Article
Academy of Management Journal

Relational Reconciliation: Socializing Others Across Demographic Differences

Format:Print
| Pages:30

Abstract

In demographically diverse organizations, employees charged with socializing others— socialization agents—must navigate a deep tension between the organization’s needs to integrate individuals into a collective and individuals’ needs for recognition of their unique identities. Through a qualitative study of employees in an urban charter high school where race and class inequalities are salient, we find that socialization agents experience this tension as identity threatening. We develop a theoretical model of relational reconciliation that traces how agents engage with this identity threat in an ongoing, stumbling process. Through relational reconciliation, agents come to redefine their selves in relation to their “socializees,” which enables them to engage in elaborated socialization practices that aim to meet the needs of both the organization and the socializee. Our work repositions socialization agents as active parties in socialization, explores the tensions of socializing members of marginalized groups into a dominant culture, and reveals the importance of engaging with one’s own identities to reconcile these tensions.