregated, not only in the sociologi-cal sense of
who worshiped with whom, but theologically, culturally, and
politically as well (Jacobson & Wadsworth, 2012). Mainstream
white Protestant congregations split over religious and ethical

questions posed by slavery and racial segregation. Protestant
denominations, both North and South, developed biblical
interpretations and theological arguments that either
rationalized or excoriated race-based bondage and segregation.
Bit-ter denominational and sectarian disputes within white
churches stimulated the growth of a separate Black Church.
Black churches provided refuge, community, solidarity, and
support for ex-slaves and black sharecroppers, and fostered
black political leadership, economic development, and
education. Black churches were centers for organized pro-test
during the 19th and 20th centuries, including and beyond the
civil rights movement (Fulop & Raboteau, 1997; Lincoln &
Mamiya, 1990; Morris, 1986). Chinese, Korean, and Latino/a
Evangelical and Catholic religious communities have also
provided similar cultural/ethnic/linguistic solidarity (Carnes &
Yang, 2004; Chen & Jeung, 2012 ; Espinosa, 2014; Garces-
Foley & Jeung, 2013; Min & Kim, 2001).The conlation of
religious with racial difference justiied slavery, even in cases in
which slaves had become Christians (that is, black Christians);
it was also evident in the anti-semitic policies and practices in
private schools, colleges, and professional preparation, clubs,
hotels, and employment (Diner, 2004; Takaki, 1991). The
strength of Catholicism and its conlation with “Mexican” as a
racial category helped to justify the 19th century appropriation
of Spanish and Mexican lands into the new states of the “anglo”
southwest and California (Menchaca, 2001; Takaki, 2008). The
racialization of religion provided the basis for vehement U.S.-
born white Protestant opposition to immigrants, such as the
Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian Sikhs, Muslims, and
Hindus; Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics; and Eastern
European Jews. The very notion of citizenship itself was
racially and religiously charged (Eck, 2001; Jacobson,
1998).RELIGION, RACE, AND IMMIGRATIONPrior to the
Civil War, an estimated half of the U.S. population and 85% of
Protestants were evangelical (Emerson & Smith, 2000), forging
a white, Protestant evangelical national identity. This white and

Protestant national identity remained largely unques-tioned
until the period from 1840 to the 1920s, when signiicant
increases in immigration of non-Protestant peoples poked holes
in a previously homogeneous, racialized, mainly Protestant
American sense of nationhood. Total immigration rose from
143,000 dur-ing the 1820s, when most immigrants were
northern Europeans, to 8,800,000 during the irst decade of the
20th century, when most immigrants were from south or eastern
Europe, or Arab and Asian countries (Ofice of Immigration
Statistics, 2006). In 1860, the foreign-born American population
was over 4 million, with more than 1.5 million from Catholic
Ireland (Jacobson, 1998). | ADAMS AND JOSHI264The Irish
potato blight of 1844 devastated an already starving Irish and
Catholic popu-lation, 90% of whose arable land had been
enclosed for cattle by English (Protestant) landlords, leaving
the rural poor to subsist mainly on backyard plots of potatoes.
With the loss of their subsistence crop, a million Irish starved to
death between 1845–1855, while English landlords converted
even more Irish lands for grain and cattle export to British
markets (Takaki, 1991). One-and-a-half million unskilled and
pauperized Irish laborers led starvation to migrate to U.S. east
coast and Midwestern cities. Italian Catholics and Jews led
European revolution, poverty, and pogroms, settling mainly but
not exclusively in urban centers. Wherever they settled, Irish,
Italian, Polish, and Latino Catholics estab-lished separate
parishes where they could worship in their languages of
origin.By 1920, more than a third of the total population of 105
million Americans included immigrants and their children (36
million), the majority of them Roman Catholic, Greek
Orthodox, and Jewish, with signiicant numbers of Buddhists,
Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs from China and India (Daniels,
2002). Asian immigration (irst Filipino and Chinese, fol-lowed
by Japanese and South Asian) and Middle Eastern immigration
(initially Syrian or Lebanese Maronite Christian) brought
Buddhist, Confucian, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh beliefs and
practices, as well as Orthodox religious adherence, to the U.S.

(Bald, 2013; GhaneaBassiri, 2010; Haddad, 2002; Jensen, 1988;
Takaki, 1998).There was often violent backlash against Irish,
German, Italian, and Polish Catholics (Guglielmo, 2003;
Ignatiev, 1995), who were perceived to challenge the white
Anglo Saxon Protestant way of life. At the turn of the 20th
century, intense anti-Catholicism, antisemitism, and opposition
to Asians and Arabs, generically painted as “not like us,” were
enforced through intimidation by white nativist groups, who
feared their brand of Protestant Americanism was under assault
by foreign religions and ethnicities. This nativist activism
resulted in the Immigration Act of 1917, which speciically
eliminated Asian immigration—and thereby immigrant
adherents of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, or
Sikhism. This act was followed by the 1924 National Origins
Act, which set the percentage for immigrants to the U.S. at a
mere 2% of the total of any nation’s residents as reported in the
1890 census. This law closed off southern and eastern European
immigration, Jews, and Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics.
These targeted and restrictive laws were part of a widespread
xenophobia character-ized at its extreme by the Ku Klux Klan
and other Christian Identity groups, whose anti-Catholicism and
antisemitism enlarged their earlier anti-black racist origins
(Dan-iels, 2002; Lee, 2004).Because of the immigration
restrictions in place after 1924, Jewish Holocaust refugees were
refused immigration status during the 1930s and 1940s, despite
strenuous rescue efforts (Wyman, 2007). During the period
1924–1965, most assimilated and Americanized Jews and
Catholics—whose ancestors had immigrated before 1924—
became white or at least “almost” if “not always quite” white.
At the same time, religious observance became increasingly
private, with worship taking place in separate parochial, home
schooling, or weekend Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish religious
education (so-called “Sunday school”).In the decades following
World War II, educational, residential, and professional bar-
riers to upward mobility were slowly dismantled for white
ethnic communities. The ben-eiciaries were mainly white

Ashkenazy Jews and white Catholics (Italians and Irish), but not
black or brown Catholics or Protestants (African Americans,
Afro-Caribbeans, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos/as and Mexican
Americans, and South or Central Americans) (Brodkin, 1998;
Guglielmo & Salerno, 2003; Ignatiev, 1995; Roediger, 1991).
European immigrants who had been seen as “ethnic” (as well as
Catholic or Jewish) assimilated by giving up the languages and
accents of their home communities, cooking and dressing
“American,” surgically altering telltale markers by having a
“nose job,” and in the aftermath of World RELIGIOUS
OPPRESSION |265War II, moving to the “integrated”
(interreligious, but not interracial) suburbs. All that remained of
their communities of origin was their religion, but that was kept
on the week-end “other” side of the “public face” of weekday
life.Not until 1965 did a new Immigration Act reopen the door
to immigration that was religiously non-Christian and racially
non-white, establishing a renewal of the earlier reli-gious,
racial, and ethnic national demographic. By 2010, immigrant
and second-generation Americans numbered nearly 72 million,
more than 40 million of them immigrants, many of them
migrating as family units within strong religious community
networks (Grieco, Trevelyan, Larsen, Acosta, Gambino, de la
Cruz, Gryn, & Walters, 2012). A major out-come of the 1965
Immigration Act has been the growing number of Hindu,
Muslim, and Sikh religious, cultural, and ethnic communities in
the U.S. as well as major increases in Asian, African, and
Latino/a Christian communities (Chen & Jeung, 2012; Ecklund
& Park, 2005; Haddad, 2011; Joshi, 2006; Kurien, 2014; Min,
2010).NATURALIZATION AND CITIZENSHIPReligion played
a role in who could enter the U.S., and it was also a factor that
intersected with race for courts hearing appeals and making
decisions about naturalization and citizen-ship for immigrants
once they were here (Haney-López, 1996). The Naturalization
Law of 1790 had restricted citizenship to “free white men,”
thereby excluding all women, blacks (until passage of the 14th
Amendment in 1868), Native American Indians, and anyone else

