Opportunity Hoarding Research Articles

Missing the Forest for the Trees: Toward a Networked Racial Analysis of White Parents in Education Policy and Research

Education policy research on White parent opportunity hoarding overlooks whiteness studies and focuses on individual-level behaviors. In this article, we advance a racial network analysis of White parent collectives to better understand how White parents reinforce racial hierarchies in schools.

Economic mobility and parents’ opportunity hoarding

Creating opportunities for people to achieve socioeconomic mobility is a widely shared societal goal. Paradoxically, however, achieving this goal can pose a threat to high-socioeconomic-status (SES) people as they look to maintain their privileged positions in society for both them and their children. Two studies evaluate whether this threat manifests as "opportunity hoarding" in which high-SES parents adopt attitudes and behaviors aimed at shoring up their families' access to valuable educational and economic resources. The current paper provides converging evidence for this hypothesis across two studies conducted with 2,557 American parents. An initial correlational study demonstrated that believing that socioeconomic mobility is possible was associated with high-SES parents being more inclined to attempt to secure valuable educational and economic resources for their children, even when doing so came at the cost of low-SES families. Specifically, high-SES parents with stronger beliefs in socioeconomic mobility exhibited decreased support for redistributive policies and viewed engaging in discrete behaviors that would unfairly advantage their children (e.g., allowing them to misrepresent their identities on school and job applications) as more acceptable relative to both low-SES parents with similar beliefs and high-SES parents who were less optimistic about socioeconomic mobility. A subsequent experimental study established these relationships causally by comparing parents' responses to different types of socioeconomic mobility. Together, the current findings merge insights across psychology and economics to deepen understandings of the processes through which societal inequities emerge and persist, especially during times of apparently abundant opportunity.

Opportunity Hoarding and Elite Reproduction: School Segregation in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract School integration is an important indicator of equality of opportunity and racial reconciliation in contemporary South Africa. Despite its prominence in public and political discourse, however, there is no systemic evidence on the levels and patterns of school segregation. Drawing on the literature on the post-apartheid political settlement and sociological theories of opportunity hoarding, we explain how the small White minority and, to a lesser extent, the new Black middle class monopolized access to South Africa’s most prestigious schools following the abolition of de jure segregation in 1994. Using the 2021 Annual School Survey—an administrative dataset covering all South African schools—and the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study school survey, we find very high levels of school segregation along racial as well as socioeconomic lines. White students almost exclusively attend former White schools, have little exposure to the low-income Black majority, and are vastly overrepresented in elite public and private schools. We argue that in South Africa and other contexts with under-resourced education systems, elite capture of the few high-performing schools serves to reproduce race and class privilege.

Defending the Color Line: White Supremacy and the Legacy of Brown

Building on W. E. B. Du Bois’s color line concept, I argue that white supremacy is deeply embedded in U.S. educational organizations and that White racial actors, opportunity hoarding, and the cultivation of racial ideology and racial ignorance help sustain it. In doing this, I seek to move away from the aspirational progress narratives often associated with Brown to the racial hierarchies and various forms of harm that schools reproduce, even when they are racially diverse. Taking the recent attacks against critical race theory as a backdrop, I argue that educational institutions not only contribute to educational inequity but also socialize people into relations of racial domination and subordination through organizational practices and individual actions. In the article’s conclusion, I highlight my efforts to disrupt these patterns and work toward the creation of more liberatory education spaces.

The Conflation of Dual Language Bilingual Education With Gifted Programs in New York City Schools

As neighborhoods across New York City gentrify, Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) has become a big draw for gentrifier families. Our research contributes to growing literature on DLBE gentrification by examining how a racially diverse group of parents in two communities perceived DLBE as a school choice option. We found that schools with DLBE programs screened potential students via academic screening tests or school choice processes to determine admission into DLBE programs. This screening process has contributed to a) the conflation of DLBE with the city’s gifted programs, and b) a focus away from admitting and centering emergent bilinguals. While this screening served to further advantage gentrifier families, some parents resisted the opportunity hoarding behaviors of their peers through their alternative school choices and advocacy efforts. In this way, we show how all parents are constrained and impacted by the neoliberal logics of contemporary DLBE policy and school choice.

Narrowing inequalities through redistribution. A relational inequality approach to female managers and the gender wage gap

ABSTRACT Recent research shows that firms and jobs are more important for understanding gender wage inequalities than individual-level and occupational-level attributes. I investigate how two mechanisms derived from relational inequality theory, opportunity hoarding and exploitation, affect within-firm gender wage gaps. First, men might exclude women from high-paying firms or jobs (i.e. opportunity hoarding), resulting in gender wage inequalities. Second, male managers might use their relational power to redistribute wages from females to males (exploitation). Increasing the number of female managers might stop this exploitation. While previous literature focused on the effect of female managers on the gender wage gap, I contribute to the literature by also considering the impact of female managers on males’ wages theoretically and empirically. Using German linked employer-employee data and fixed-effect regressions at the firm and job levels, I find evidence for opportunity hoarding at both the firm and the job levels. For the exploitation mechanism, female managers increase females’ wages and lower males’ wages, suggesting the existence of the exploitation mechanism. Further analyses show that the increases in females’ wages are proportional to the decreases in males’ wages. Thus, I find evidence for female managers redistributing males’ wages to females.

