UCL School of Management is delighted to welcome Professor David Gomulya, Singapore Management University, to host a research seminar discussing; ‘When You Discriminate, I See Opportunity: Appearance of Racial Bias as an Opportunity for Race-Based Exploitation in the Labor Market.

Abstract:

This paper explores how racial stereotypes, alongside the perceived presence or absence of prior discrimination in leadership labor markets, influence subsequent rehiring prospects. Drawing on attribution theory, we introduce the concept of “reflexive cue interpretation”, whereby evaluators assess not only a candidate’s attributes but also the credibility and potential biases of prior evaluators. We examine this process in the NBA head coach labor markets and discover that organisations reinterpret dismissal contexts through a racialised attributional lens: when a candidate’s prior termination creates an appearance of possible racial biases based on statistical or taste-based discrimination, it may signal a labor market exploitation opportunity.

Conversely, the absence of such bias appearance exacerbates racial discrimination through stereotype confirmation. This study advances attribution theory by demonstrating how evaluators make meta-evaluative inferences about prior evaluators’ motives, provides boundary conditions for status characteristics and leadership categorisation theories, and reframes racial discrimination as oscillating between penalty and opportunity depending on attributional context. These findings explain the persistence of racial inequality by revealing how discrimination operates as a calculated organisational practice rather than purely animus-driven behavior.