of non-white racial ancestry. Citizenship was not fully available
to Native Americans until the 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act,
which extended citizenship to native peoples living on
reservations, thus providing them with legal standing and the
ability to ile claims for reli-gious protection. These citizenship
dates account for the relatively recent Native American
litigation for religious protection of their sacred sites and their
1st Amendment rights to the free exercise of their traditional
religious practices (Adams, 2012).Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian,
Indian, Japanese, Mexican, Syrian, and Turkish immigrants
turned to the courts for naturalization, using a range of
arguments to buttress their claims for naturalization as white
peoples, but with contradictory results that often involved the
intersection of religious and racial identities. These applicants
were considered racially ambiguous: Not black, but also not
white, and marked by the perception that their reli-gious
cultures were unassimilable and “fundamentally at odds” with
the American way of life (Ngai, 2004).In cases involving
Syrians, the intersection of religious identity (Muslim) and skin
color became determinative, as in the 1909 case of the light-
skinned Costa Najour, who was granted citizenship by a court
that identiied Syrians as members of the “white race” but also
registered their concern that this “subject of the Muslim
Ottoman Sultan, was inca-pable of understanding American
Institutions and government” (Gualtieri, 2001, pp. 34, 37). By
contrast, in 1942, the dark-skinned Yemeni Arab Ahmed Hassan
was denied citi-zenship on the religious grounds that “a wide
gulf separates [Mohammedan] culture from that of the
predominantly Christian peoples of Europe” (Gualtieri, 2001, p.
81). Further, even Syrian Christian naturalization applicants
who were deemed white and granted citi-zenship, faced
discrimination, harassment, and violence from the Ku Klux Klan
(Gualtieri, 2001).Two pivotal Supreme Court decisions, Takao
Ozawa v. U.S. and U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, illustrate the
crazy-quilt conlations of religion and race in Supreme Court
nat-uralization cases. Takao Ozawa was a Japanese-born but

California-educated and English-speaking church member who
had lived in the U.S. for 20 years when he applied in 1914 for
naturalization. To the courts, Ozawa was not “white” because
the court accepted | ADAMS AND JOSHI266the pseudo-
scientiic classiication of Japanese as “mongoloid” (Haney-
López, 1996). Fol-lowing this racial logic, Bhagat Singh Thind,
an Indian Sikh, petitioned for citizenship as a white man,
arguing that South Asian Indians were classiied racially as
Aryans/Caucasians and therefore white. The Supreme Court
reversed its logic from the Ozawa case, argu-ing that while
Singh might be classiied as white, “the average man knows
perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound
differences” between “the blond Scandinavian and the brown
Hindu” despite their shared Caucasian ancestry. Further, the
Court argued that “Hindus could not be assimilated into a
‘civilization of white men,’ ” confusing Sikh with Hindu
identity based on Thind’s Indian roots (quoted in Snow, 2004,
p. 268). The twisted and contradictory logics of Supreme Court
naturalization litigation tied religious to race-based rationales
against citizenship in order to have it both ways, but toward the
same end point: Racialized religious minorities were not
eligible for U.S. citizenship.DISCRIMINATION AGAINST
WHITE RELIGIOUS MINORITY GROUPSThe racial exclusion
of Christian communities of color from white churches took
place in tandem with the religious exclusion also of minority
white religious sects from U.S. politi-cal life. For example, the
violence directed against U.S.-born Christians who broke from
denominational Protestantism to form the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), the Seventh-day
Adventists, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, was triggered by out-
rage over their overt rejection of establishment Protestantism,
and also by their repudiation of federal, state, or local political
authority (Butler, Wacker, & Balmer, 2003; Mazur & McCarthy,
2001; Prentiss, 2003). The clashes of police and armed mobs
against Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses resulted in the
withdrawal of these religious sects into relatively autonomous

geographical spaces, or relinquishment of their sectarian claims
to political autonomy (Mazur, 1999).Although Mormons,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-day Adventists have been at
times considered denominations within Christianity, their
theological claims, political separatism, and aspirations toward
autonomy alienated them from sectarian Protestant Christianity.
Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-day Adventists
experienced vio-lence in the 19th century that was harshly
similar to the colonial expulsions and execu-tions of so-called
heretics who threatened the earlier established
religious/political status quo. The antagonism toward Mormons
broke into the political and Constitutional arena when Congress
prohibited polygamy in 1862, and the Supreme Court rejected
Mormon claims to maintain multiple marriages under the free
exercise case of the 1st Amendment (U.S. v. Reynolds, 1879).
In this precedent-setting case, Reynolds, who was the
defendant, argued that the anti-polygamy statute violated his
free religious exercise as a Mormon. The Supreme Court
reasoned that polygamy constituted an “action” not a “belief,”
and not only was not constitutionally protected, but should be
restricted for the good of society (Feldman, 1996).The Reynolds
case is important because the Supreme Court narrowly deined
“free exer-cise” to protect belief but not action, most notably
when such actions seemed so far outside Christian norms as to
pose a danger to Christian society. But from the Reynolds case
on, one cannot ind a clear, bright line between “belief” and
“action” in keeping with the meaning of the Constitutionally
guaranteed free “exercise” of religion. The line zigs and zags
according to the faith traditions of petitioners for “free
exercise” of their religion in relation to the Supreme Court’s
willingness to accept their claims that these practices were
required by sincerely held religious beliefs. Two issues have
been at stake here: (1) whether the religious practices oppose
the public good, and (2) whether the religious practices are
accepted as authentic by the Court. RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION
|267DISCRIMINATION AGAINST AGNOSTICS AND

ATHEISTSChristian distrust of freethinkers, agnostics, and
atheists became hardened once the evangelizing fervor of 19th
century revivalist Protestantism overwhelmed the rationalist
freethought traditions of an earlier period. Many of the framers
of the Constitution, like Jefferson, had been freethinkers and
Deists. The founding documents of the early Repub-lic relect
their secular views. Until 1914, there was a vigorous
freethought movement in the U.S. that linked secular beliefs to
an “absolute separation of church and state, which translated
into opposition to any tax support of religious institutions—
especially parochial schools” (Green, 2012; Jacoby, 2004, p.
153).These traditions of freethought and secularism, as well as
atheism and agnosticism, came into collision with powerful
religious organizations that emerged among immigrant Catho-
lics as well as U.S.-born evangelical Protestants. Religious
opposition to secularism and atheism became political, as the
perceived threat of “foreign” socialism, anarchism, and
radicalism among immigrant-identiied activists gained visibility
by the mid- to late-19th century. Irish union organizers, Italian
radicals, and Jewish socialists were targeted by poli-ticians and
the media as serious dangers to U.S. business and commerce,
threatening to drive a knife into the heart of U.S. capitalism.
Immigrant European socialists were opposed on religious as
well as political grounds, partly because some immigrant
activists were Jewish, and partly because an atheist world view
imagined that human progress could be achieved without divine
intervention or sanction.By the mid-20th century, the global
threat of “godless Communism” to U.S. capitalism at home and
abroad had discredited U.S. atheism or agnosticism and
cemented the associa-tion of atheism with socialism. The
Palmer raids on union organizers following the Red Scare of
1919 equated religious with political unorthodoxy, and atheism
with socialism, so that earlier proud intellectual traditions of
freethought, agnosticism, atheism, and secu-larism were tarred
with the brush of bolshevism. All were positioned as potent
political heresies that could undermine the powerful Christian-

identiied nation-state focused on capitalism and global inance
that the U.S. considered itself to be (Kruse, 2015).The
McCarthyism of the 1950s, largely a repeat of the Red Scare of
1919, used theolog-ical grounds to purge the godless on behalf
of the body politic. It was during the McCar-thy era that the
phrase “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance
(1954) as an ecumenical religious reference that would
differentiate the god-fearing U.S. from the god-less Soviets. A
successful 2003 lawsuit brought by an atheist, who argued that
the phrase “under God” violated the establishment clause of the
1st Amendment, led to hate mail against the plaintiff and furor
in the media (Jacoby, 2004).THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH
AND STATEMost U.S. citizens assume that freedom of
religious expression has deinitively been assured by the 1st
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, an assumption that is
contradicted by more than a century of Supreme Court
constitutional rulings that differentiate between “belief” and
“expression” or “practice.” In large measure, the indings are
against plaintiffs whose religious practices do not accord with
the Court’s hegemonic understandings of Christian practices
(Adams, 2012; Echo-Hawk, 2010; Feldman, 1996; Mazur &
McCarthy, 2001).The religious protection clauses of the 1st
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1791) stipulate that
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” These clauses
were added to provide a mutual assur-ance pact among the
Protestant denominations of the 13 colonies that there would be
no federally subsidized church supported by public taxes such
as they had rebelled against in England (Fraser, 1999; Mazur,
1999). | ADAMS AND JOSHI268The question whether religious
freedom was extended only to Protestants across denominations,
or to Catholics, Jews and all religions outside Protestantism,
has haunted discussions of these religious protection clauses
from the outset. On the one hand, the language of the
Constitutional religion clauses declined to name the protected
religions, relecting the more inclusive language of Jefferson’s