Meritocracy and Advantaged Parents’ Perceptions of the Fairness of School Choice Policies

The widespread expansion of school choice policies has bolstered the consumer-education paradigm where parents compete for what they perceive to be a limited number of high quality schools. In this comparative case study, we examine advantaged White parents’ perceptions of meritocracy in the context of a competitive elementary and high school choice system in New York City. We find that parents’ critique the choice policies and the unfair burdens they place on low-income and immigrant families while engaging in opportunity hoarding to ensure their children’s privileged access to the most competitive schools, all while dismissing claims that school choice is meritocratic. Ultimately, advantaged parents’ suggest returning to neighborhood zoning which would preserve their access to exclusive, high performing schools and avoid the stress and inequities of school choice policies. This study offers further examples of the powerful influence of contradictory White discourse in the context of education policy and reform.

A Response to David Imbroscio: Neighborhoods Matter, and Efforts to Integrate Them Are Not Futile

Imbroscio questions both the significance of opportunity hoarding as a driver of inequality and the feasibility of stopping or moderating the phenomenon. But research shows clearly that both neighborhoods and schools are important contributors to inequality. As for futility, his claim that efforts to address exclusionary zoning will necessarily be thwarted by the flight of the affluent is simply not supported by evidence. In a perfectly integrated U.S., all neighborhoods would be about 12% poor. There is little evidence that poverty rates at this level will trigger flight of nonpoor households. As for his contention that community investments will only fuel dispossession, attracting some higher income residents doesn’t necessarily lead to wholesale resegregation. More fundamentally, Imbroscio’s pairing of these claims (the insignificance of opportunity hoarding on the one hand and the futility of addressing it on the other) begs the question: If opportunity hoarding is unimportant as a driver of inequality, then why is it so difficult to stop it? Why do wealthy, white households insist on living in wealthy enclaves if neighborhood resources matter so little in sustaining their privilege? Finally, as for political infeasibility, it’s hard to believe that the road to tackling exclusionary zoning is more difficult than the road to employee-owned business and worker cooperatives. And, ultimately, it’s not clear why advocates can’t work toward greater spatial equity while also pushing for structural reforms in the labor market.

Beyond Opportunity Hoarding: Interrogating Its Limits as an Account of Urban Inequalities

To account for the extensive inequalities manifest within urban (or metropolitan) areas in the United States, the idea of “opportunity hoarding” has garnered increasing salience. When applied to explain urban inequalities, the focus of opportunity hoarding is on places—especially how residents of affluent, predominantly White residential neighborhoods or political jurisdictions are able to secure a plethora of opportunities for themselves and especially their children, at the expense of those living in less privileged places. I interrogate the account of American urban inequalities embedded within the idea of opportunity hoarding, finding it to be limited in significant ways. In light of these findings, I discuss what a superior account of urban inequalities might look like, and suggest how this account points toward potentially more efficacious strategies to attack these inequalities, perhaps ushering in a more just future for American cities and metros.

Toward a New Project for Equality and Justice—In Housing, and Beyond: A Rejoinder

I offer a rejoinder to the five responses to my article, “Beyond Opportunity Hoarding,” generously provided by Professors Bates, Dawkins, Ellen, Greenlee, and Lens. I argue it is imperative we face soberly three central problematics looming over the current debate: a) the enormity and profoundness of America's urban problems; b) the failure of the Opportunity Project to address these problems; and c) the reasons for this failure. I conclude by reiterating the need for an alternative strategy (or a new Project) to advance equality and justice, one built around a robust and large-scale program of Community Wealth Building. I discuss Community Wealth Building's appropriateness as an area of inquiry and engagement for housing researchers and practitioners, and I consider the challenges confronting its feasibility in light of several salient (and hopeful) political and social developments unfolding in contemporary urban America.

Follow the Money (Deeper)—A Clinical Diagnosis of Opportunity Hoarding

In his argument for a rereading of opportunity hoarding and related policy prescriptions, David Imbroscio provides evidence for the misdiagnosis of elements of the problem vis-à-vis the entry and exit hypotheses consequentially resulting in limited effectiveness of common “prescribed treatments” for this behavior. His way forward focuses on a fundamental rebalancing of the instruments through which wealth is distributed to create more parity—a breaking up of the hoard. Thinking about his argument, I offer three additional premises that ask us to look more closely at how we treat the symptoms of opportunity hoarding, in a way that reflects the power of the mechanisms that sustain it.

