Institutionalized Bias

Institutionalized bias occurs when institutional practices, scripts, or procedures work to systematically advantage certain groups or agendas over others. The topic of institutionalized bias is important to those who study intergroup relations in part because it can account for how processes can advantage dominant groups in the absence of overt efforts to discriminate against marginalized groups. In other words, even in the absence of any intention to discriminate, institutional practices can produce the same outcomes as discrimination by advantaging certain groups over others. This entry provides a broader context for the concept of institutionalized bias and gives examples of how such bias can be manifest.

The key feature of institutionalized bias that distinguishes it from other forms of bias or from discrimination is that it is built into the fabric of institutions. For example, research has found that social welfare policy in the United States affects the access of gay men and lesbians to social services. Two pieces of legislation passed in the mid-1990s, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), appear unrelated but in fact establish an institutionalized bias that limits the extent to which gay men and lesbians can access social services. PRWORA expanded welfare-to-work programs and also placed restrictions on access to public assistance. DOMA defined marriage as a legal union between a man and a woman. Together, the acts constitute a national policy context that on legal grounds blocks access to social services for gay men and lesbians.

Although the concept of institutionalized bias has been discussed by scholars at least since the 1960s, current treatments of the concept are typically consistent with the theoretical principles of the new institutionalism (also called neoinstitutionalism) that emerged in the 1980s. This theory is broadly concerned with how institutions, particularly organizations, are influenced by their broader environments. It argues that organizations feel pressure to incorporate the practices defined by prevailing concepts of organizational work that have become institutionalized in society. Institutionalism is the process by which social processes or structures come to take on a rulelike status in social thought and action.

Institutional theory asserts that group structures gain legitimacy when they conform to the accepted practices in their environments. These practices are called social institutions. For example, it is commonly accepted in the United States that organizations should be structured with formal hierarchies, with some positions in the hierarchies subordinate to others. This type of structure is institutionalized. Many institutionalized practices are so widely shared, externally validated, and collectively expected that they become the obvious and natural course of action.

The best known statement of the institutional approach is from Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell. According to DiMaggio and Powell, organizations exist in fields of other organizations. As these fields become more mature, they influence organizations within them. DiMaggio and Powell propose that as fields become increasingly mature, the organizations within them become increasingly homogeneous. In an effort to attain legitimacy, organizations adopt institutionalized structures and practices that conform to their environments, such as structuring with formal hierarchies. Institutional theory proposes that change in organizations is constrained by organizational fields, and when it occurs, it is in the direction of greater conformity to institutionalized practices.

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