1779 Act for Establishing Religious Freedom for Virginia
(1779), “that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument
to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the
same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil
capacities” (quoted in Feldman, 1996, p. 151). But the other
side feared that the 1st Amendment became “a door opened for
the Jews, Turks, and Hea-thens to enter in publick ofice” and an
“invitation for Jews and pagans of every kind to come” to the
U.S. (quoted in Feldman, 1996, pp. 162–163). Two centuries
later, the Court ruled for the Jeffersonian perspective of
religious inclusion:Perhaps in the early days of the republic
these words were understood to protect only the diversity within
Christianity, but today they are recognized as guaranteeing reli-
gious liberty and equality to the inidel, the atheist, or the
adherent of non-Christian faith such as Islam or Judaism. . . .
The anti-discrimination principle inherent in the Establishment
Clause necessarily means that would-be discriminators on the
basis of religion cannot prevail.(County of Allegeny v.
American Civil Liberties Union, 1989)The irst of the “religious
protection” clauses, the Establishment Clause (“Congress shall
make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) prohibits
government from estab-lishing or favoring any single religion,
religious denomination, or sect. The second reli-gious
protection clause, Free Exercise Clause (“Congress shall make
no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) has been
interpreted to refer to religious belief and/or practice, although
religious practice claims have been narrowly hedged and in
many cases rejected in Supreme Court indings.The well-known
phrase “separation of church and state” comes not from the
Consti-tution itself but from a letter from Jefferson (1802) to
assure a Baptist congregation that the 1st Amendment had built
“a wall of separation between Church and State” (Butler,
Wacker, & Balmer, 2003, pp. 155–160; Fraser, 1999, pp. 18–
21). This “wall of separa-tion” between government and
religion is still referred to as “the separation of Church and
State,” despite the proliferation of diverse religious places for

worship such as Buddhist ashrams, Sikh gurdwaras, Muslim
mosques, and Jewish synagogues or temples today.In resolving
legal questions brought under these two religious protection
clauses, the Supreme Court has rarely used strict separation or a
literal “wall of separation.” Instead, most decisions have used
accommodation or non-preference to avoid tilting any advantage
to one religion over another. Accordingly, the Court found that
students might be released from K–12 classes to receive
religious instruction outside the school premises, but did not
allow taxpayer (public) reimbursement to parochial schools for
expenses incurred in teach-ing secular subjects inside the school
premises (Lemon v. Kurtzman, 1971). In reaching these
decisions, the Court asked questions such as: What is the
secular purpose of any leg-islation in question? Is its primary
effect to advance or inhibit religion? Will a legal decision avoid
“ ‘excessive government entanglement with religion’ ”
(Maddigan, 1993, p. 299)?The free exercise clause has generally
been interpreted by the courts to afirm free reli-gious belief, but
not to afirm religious practices or behaviors that were in conlict
with neutral-seeming legal restrictions. Freedom of religious
belief has not been challenged because it is closely linked with
freedom of speech (also a 1st Amendment right). But case law
dealing with religious worship, practice, behavior, expression,
or action have been RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION |269balanced
against the legal concept of compelling state interests. The
Court generally has looked more favorably upon “free exercise”
claims brought by Christian-identiied groups, such as Seventh-
day Adventists (Sherbert v. Verner, 1963) and Amish
(Wisconsin v. Yoder, 1972).Claiming their “free exercise”
rights has proven more daunting for non-Christians. For
example, in a free-exercise claim brought by an Orthodox Jew
in the military who was required by religion to maintain head-
covering at all times, the Court deferred to the mili-tary code.
The Court argued that wearing the yarmulke was a personal
preference, not a requirement of his religion; and that the
standardized uniform needs of the military super-seded his free

exercise claims, and that military regulations were reasonable
and did not violate the free exercise clause (Goldman v.
Weinberger, 1986). By comparison, the Court had no dificulty
afirming the “religious requirements” in cases brought by the
Amish, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-day
Adventists.Similarly, Native American Indian free exercise
claims from 1980 on were unsuccess-ful, and were evaluated by
shifting, unfavorable criteria (Feldman, 1996; Long, 2000). The
Court found that Cherokee and Navajo plaintiffs were not
justiied in claiming “free exercise” relief from federal land
policies that prevented their religious practice in sacred sites
that had been designated as federal parks or other public uses.
In contrast to earlier indings (concerning the Amish or Seventh-
day Adventists), the Court did not see that Native peoples, too,
practiced ancient recognized religions; and that they, like the
Amish, held their beliefs sincerely. The Court ignored the
burden on free expression by federal land management policies
or indings that the state interests in park policy were negligible
and that the parks had not used the least-restrictive means
(Beaman, 2003; Echo-Hawk, 2010).If one were to apply a test
of consistency to these and other Supreme Court 1st Amend-
ment protection of free religious exercise cases, it would seem
clear that these non-Christian cases met the criteria afirmed in
the case of Amish or Seventh-day Adventist free exercise
indings. The major difference appears to be that the cases
rejected by the courts were cases in which the free exercise
claims were not based upon traditional or (for them) rec-
ognizable norms of religious free exercise and worship. For
example, it did not occur to the court that standardized uniforms
“will almost always mirror the values and practices of the
dominant majority—namely Christians. Put bluntly, the U.S.
military is unlikely to require everyone to wear a yarmulke as
part of the standard uniform” (Feldman, 1996, p. 247). The
Court did not consider that in Orthodox Judaism (as in other
orthodox reli-gions), head-covering is required at all times.
Nor, in the Native peoples’ sacred sites cases, was the Court

willing to protect Native peoples’ capacity to conduct
traditional religious ceremonies in ancient, well-established,
and traditional sacred settings. In the numerous Native cases
brought and lost, “free exercise” claims were subordinated to
the federal gov-ernment’s authority in controlling what had
become federal lands, with no regard for the ways in which such
land had been acquired (Linge, 2000, p. 314).At the same time,
the Supreme Court upheld the use of politically sanctioned
religious speech, ritual, and symbols that had been derived from
Christian texts and traditions and used to describe the religious
heritage of the U.S., and which they rationalized as a U.S. “civil
religion” (Bellah, 1967; Jones & Richey, 1974). For example,
the phrase “In God We Trust” was added to the U.S. currency in
1864, and Congress made Christmas a national holiday in 1865
during the crisis of Civil War. The phrase “In God We Trust”
uses the Christian norm of naming the deity, an affront to
orthodox Jews (who must not write or utter the divine name), to
Muslims (who invoke Allah), or to the variously named deities
in Hindu or other faith traditions. “In God We Trust” excludes
freethinkers, agnostics, and atheists from the hegemonic
Christian national identity (“we”) assumed by this phrase. |
ADAMS AND JOSHI270Supreme Court decisions between 1890
and 1930 stated that the U.S. “is one of the ‘Christian
countries’,” a “Christian nation,” “a Christian people,” although
in 1952 the phrasing became more ecumenical: “We are a
religious people whose institutions presup-pose a Supreme
Being” (Feldman, 1996).RELIGION AND PUBLIC
SCHOOLINGReligion has been central to U.S. education, from
the colonial period when it was a fam-ily responsibility to
educate one’s young, into the 19th century when it became a
priority for the state. The “common” (public) schools of the
19th century public education shared Protestant religious texts,
prayers, and values as a nationalizing glue for a newly
established system of primary schooling. The need for a
“public” educational system had become evi-dent following the
Civil War, when immigrants as well as U.S.-born settlers

