Stanford Graduate School of Business, United States
In organizational hiring, both techno-rational job requirements and cultural factors—comprising shared norms and beliefs about worker ideals—are pivotal. Research often overvalues cultural fit, focusing on elite sectors like consulting, which skews wider applicability. My 16-month ethnography within Bangladeshi garment firms found owners de-emphasize cultural similarity, avoiding local CEOs to prevent reproduction of socio-structural hierarchies within the firm. Instead, they strategically choose 'relative outsiders' from similar cultures for better assimilation. This approach spotlights the interplay between structural and cultural factors in hiring, challenging prevailing beliefs about the primacy of cultural alignment in organizational practices.
