Salience Shifts and Managerial Discretion: How Periods of Islamist Terrorism Affect the Employment of Middle Eastern Men
研究发现，多起伊斯兰恐怖袭击事件经媒体放大后，会引发对中东裔男性的负面刻板印象，导致其就业减少，尤其在非复杂岗位、缺乏正式招聘程序或工人代表的工作场所中影响更显著，而中东裔管理者的存在可缓解这一效应。
Islamist terrorist attacks evoke negative stereotypes and symbolic threat perceptions toward men perceived to be of Middle Eastern origin, yet evidence on the labor market consequences of these attacks remains inconsistent. We address this ambiguity by developing a framework that links external shocks to employment outcomes through salience shifts and managerial discretion within workplaces. Salience shifts arise when clusters of terrorist attacks—rather than isolated events—are amplified by media coverage, reinforcing or generating stereotypes and increasing the likelihood that ethnoracial categories become consequential in hiring decisions. Whether such shifts translate into exclusion depends on organizational contexts that mute or permit greater managerial discretion. We test this framework using monthly linked employer–employee data from Germany (1999 to 2019), data on terrorist attacks linked to Islamist motives, name-based measures of perceived origin, and topic-modeled newspaper coverage. Our analyses show that periods marked by multiple Islamist terrorist attacks and heightened media coverage significantly reduce the employment of men perceived to be of Middle Eastern origin. These effects are strongest in workplaces with a high share of non-complex jobs and in settings lacking formal hiring procedures or worker representation, but they are muted where Middle Eastern managers are present. Together, these findings indicate when and where politicized events translate into employment disparities, highlighting the need to account for temporal and organizational contexts.