migrated into western territories, all needing to ensure literacy
and practical education for their children. There was also the
perceived need to “Americanize” the children of Irish and
German Catholic immigrants at mid-century, and the many other
immigrants that followed. To meet these needs, Protestant
leaders established a “nondenominational” network of “com-
mon schools,” which were racially segregated and whose
“common” curriculum forged the values for a shared national
identity (Fraser, 1999).The common schools formed the
precursor for today’s public school system. The com-mon
schools delivered a core curriculum upon which the major
Protestant denominations could agree. They could be considered
ecumenical or non-denominational only in the sense of bridging
sectarian differences within a Protestant framework, although
Amish, Mennonites, and Quakers more often maintained their
own schools. Catholic immigrant communities established their
own parish-based “parochial” school system, designed to
maintain Catholic education by using the Douay Bible and
Roman Catholic catechism, rather than the King James Bible
and Protestant Book of Common Prayer used in the com-mon
schools.The emergence of two major educational networks, each
with explicit religious afilia-tions, led to political, inancial,
legal, and at times violent conlicts between a (largely Prot-
estant) Christian population in the public schools and
challenges from parochial schools. This conlict only intensiied
as the political leverage generated by Jewish, Catholic, and
other non-Christian populations increased. Prayer and Bible
readings in public schools came under scrutiny in
“establishment” 1st Amendment cases of the 1950s and
1960s.Two such cases went to the U.S. Supreme Court and
continue to impact the dialogue about religion and public
schools today. In Engel v. Vitale (1962), Jewish families in
Long Island protested the daily prayer that had been mandated
(by state legislation in 1951) to promote religious commitment
and moral and spiritual values. The Supreme Court agreed with
the plaintiffs that prayer in public schools violated the 1st

Amendment’s Estab-lishment Clause. Then, in Abington
Township School District v. Schempp, 1963, the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled against Bible reading and recitation of the Lord’s
Prayer in public schools, but commented that study about
religions (as distinct from religious study) in the nation’s public
schools is both legal and desirable. The justices stated that a
student’s education is not complete without instruction
concerning religious inluences on history, culture, and literature
(Murray, 2008).As the diversity of religions held by U.S.
citizens increased, members of faith traditions challenging
limits on their free expression turned to the courts to decide
Constitutional issues of religion and public schools. These
issues ranged from prayer in schools or school events, to the
celebration of Christian holidays in public spaces, to curricular
decisions concerning evolution or creationism in biology
classes, to the appropriate garb (hijab, RELIGIOUS
OPPRESSION |271kippa) for public school students. School
boards and religious communities across the country continue to
debate whether public schools should be secular religion-free
zones or whether teaching about religion (rather than teaching
of religion) should be included in standard public school
curricula. In this chapter, we take the position that to truly
under-stand our own neighbors and to participate effectively in
a diverse citizenry and global society, we will need to do a
much better job of understanding each other’s religions, beliefs
and traditions of worship, as well as the salience of religion in
our different cultures.DEMOGRAPHICS OF CURRENT U.S.
RELIGIOUS DIVERSITYThe national census does not provide
the demographic information on religion that it offers for ethnic
and racial self-identiication. Non-governmental surveys that
collect data on religion are often voluntary, based on self-
reports from organized religious congrega-tions or afiliations,
and thus vary depending on whether religious identity is linked
to organized, observant religious communities, or based on
survey data and self-report. Since Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim,
Sikh, and Native American religious practices are not neces-

sarily congregational or documented by oficial listings, it
becomes all the more dificult to gather demographic data on the
numbers of adherents. The numbers in Table 8.1 are gathered
from composite sources to provide an estimate of religious
demographics.The approximate numbers for Buddhists include
converts of all races as well as immi-grant irst- and second-
generation Americans. Buddhists come primarily from Japan,
China, Tibet, Thailand, Cambodia, and other Asian nations.
Approximately 75% to 80% of American Buddhists are of Asian
ancestry.Most Sikhs are of Indian origin, from Punjab. Islam is
a pan-ethnic religion, with adher-ents in the U.S. from East,
Southeast, Central, and South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
There are also African American and European American
(mainly Albanian) Muslims. Afri-can Americans, Arabs, and
South Asians comprise more than three-quarters of all Muslims
in the United States. South Asians make up the fastest growing
Muslim immigrant popu-lation. Around 60% of native-born U.S.
Muslims are African Americans (Pew Research Center,
2011a).Table 8.1 U.S. Religious
DemographicsReligionNumbersSourceBuddhist2.2–3.6
millionPew Research Center (Lipka, 2014)Dharma World
Magazine (Tanaka, 2011)Christian240–262 millionGallup Poll
(Newport, 2012) Pew Research Center(Pew Research Center,
2011b)Hindu2.3–3 millionAssociation of Religion Data
Archives (Melton & Jones, 2011)U.S. Census Bureau’s
American Community Survey (Hinduism Today,
2008)Jewish4.2–6.8 millionPew Research Center (Lipka,
2013)Brandeis University’s Steinhardt Social Research Institute
(Tighe, Saxe, Magidin de Kramer, & Parmer, 2013)Muslim1.8–7
millionPew Research Forum (Pew Research Center, 2011a)The
American Mosque (Bagby, 2011)Sikh200,000–700,000Sikh
American Legal Defense & Education Fund (SALDEF, 2014) |
ADAMS AND JOSHI272The overall Christian share of the U.S.
population dropped from 78% in 2007 to 70% in 2014, with the
loss mainly to mainstream Protestants and Catholics,
accompanied by increases in those who claimed to be

“unafiliated” or non-Christian (Pew Research Center, 2015, pp.
2–3). Pew also reported increased interreligious marriages, from
19% prior to 1960 to 39% in 2010 (2015, p. 5). Pew further
reported that “By a wide margin, religious ‘nones’ have
experienced larger gains through religious switching” in the
sense that 18% of U.S. adults raised in a religious faith had
come to identify with no religion in the Pew sur-vey (2015, p.
11). There were gains in the populations of Catholics and
evangelical Prot-estants of color. In broad brushstrokes,
however, the U.S. has more Christians than other countries
globally—70% people in the U.S. identify with some branch of
Christianity.CONTEMPORARY MANIFESTATIONS OF
CHRISTIAN HEGEMONYCHRISTIAN NORMATIVITY,
HEGEMONY, AND PRIVILEGEMany of the historical legacies
noted above persist today in events and acts that, over time,
became normalized within U.S. traditions while retaining their
Christian associa-tions. There are numerous examples of
Christian normativity—contemporary rituals and practices that
carry Christian culture into the public sphere yet are accepted as
“normal,” such as the lighting of the Christmas tree at the White
House or in a local town, commu-nity Easter egg hunts, and the
presumptively non-denominational prayer at the start of a city
council meeting.These public rituals have a basis in
Christianity, and become repackaged as a U.S. “civil religion,”
meaning they are supposed to be seen as “American” traditions,
widespread and propagated by the popular media (Steinberg &
Kincheloe, 2009). This “civil religion” is maintained as a glue
for U.S. national identity and an indicator of one’s patriotism.
Calling this marker of Christian hegemony a “civil religion”
downplays the role of Christianity in the American way of life
(Feldman, 1996; Murray, 2008).Many people consider these
events to be normal, appropriate, and joyous activities for all
Americans. Few people think seriously about the ways in which
U.S. Christianity has institutionalized its values and practices
while marginalizing and subordinating those who do not adhere
to Christian faith traditions. The above scenarios of

