Perspective—The Black Box of Organizational Demography
批判了组织人口学研究中将人口变量与组织结果直接关联而忽略中间机制的黑箱方法，指出这种简单解释可能隐含多种相互排斥的理论，且实证支持薄弱，并提出了四个未来研究方向。
Since its definition in the early 1980s, organizational demography has become an influential research area. Scholars map the relationship between demographic variables and organizational outcomes, examining such questions as whether increasing work group diversity leads to greater turnover and whether decreasing tenure similarity within a top management team leads to more numerous strategic reorientations. Asking such questions requires only a demographic predictor and an outcome, but answering them often requires additional theoretical constructs. For example, the relationship between work group diversity and turnover might be explained by communication and conflict. As work group diversity increases, communication within the group may become more difficult, resulting in greater conflict and thus increasing turnover. Despite the important, sometimes critical, role of such additional theoretical concepts, researchers often leave them loosely specified and unmeasured, creating a “black box” filled with vague, untested theories. This article presents a critical analysis of this approach. The results show that simple demographic explanations may generate multiple, mutually exclusive, often implicit theories involving numerous additional concepts. An evaluation of these more complex theories against previous research shows that they receive only weak support. Hence, the black box approach to organizational demography presents serious theoretical problems. Examples are provided to illuminate these problems. Four directions are suggested for research in organizational demography: deepening current variance explanations, creating dynamic models, exploring factors that produce demographic distributions, and moving beyond the variance model.