Organizational Consolidation: How Organizations Reflect or Refract Societal Hierarchies

To understand how organizations distribute resources, we need to understand how they come to evaluate their members as worthy. This article introduces “organizational consolidation”: the degree to which ascriptive statuses—race, gender, class—align with the context-specific criteria that actors use when evaluating one another. Building on relational inequality theory and inhabited institutionalism, we argue that organizational consolidation shapes which attributes stand out, how actors categorize one another, and how combinations of attributes yield recognition or marginalization. When consolidation is high, local meaning-making is more likely to reproduce patterns of recognition that track ascriptive statuses; when it is low, alternative patterns become possible. We develop a concept-methods package that turns this framework into a roadmap for observing local patterns of recognition: association rule mining, latent class analysis, and partial order set modeling. We illustrate the value of these tools in a small, racially diverse U.S. high school where consolidation is low: teachers evaluate students through combinations of race, gender, and organizationally relevant characteristics, rather than any single attribute. By formalizing organizational consolidation as a measurable structural condition, we provide a diagnostic for comparing how organizations reflect or refract broader social hierarchies—shifting focus to how and under what organizational conditions inequality takes the specific forms it does.