“normalized” customs operate to privilege Christians while
contributing to the marginalization and fur-ther invisibility of
non-Christian faiths and atheists and agnostics. Christianity is a
visible ingredient of U.S. patriotism in war-time or times of
presumed conlict, as during the Cold War of the 1950s—when
to be an atheist was to be un-American, and to be a Jew was
suspect—or today with the suspicion of anyone thought to be
Muslim. This issue emerged again in questions of President
Obama’s religious convictions (Protestant or Muslim), even to
rumors whether he took the oath of ofice holding a Bible or the
Qur’an.Further, Christian norms shape assumptions about where
and how to worship: In rec-ognizable religious buildings
(churches), but not in geographic sacred sites; and with hands
clasped in prayer, but not stretched forward on the loor from a
kneeling position. The respect shown to core Christian beliefs
(the Virgin birth, the Resurrection, the Second Coming) is not
accorded to the religious or spiritual beliefs of indigenous
peoples. Moham-med’s midnight light to heaven (Islam) or
Vishnu’s periodic visitation of the Earth under different guises
(Hinduism) are mocked and laughed at, reduced to the status of
“myths” and “folkways.” These views devalue them by
removing their religious content through an implicit comparison
with Christian beliefs or truths, and with Christian worship and
religious observance (Joshi, 2006). RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION
|273Because Christianity is culturally normative, non-Christians
are asked, “What is ‘your Bible’?” and “When is ‘your
Christmas’?” The normative force of these questions comes
from the assumption that other religions have the same or
equivalent versions of one sacred text or one or two major
holidays. Hinduism, for example, has more than one sacred text,
as does Judaism. Similarly, the respect accorded to U.S. depic-
tions of God as a bearded (often fearsome) elderly man—or the
Trinity that includes a white-bearded elder, a younger blue-eyed
blondish Jesus, and a white dove—is not granted to Ganesh
(half-elephant, half-human); or Krishna with his blue skin; or
the four-armed Saraswati, goddess of knowledge, wisdom, and

learning; or images of the seated Buddha.Christian hegemony
conveys the societal power inherent in these cumulative norma-
tive markers of Christianity (Kivel, 2013). The patriotism
conveyed by “one nation under God” or the usual valedictory of
U.S. Presidents, “God bless America,” afirms identiica-tion
with a Christian God. Beyond the cultural insult, hegemonic
Christianity has real economic consequences for Jews who
worship and rest from Friday sundown through Sat-urday; for
Muslims who have weekly prayer obligations on Fridays; and
for Hindus, Sikhs, and others whose major holidays may not
coincide with the seven-day week at all. Across the U.S.,
historically and today, state laws and local ordinances,
including strict regulations against work, shopping, and other
activities, have been used to ensure that Sunday would be
treated as the “Sabbath” (the day of rest). Even today, for
example, retail businesses are closed on Sundays in Bergen
County, New Jersey, and Georgia law forbids the Sunday sales
of alcohol.Christian hegemony at the institutional level and
Christian norms at the cultural and societal level intertwine and
result in Christian ideas and practices that are engrained and
embedded in U.S. culture, law, and policy. The result is
Christian privilege, a circumstance where Christians enjoy
advantages that are denied to non-Christians.At the
interpersonal and individual level, there are many examples of
Christian privilege in everyday life (Killermann, 2012;
Schlosser, 2003). Americans who are Christian can:• Easily ind
Christmas cards, Easter baskets, or other items and food for
holiday observances;• Have a religious symbol (a ish, for
example) as a bumper sticker without worrying that their car
will be vandalized, or they can wear a religious symbol without
being afraid of being attacked;• Travel to any part of the
country and know their religion will be accepted and that they
will have access to religious spaces to practice their faith;•
Fundraise to support congregations of their faith without being
investigated as poten-tially threatening or terrorist behavior;•
Are likely to have politicians responsible for their governance

who share their faith.RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION:
DISADVANTAGE, MARGINALIZATION, AND
DISCRIMINATIONReligious oppression refers to the cultural
marginalization and societal subordination of Buddhists,
Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Native American spiritualties, Sikhs,
and those who identify as atheists, agnostics, or freethinkers in
the U.S. Religious oppression is present as individual biases and
prejudices, in institutional policies and practices, and in the
cultural norms and societal hegemony of Christianity in the
U.S.Many examples of bias, prejudice, and ignorance at the
individual level have already been mentioned in the preceding
section on Christian normativity, such as a personal sense of
exclusion from team-based Christian prayer, or rude rather than
respectful questions | ADAMS AND JOSHI274about one’s
practices, posed in language framed by the Christian norms
(“What is your Bible?” “Where do you go to church?”). Other
examples include being expected to speak as a representative of
one’s religious group, and dealing with stereotypes such as that
Jews are cheap, or that Muslims are violent.Non-Christians,
whether adherents of other faith traditions or agnostics and
atheists, are subject to the proselytizing encouraged in
evangelical Christian practice. Christians who believe they are
doing the “right thing” by carrying the “good news” to non-
Christians would be shocked to know that such proselytizing
can be experienced as bullying and harassment—and that when
repeated, build up on a daily basis as microaggressions that
cause anxiety and fear. The Butte, Montana, newspaper editor
(1870) who wrote “the Chinaman’s life is not our life, his
religion is not our religion” (Eck, 2001, p. 166) sounds much
the same normative note as the recent proselytizing claim “that
all Hindus should open their eyes and ind Jesus” (Haiz &
Raghunathan, 2014, p. x).Finally, there is always the fear of
personal violence. Many Hindus, Jews, Muslims, or Sikhs feel
vulnerable on the basis of both dark-skinned physiognomy and
religious attire that mark their outsider religious status,
confounded with and multiplied by outsider racial, ethnic, and

linguistic status. They and their families have bricks thrown
through windows or vicious slurs from passersby. Sikhs who
wear turbans are attacked and their turbans forcibly removed;
Hindu women wearing a bindi or forehead dot are harassed and
insulted. Hate crimes against Jews have increased at synagogues
and Jewish day care cen-ters. Individuals angry about Israel’s
actions toward Palestinians may target individual Jews who
have no connection to and may not even support such policies.
As numerous hate crimes studies have shown, such violence is
regrettably neither rare nor a phenomenon of the past (Eck,
2001; Pew Research Center passim).At the institutional level of
the workplace, individuals whose religious identities are vis-
ible may not be considered appropriate for “front desk” or
“client service” positions and have been denied employment. In
these situations, grooming and dress policies reproduce
mainstream cultural norms that clash with the kippa (yarmulke),
turban, long hair, and beard that are required of observant
Jewish, Sikh, or Muslim men. For example, a U.S. Supreme
Court decision in 2015 revealed that clothier Abercrombie &
Fitch had refused to hire a Muslim girl as one of its sales staff
because she wore the traditional Muslim headscarf or hijab.
When non-Christian religious groups have attempted to erect a
house of worship in some towns and cities across the country,
city councils and neighborhood groups have created legal
roadblocks, and have in many cases prevented the construction
or so poisoned the cultural atmosphere that religious minorities
chose to go elsewhere (Eck, 2001; Esposito & Kalin, 2011;
Singh, 2003).The cultural devaluation by which religious beliefs
of Hindus, Muslims and Native peoples have been represented
as “myths” and “legends” is also expressed at the institu-tional
level of the marketplace, where popular dress fads commodify
and trivialize markers of marginalized or exoticized religion.
Sales in gift shops of Native dream catchers, which is distinct
from Native artists who reproduce Hopi spiritual items and
whose proceeds support Native artists and communities, are one
example of religious misappropriation. Another is the

popularity of Hindu god and goddess images on candles,
perfume, and clothing with secular purposes. On the mass-
production market, these multi-armed gods and goddesses
become cultish and fetishized, portrayed as cartoonish, despite
their reli-gious seriousness to believers as visible
manifestations of the divine.The overarching vision of social
justice is one in which the current “privileges” held by
Christians in the U.S. become considered “rights” that are
protected for everyone, regard-less of religion or non-religion.
For this to take place, U.S. Christians will need to became far
more aware of their privilege and of the cumulative and
powerful normative inluence RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION |275of
Christianity in everyday life, if they are to “level the living
ield” for their non-Christian colleagues, neighbors, and
classmates.CONTEMPORARY RACIALIZATION OF
RELIGIONAs noted in the earlier section on historical legacies,
race had been “co-constitutive” with religion for the Jews,
Arabs, and Asian immigrants from 1870–1924, and remains an
important contemporary issue requiring special attention.
Particularly since 9/11, brown-skinned, bearded Arab
Americans and South Asian Americans, as well as Latinos and
biracial, multiracial people, are assumed to be Muslim on the
basis of their racial appearance, which is presumed to verify
their religious identities. This is a period dur-ing which
Muslims are among the most demonized members of U.S.
society as a result of international events and domestic actions
by those who commit violence abroad or in the U.S. in the name
of Islam.The notion of the “Muslim terrorist,” powerfully
etched in the minds of many Ameri-cans, is still in place. That
this stereotype is the irst assumption of the press and the police
when violence occurs was demonstrated at the time of the
bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building (carried out by
a white right-wing extremist). We neglect the evidence on the
other side—that threats and arson against medical clinics that
provide abortion services, the murders of Jews, and the
execution-style massacre of black worshippers at a South

