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Re-envisioning Inclusion: Unify Employee Affinity Groups with Kenji Yoshino, Professor, NYU School of Law; Author
Bridging and Bonding Capital
The political scientist Robert Putnam up at Harvard describes the difference between bridging capital and bonding capital. And bonding capital is a capital that you create internal to a group. So let’s say you’re a company and you have an affinity group, an employee resource group or a business resource group. And that would be a means of creating bonding capital. So you would say we’re going to create an affinity group for women or we’re going to create an affinity group for Asians or we’re going to create an affinity group for veterans. Those groups are critically important because they create focal points for people of the same background or people with the same interests can come together and realize that they’re not alone within the organization. And that is really, really important work for the organization to be doing. But Putnam goes on to say you can’t just have bonding capital. Healthy organizations or healthy society also has to have bridging capital that cuts across the organization. So the organization doesn’t balkanize into these silos.
And I think a lot of individuals within companies are thinking we’ve created kind of a Frankenstein monster with these business resource groups or affinity groups because, you know, these were all the rage in the past couple of decades or so. But now organizations are waking up and realizing that many individuals identify more with their affinity group than they do with the organization at large. And so it’s really important to prevent that balkanization is to create the bridging capital. So to put this in more homespun language which Putnam is brilliant at doing, he says that bonding capital is the superglue that binds people together and bridging capital is the WD-40 that allows individuals to slide across groups. So when I go in to give talks at these organizations I often emphasize the importance of creating both bonding and bridging capital.
Using the Covering Analytic to Create Bridging and Bonding Capital
The covering phenomenon is useful both with regard to strengthening bonding capital and bridging capital. So that, as you know, I have these four axes of covering and so we could just create a table for say how, you know, African Americans cover along those four axes of appearance, affiliation, advocacy and association. And that would create bonding capital because people could look at that table and agree or disagree but for the most part you get consensus around the various ways in which African Americans cover along those four dimensions. But notice that the power of the analytic is that that’s not the only way to cut the data. We can also cut our data according to axis. So you could say how do people engage in appearance based covering. And you could chase that across every single cohort within the organization so that you could get women talking about engaging in appearance based covering or veterans talking about engaging in appearance based covering or what have you.
In other words, just to be a little bit more concrete about this because I think examples always help, if you were to talk about the African American and how the African American covered, you know, the chart would look something along the lines of I have to straighten my hair for appearance based covering or when I eat ethnic foods I do it with my door closed for affiliation based covering. Or for advocacy based covering I don’t advocate for other African Americans within the organization because it would look like favoritism. Or association based covering I don’t hang out with other African Americans or sit with them during lunch because I’ll be seen as an ethnic clumper. So you could fill out that chart and many African Americans can and have looked at that and said I relate to that. But I think just as crucially we have to flip the paradigm and say the bonding capital is important but it’s not the be all and the end all. We also need the bridging capital. So we need to say how does every group within this organization engage in appearance based covering?
And just to go back to the examples that I raised earlier, women engage in appearance based covering all the time by dressing and acting in ways that make them seem more “masculine” right. So they don’t trigger stereotypes about women that are induced by overly “feminine” behaviors. Similarly with regard to veteran status, many veterans say that they worry about wearing any kind of military insignia or having any kind of signage like even like a sticker on a laptop that says, you know, I am pro military or what have you because they’re worried about triggering anti-military sentiments. So this kind of self-presentation is something that we all worry about and you can actually cut it across the organization.
Teaching and Learning Together
So I was actually recently this past year at an investment bank that said come in and talk to us about how Asian Americans cover during May. And I said, you know, I want another affinity group there because I think this will be much more effective if there is cross teaching going on. And so they very cleverly said well June is Gay Pride Month and so we’re going to have the gay affinity group there as well. And what we did is we just did the charts for both groups, you know, we crowdsourced it essentially among the attendees. And then we had co-teaching where the Asian individuals describe how they cover to the LGBT individuals and vice versa. And obviously there was some overlap between the two groups as well. But what was important about that was that you both had the bonding capital which allowed people to have something deeper than and more analytically rigorous to share than would usually be the case. You also had the bridging where you didn’t just stop with the bonding capital but you made sure that that capital was transmitted, right, across these boundaries. And so the idea was it would be one organization, right, rather than an organization that was balkanized into these many different groups.