Carolina prayer service—all were conducted by white Christian
ideological extrem-ists who were not, however, described as
“Christian terrorists” (Singh, 2013). Instead, the fanaticism and
violence committed by these extremists were attributed to
unique psycho-logical or ideological factors. Indeed, “Muslim”
or “Islamic” and “terrorists” seem a single, hyphenated term in
media coverage, which emphasizes the threats posed by dark-
skinned, bearded Muslims (Alsultany, 2008; Rana,
2011).Islamophobia in the U.S. is not just a post 9/11
phenomenon, as noted in the earlier sec-tion on historical
legacies. But there has been clear acceleration in the religious
and racial stereotyping of Muslims—a “phobia” toward
adherents of Islam (Islamophobia)—as if all were violent
extremists. These assumptions have been reinforced in response
to the oil crisis of 1973, the Gulf Wars of the 1980s and 1990s,
the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the bombings in London
and Madrid. Most recently, the stereotyping in the media builds
on stories of Western-born young Muslims joining ISIS, and
also accelerates fears of a geopolitical threat brought back to
Europe and the U.S. by ISIS-trained jihadists.Media
representations designed to meet a 24/7 news cycle or focus on
monitoring U.S. borders essentialize Muslims as if all were
intrinsically violent, destructive, and incapable of self-
regulation or democracy, whether on the basis of theology or
genetics (Esposito & Kalin, 2011; Jamal & Naber, 2008).
Remarks from political leaders and the news media reinforce
caricatures that are ilmmakers’ or cartoonists’ stock-in-trade
(Alsultany, 2008; Shaheen, 2001). These negative images echo
the antisemitic cartoons at the height of anti-semitism in pre-
World War II Europe and the U.S.The widespread use of the
term “Muslim terrorist” not only perpetuates fallacious and
harmful stereotypes. It erases the complexity of religious
traditions that are encapsulated within Islam, a religion as
complex and multifaceted as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism,
and Judaism. All (like Islam) contain a wide spectrum of beliefs
that range from literal ultra-orthodoxy at one end (at times,

marked by fanaticism) to progressive liberalism at the other (at
times verging on secularism). In a variation of the ironic tag
that refers to the racial proiling of African Americans, Singh
(2103) notes the new racial designation “apparently Muslim” to
capture the daily experience of Arab Americans when traveling,
dealing with police, applying for jobs, and receiving poor
service in restaurants. | ADAMS AND JOSHI276GLOBAL
RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL VIOLENCEWhile the focus of
this chapter is on religious oppression in the U.S., the dynamics
we describe occur globally. Most nation-states have one
dominant religion that is hegemonic and that shapes national
identity, thereby marginalizing or subordinating religious
minori-ties in ways that intersect with class or caste, race, and
ethnicity.Some countries, such as Australia, Canada, France,
India, South Africa, and the U.S., have religious protections
built into their Constitutions. Others maintain formal religious
establishments as part of the political framework, such as Great
Britain’s Anglican Church, or Islam as an oficial state religion
in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, or Judaism within Israel. These
countries share with other democracies the dilemma of
protecting the human rights of all peoples, in this case of
religious minorities, despite political decisions driven by
majoritarian electoral politics.Many nation-states have
experienced violent upheavals that relect religious hegemony
and marginalization, such as the Hindu/Muslim conlicts in India
and Muslim/Christian violence in Pakistan. Religious claims are
further complicated by ethnicity, class, or caste; historical and
geographic competition for national identity; and resources (as
in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia; or Israel and Palestine)
(Armstrong, 2014; Fox, 2000, 2002). The conlicts in Northern
Ireland and Israel relect historical and contemporary inequities
and grievances based on political and economic
privileges/disadvantages that greatly compli-cate religious
struggles for national identity. It is hard to grasp the complexity
of global or local religious conlicts without accounting for
decades, sometimes centuries, of religious, ethnic, and

economic struggle, intensiied and justiied by competing
historical narratives and claims for land, food, and water
between dominating and subordinated peoples (Arm-strong,
2014; Fox, 2000, 2002; Juergensmeyer, 2000, 2004; Said 1978,
1993).The global and local have converged in the U.S.,
especially on college campuses, in ideological positions taken
or assumed to have been taken by students on different sides of
the seemingly intractable conlict between Israel and Palestine.
This conlict is sometimes generalized as a conlict speciically
between Jews and Muslims, a view that oversimpliies the
complexities in the Middle East of competing nationalisms and
territorial claims vin-dicated by conlicting histories, as well as
different ideological disagreements within Islam and
Judaism.This conlict has come to U.S. college campuses by
divestment efforts and the erroneous view that thoughtful
critiques of Israeli policies and nationalism are necessarily
antisemitic. This conlict seriously impacts the relations between
Jews and Muslims in the U.S., what-ever their convictions about
the politics of the Middle East (Shavit, 2013; Tolan, 2006), and
they play out in complex and challenging ways that negatively
affect campus Jews (Kosmin & Keysar, 2015) and campus
Muslims (Berlak, 2014). One dimension is the role of
oversimpliication, by which all Jews are faulted for Israeli
settlement expansions and military policies, so that U.S. Jews
(who largely are white) are also held responsible for the racism
that is a component of the Israeli-Palestinian conlict. It is not
often noted that many Israeli Jews are also peoples of color,
refugees from North African and Arab countries. On the other
end, Muslims are faulted and feared as if all were adherents of
radical Islam.These ideological conlicts leave no space for Jews
who critique Israeli politics, but who also need to identify as
Jewish (Karpf, Klug, Rose, & Rosenbaum, 2008; Kushner &
Solomon, 2003)—or for Muslims who oppose radical Islam but
who also (sometimes vis-ibly) identify as Muslim. The Trinity
College Anti-Semitism Report (February 2015) found
alarmingly high reports by Jewish students of antisemitic

incidents experienced or observed on their campuses, mainly
one-on-one, sometimes in groups or classrooms, but generally
RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION |277ignored or downplayed by
campus administrations (Kosmin & Keysar, 2015, pp. 10–12).
The Political Research Associates report on antisemitism and
Islamophobia on U.S. col-lege campuses offers detailed analysis
of the dilemmas facing observant as well as secular Jews and
Muslims, with interviews and campus scenarios detailing the
speciics of campus conlicts and controversies (Berlak, 2014).
The essentializing inherent to antisemitism and Islamophobia
disrupts efforts to build bridges and coalitions within
educational settings, at a time when young people may be most
open to cross-religious friendships, collaboration, and interfaith
activism.INTERSECTIONS OF RELIGIOUS HEGEMONY AND
OPPRESSION WITH OTHER ISMSWhile we particularly
highlight the intersection of region and race, Christian
hegemony and religious oppression intersect with other social
identities and forms of oppression as well. Two Supreme Court
split decisions in 2014 and 2015, relecting the opposite sides of
the Court, placed religious-freedom claims in direct opposition
to women’s rights to choose and gay couples’ rights to marry.
In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), a narrow con-servative
majority found that family-owned companies could be exempted
from providing for insurance under the Affordable Care Act for
contraception on the basis of their reli-gious opposition to
contraception. The Court’s inding was based on a new
interpretation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA,
1993), which had been originally crafted by Congress to protect
marginalized religions, such as those of Native peoples. This
new reasoning on RFRA would protect the religious exercise of
individuals and for-proit com-panies whose religious
convictions opposed the rights of marginalized groups—of
women for contraception, and a year later, same-sex marriage.In
2015, a liberal narrow majority in the Court found marriage
equality to be a Con-stitutionally protected right. In nearly
simultaneous protest, state legislatures passed local versions of

RFRA protecting commercial enterprises (lorists, bakeries)
whose owners opposed marriage equality on religious grounds,
and who denied services to gay couples. Civil rights groups
immediately responded by stating that the denial of service by
businesses to legally protected minorities is the very deinition
of discrimination. The resulting politi-cal irestorm over
“religious protection” legislation in opposition to anti-
discrimination laws protecting subordinated groups on the basis
of gender and sexuality shows no sign of abating and is likely to
be a hotly contested issue in the future (Cole, 2015; Eckholm,
2015).Many global issues may wear a religious veneer, but
below the surface one inds long-simmering conlicts among
social classes, racial or ethnic groups, and the suppression of
women’s rights to their bodies and to education. Conlicts that
have been framed as reli-gious (in the Middle East, India,
Pakistan, and Ireland) require closer analysis of economic
inequality (land, jobs, education), sexual abuse and
subordination, violence toward sexual and gender
nonconformity, and competing nationalisms that have been
subsumed by the religious dimensions that seem most visible
(Little, 2007). Similarly, the sexual victimiza-tion of women in
Africa, China, India, and Pakistan, or efforts to prevent their
education (as in Afghanistan), may relect ethnic authoritarian
enforcement of religious patriarchy within families, reinforced
by police or other authorities.This intersectional approach to
religious oppression explores the “co-constitutive relationships”
(Goldschmidt & McAlister, 2004, p. 6) between religion and
other social categories—race, ethnicity, economic class, gender,
and sexuality—to which we must add | ADAMS AND
JOSHI278nationalism. The intersection of religion with
nationalism accounts for many of the most vicious attacks on
members of “outsider” religious groups historically (such as
pogroms against Jews in Russia) and currently (such as attacks
on Sikhs in the U.S. and Chris-tians in Pakistan). In such cases,
it is extraordinarily dificult to try to hold in place one strand—
religion—while also understanding that it is not truly a single

strand but involves a “simultaneity of systems.” Solo issues we
call race and/or ethnicity and/or culture and/or class and caste
and/or religion are interactive rather than unitary, “constructed
in and through each other, and through other categories of
difference” (Goldschmidt & McAli-ster, 2004, p. 7).Adding
religion as yet another category of analysis within systems of
domination and oppression makes for a slippery slope if one
attempts merely to isolate or freeze religious justiications from
a complex web that includes cultural, ethnic, racial, class or
gender-based rationales for oppression. The primary reason for
attempting this disentanglement through a focus on speciic
isms—in this case, religion— is to better understand the previ-
ously under-examined religious justiications used in tandem
with racism or classism to dehumanize the “Other,” dismiss
minority religions, relocate or restrict their living spaces, and
eradicate their cultures. “Land acquisition and missionary work
always went hand in hand in American history” (Deloria,
1969/1999, p. 22).MOVING TOWARD JUSTICEAlthough there
have been Baha’is, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs,
Zoroastrians, and practitioners of Santería, Shinto, Native
American spiritualties, and other world religions in the U.S. for
decades, and in some cases for centuries, never have there been
so many burgeoning religious-oriented communities and
organized houses of worship as there are today. Just as the
arrival of Catholic and Jewish immigrants spurred public debate
on reli-gion and schooling in the 19th and early 20th centuries,
so today new waves of immigrants are creating new points of
discussion and conlict in these areas. Along with the increase in
faith traditions that are not Christian, we also see a rise in the
number of people who think of themselves as non-afiliated,
agnostic, atheist, or “nothing in particular” (Pew Research
Center, 2015). Agnostics and atheists have become more
outspoken and openly challenge the beliefs and traditions of
formal religion (Andrews, 2013; Christina, 2012; Hitchens,
2007). Promoting religious pluralism needs to provide space for
non-believers who may identify in various ways—as agnostic,

atheist, non-believer, rationalist, secular humanist, or “nothing
in particular.”One way for our society to be more inclusive is to
not use religion as a rationale or excuse for discrimination
against social identity groups that may seem outsider to one’s
own faith tradition. For example, individual religious beliefs
have been used to perpetuate homophobia. The renewed
attention on the free exercise of religion demonstrates the need
for greater clarity and understanding about what can and cannot
be done to express or suppress religion in the public arena, as in
the case of Christmas nativity scenes on public property,
sectarian prayer before public meetings, and denial of public
services on the basis of religious objections to gays and
lesbians. During the Christmas season, some public oficials
incorporate celebrations of Chanukah and Kwanzaa. In the case
of Christian nor-mative public celebrations, public oficials need
to consider how to be authentically inclu-sive and pluralistic as
distinct from “additive.” This includes questioning the
hegemonic assumption that authorities should invoke a speciic
deity for guidance in public matters. While oficials might look
for guidance in their private moments, it can be argued that a
RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION |279public meeting should not
presume agreement among participants as to the nature or the
role of divine guidance.The interfaith arena offers many
opportunities for mutual understanding and respect, if not
agreement, including but not limited to inter-religious dialogue
(Forward, 2001; McCarthy, 2007; Patel, 2012; Smock, 2002).
Interfaith councils have in recent decades included
representatives of many religious traditions. Some interfaith
groups focus on learn-ing and understanding through dialogue;
others address common social concerns; still others revolve
around campus environments or public spaces, such as hospitals
or prisons (McCar-thy, 2007; Patel & Scorer, 2012). Despite
their different approaches, interfaith groups share the unifying
belief in intentional relationship-building to resolve intergroup
conlict.Interfaith groups have provided support to speciic
religious communities in times of crisis, as in the case of

members of Jewish communities who were victims of white
suprema-cist hate crimes in Billings, Montana (NIOT,
1995/1996). In the aftermath of 9/11, Church members reached
out to local Muslim organizations and mosques to ensure their
fellow neighbors could pray peacefully and without fear of
violence. Protestant ministers came together in 2002 in New
Jersey to advance dialogues among different religious communi-
ties (Niebuhr, 2008). After the massacre at the Oak Creek
Gurdwara in Wisconsin, Sikhs and non-Sikhs alike made their
way to gurdwaras in record numbers to show their support,
while the Sikh community emphasized that their doors had been
and would continue to be open. Interfaith efforts continue to
focus on opportunities for members of each group to learn more
about the others by meeting in different houses of worship and
sharing meals to create bonds and communities.Beyond
interfaith coalitions, the vigorous theological as well as moral
and pragmatic demands for economic justice by Pope Francis
have reached a broad and enthusiastic public, with considerable
media attention. Pope Francis’s public apology for the partici-
pation of the Roman Catholic Church in colonial-era violence
against indigenous peo-ples throughout the Americas offered a
dramatic instance of the Church’s willingness to acknowledge
its share of responsibility for the horrors of Spanish
colonialism. Pope Francis places responsibility on the inequities
of capitalism for global poverty and economic injus-tice, with a
critique that goes well beyond traditional Catholic social
teachings and recalls the efforts of Liberation Theology, whose
spirit this Pope now embraces.As we hope for a future that
includes religious justice, we must look not only to our
religious and secular social movements, but also look for clarity
about the role of religion in the public education curriculum.
Educators have come to understand that moderniza-tion calls for
pluralism, not secularization among its “diversity” concerns
(Patel, 2015), although secularists or non-aligned non-believers
must also be included in such religious pluralism.Teaching
about religion in public education has been hampered because

of anxiety and misunderstanding about the applicability of the
religion clauses of the 1st Amendment to public schooling. The
Constitutional prohibition against devotional reading or
sectarian prayer in schools has frightened policy-makers into
choosing “non-religious” secularism over religious pluralism in
efforts to maintain “total separation” between religion and pub-
lic education. This approach misrepresents the Constitutional
mandate, which does not require that public schools provide a
“religion-free zone.” The Supreme Court has encour-aged that
religion be made part of the school curriculum so long as the
distinction between “teaching” and “preaching” is respected.
The Court has made clear that schools may, and should, promote
awareness of religion and expose students of all ages to the
diversity of religious world views, but may not endorse or
denigrate any particular religion or belief.The Court on several
occasions argued that the 1st Amendment calls for political
neutrality, but not exclusion, with regard to religion, by
describing the Constitutional | ADAMS AND
JOSHI280requirement for “the state to be neutral in its relations
with groups of religious believers and non-believers . . . State
power is no more to be used so as to handicap religions than it
is to favor them” (Everson v. Board of Education, 1947). In a
subsequent decision (Abington v. Schempp, 1963), the Court
suggested a path forward, namely, a renewed commitment to
teaching about religion and religious traditions (not the teaching
of any one speciic reli-gion) as part of the regular curriculum.
Writing with the majority, Justice Tom Clark said:It might well
be said that one’s education is not complete without a study of
com-parative religion or the history of religion and its
relationship to the advancement of civilization. It certainly may
be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and
historical qualities. Nothing we have said here indicated that
such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented
objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not
be effected consistently with the First Amendment.(Abington v.
Schempp, 1963)Understanding religious differences and the role

of religion in the contemporary world—and in our students’
lives—is important to personal growth and development,
exposes religious prejudice, and helps build classroom
communities where students develop the trust, knowledge, and
skills to become thoughtful global citizens. Educators have pre-
pared excellent guides to support these efforts in K–12
schooling as well as in higher educa-tion (Anderson, 2007;
Haynes, Chaltain, Ferguson, Hudson, & Thomas, 2003; Haynes
& Thomas, 2001; Jones & Shefield, 2009; Moore, 2007; Murray,
2008; Nash, 2001).There are many settings, classrooms,
community groups, and religious organizations where members
of different religious communities—and those who do not
identify with any religion—can further explore the Christian
hegemony and religious discrimination that characterizes our
historical past and present, and consider how to foster religious
pluralism and social justice in their future. We aim for
something greater than merely to reduce religious
discrimination against non-Christians, although that is surely an
impor-tant intermediary step. Our aim is a genuinely pluralistic
society that is socially just and in which religious communities,
as well as non-believers, are visible, but without privileges
accorded to some and disadvantages experienced by others. As
we imagine ways of moving from “here” to “there,” we focus
upon how to challenge Christian hegemony in the public square
and in educational settings, so that, in the words of an earlier
Supreme Court, “The anti-discrimination principle inherent in
the Establishment Clause necessarily means that would-be
discriminators on the basis of religion cannot prevail” (County
of Allegeny v. American Civil Liberties Union, 1989).SAMPLE
DESIGN FOR TEACHING ABOUT CHRISTIAN HEGEMONY
AND RELIGIOUS OPPRESSIONThe following design uses a
social justice approach to Christian hegemony and religious
oppression, drawing upon themes and information presented in
this chapter. This is not an instructional design to teach “about”
religion, nor does it focus on the differences among religions. It
focuses on historical and contemporary manifestations of

religious oppression as it plays out in the U.S. through
pervasive Christian hegemony.This design, like other designs in
this volume, uses four quadrants to suggest ways to “sequence”
the learning outcomes for students. These quadrants generall
| ADAMS AND JOSHI280requirement for “the state to be
neutral in its relations with groups of religious believers and
non-believers . . . State power is no more to be used so as to
handicap religions than it is to favor them” (Everson v. Board
of Education, 1947). In a subsequent decision (Abington v.
Schempp, 1963), the Court suggested a path forward, namely, a
renewed commitment to teaching about religion and religious
traditions (not the teaching of any one speciic reli-gion) as part
of the regular curriculum. Writing with the majority, Justice
Tom Clark said:It might well be said that one’s education is not
complete without a study of com-parative religion or the history
of religion and its relationship to the advancement of
civilization. It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of
study for its literary and historical qualities. Nothing we have
said here indicated that such study of the Bible or of religion,
when presented objectively as part of a secular program of
education, may not be effected consistently with the First
Amendment.(Abington v. Schempp, 1963)Understanding
religious differences and the role of religion in the
contemporary world—and in our students’ lives—is important
to personal growth and development, exposes religious
prejudice, and helps build classroom communities where
students develop the trust, knowledge, and skills to become
thoughtful global citizens. Educators have pre-pared excellent
guides to support these efforts in K–12 schooling as well as in
higher educa-tion (Anderson, 2007; Haynes, Chaltain, Ferguson,
Hudson, & Thomas, 2003; Haynes & Thomas, 2001; Jones &
Shefield, 2009; Moore, 2007; Murray, 2008; Nash, 2001).There
are many settings, classrooms, community groups, and religious
organizations where members of different religious
communities—and those who do not identify with any

religion—can further explore the Christian hegemony and
religious discrimination that characterizes our historical past
and present, and consider how to foster religious pluralism and
social justice in their future. We aim for something greater than
merely to reduce religious discrimination against non-
Christians, although that is surely an impor-tant intermediary
step. Our aim is a genuinely pluralistic society that is socially
just and in which religious communities, as well as non-
believers, are visible, but without privileges accorded to some
and disadvantages experienced by others. As we imagine ways
of moving from “here” to “there,” we focus upon how to
challenge Christian hegemony in the public square and in
educational settings, so that, in the words of an earlier Supreme
Court, “The anti-discrimination principle inherent in the
Establishment Clause necessarily means that would-be
discriminators on the basis of religion cannot prevail” (County
of Allegeny v. American Civil Liberties Union, 1989).SAMPLE
DESIGN FOR TEACHING ABOUT CHRISTIAN HEGEMONY
AND RELIGIOUS OPPRESSIONThe following design uses a
social justice approach to Christian hegemony and religious
oppression, drawing upon themes and information presented in
this chapter. This is not an instructional design to teach “about”
religion, nor does it focus on the differences among religions. It
focuses on historical and contemporary manifestations of
religious oppression as it plays out in the U.S. through
pervasive Christian hegemony.This design, like other designs in
this volume, uses four quadrants to suggest ways to “sequence”
the learning outcomes for students. These quadrants generally
follow the sequence “What? So what? Now what?” by which we
mean: “What is this issue all about?”(overview and personal
awareness), “What do we need to know to understand this
issue?” (conceptual frameworks, historical legacies,
contemporary manifestations, inter-sections with other issues),
and “Now that we know and care about this issue, what do we
feel comfortable and have the knowledge and skills to do about
it?” (advocacy, coalition building, action planning).We use the

four-quadrant design because it helps us keep this learning
sequence in focus. It can easily be adapted to other modalities,
such as short workshops or semester-long courses. Examples of
other modalities appear on the chapter website.The sample
design for Religious Oppression offered below is immediately
followed by learning objectives and core concepts speciic to
each of the four quadrants, as well as brief descriptors of the
activities needed to carry out the design. Actual instructions and
facilita-tion notes for each of these activities can be found on
the Religious Oppression website that accompanies this volume
(p. 281).This design presupposes familiarity with the core social
justice concepts that we con-sider foundational to any social
justice approach (presented in Chapter 4). We incorporate these
core concepts in ways that we believe “it” an exploration of
religious oppression. We assume that instructors and facilitators
will have read Chapter 4 and will have considered these core
concepts more fully prior to applying them to Religious
Oppression.Following the four-quadrant design, learning
outcomes, core concepts, and activities, the chapter closes with
general discussion of pedagogical, design, and facilitation
issues that we have found to be speciic to teaching about
religious oppression. Speciic consid-erations of pedagogy,
design, and facilitation for each of the activities are explained
more fully on the website, immediately following the
description of each activity.
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A Class Divided and the Invisible Knapsack Review
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Class Divided and White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible
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in a professional development for teachers. Examples are
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Essay persuades stakeholders for or against using A Class
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help broaden teachers' cultural competence, build stronger
relationships, and create more relevant educational experiences.
Essay convincingly persuades stakeholders for or against using
A Class Divided and White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible
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materials could be used to help broaden teachers' cultural
competence, build stronger relationships, and create more
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