Bringing Institutions Into the Opportunity Hoarding Debate

David Imbroscio’s “Beyond Opportunity Hoarding: Interrogating its Limits as an Account of Urban Inequalities” takes issue with the recent scholarly attention given to the concept of opportunity hoarding. Imbroscio worries that opportunity hoarding accounts of metropolitan inequalities place too much emphasis on the role of education and unequal patterns of consumption while ignoring the growing weakness of labor power vis-à-vis capital and the extreme concentration of capital ownership at the top of the wealth distribution. In this comment, I argue that Imbroscio downplays the importance of the institutions that generate metropolitan inequalities in the US. Imbroscio dismisses the two institutional processes that contribute to opportunity hoarding (barriers to the entry of people and the exit of resources) without providing a complete account of how the institutions of homeownership and fiscal decentralization work together to erect barriers to entry and exit. To dismiss entry and exit as solutions to opportunity hoarding without assigning blame to the institutions that stand in the way is to miss the forest for the trees.

A Research Agenda Pending Revolution

This essay responds to David Imbroscio’s “Beyond Opportunity Hoarding: Interrogating Its Limits as an Account of Urban Inequities” by suggesting questions that researchers might ask about opportunity hoarding if they considered the concept through a Black epistemic lens. I propose that investigating cultural, cognitive, and psychological commitments to hoarding as a key feature of Whiteness and racial capitalism might lead to insights on how to divest from and ultimately dismantle these systems.

Shadow education, pandemic style: Social class, race, and supplemental education during Covid-19.

Research on shadow education-i.e., one-on-one or group learning intended to supplement children's experiences in school-has documented persistent social class and racial/ethnic inequalities. Yet, as with many things during the Covid-19 pandemic, the nature of shadow education changed dramatically. Much supplemental education shifted online, potentially increasing accessibility; many universities became testoptional, potentially reducing the demand for the shadow education industry; and a new form of shadow education-learning pods-emerged to take pandemic schooling from a more individual to a more collective experience. In this article, we use data from a sample of U.S. parents of K-12 students stratified by race/ethnicity (N = 1911) to assess social class and racial/ethnic inequalities in shadow education in 2020-21, the first full academic year of the Covid-19 pandemic. We are also the first scholars, to our knowledge, to assess high-quality data on the use of learning pods. We find that during the pandemic, African American and South Asian students were more likely than White student to use test preparation services and online supplemental education, and that African Americans, East Asians and Latinx were more likely to utilize private tutoring. We find few disparities by family income, however, thus supporting the idea that some forms of shadow education have become more accessible than they once were. Regarding learning pods, we find that pods were most common among African American families and families with parents who were less educated and worked fulltime. Thus, most learning pods were not a means of "opportunity hoarding," as some scholars originally feared, but instead provided sorely needed childcare and support during a time of social turbulence.

Opportunity Hoarding and the Maintenance of “White” Educational Space

In this paper, we discuss the fundamental whiteness of educational spaces and detail the historical and contemporary mechanisms through which these spaces are created and perpetuate. We draw on Charles Tilly’s concept of opportunity hoarding to detail how white racial actors and white-dominated institutions create and defend “white” spaces within education. We expand current educational scholarship in this area by theorizing connections between opportunity hoarding and sociological work on racial boundaries, institutional theory, and organizational routines and point the way toward more nuanced examinations of opportunity hoarding in education.

Culture and Durable Inequality

In recent decades, sociologists have generally avoided explicitly discussing the role of culture in processes of social inequality. We argue that the prevailing disciplinary theory of inequality, the framework laid out in Charles Tilly's Durable Inequality, necessarily relies on cognitive processes and cultural concepts. The four primary mechanisms driving inequality—exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation, and adaptation—involve justification, categorization, coordination, and (e)valuation. We survey research on social inequality that illustrates each of these four processes. Our review reveals important empirical patterns about how disparities between groups emerge and endure. We observe that while sociologists often conduct work that implicitly relies on cultural concepts, other social science disciplines are also doing vital work in this area because they engage directly with cultural concepts. We identify key areas where sociologists are well positioned to use cultural concepts to uncover important findings regarding inequality, as well as to propose interventions for mitigating or preventing inequality.

Of Tax, Crime, and Happiness. An Interdisciplinary Research Review on Social Inequality

This article reviews research literature on inequality from economics, sociology and political science from a historiographic perspective. The literature covered here mainly focusses on the development of Western societies between 1970 and 2010 and is organised in terms of research concepts such as tax competition, educational attainment gaps, educational assortative mating, opportunity hoarding, happiness inequality, politics of resentment, welfare chauvinism and nature versus nurture.

Durable Wealth: Institutions, Mechanisms, and Practices of Wealth Perpetuation

Research indicates that positions of very high private wealth can often be maintained by families over many generations. This article puts front and center the institutions, mechanisms and practices through which families at the very top of the wealth distribution protect and enlarge their wealth. Opportunity hoarding is based on legal institutions, most importantly inheritance law, trust law, advantageous financial regulations and estate tax policies. Wealthy owners also pay for a growing number of legal and financial experts whose task it is to protect their fortunes. The stipulations of legal institutions are shaped through lobbying, campaign donations and the influencing of public opinion, facilitating the intergenerational preservation of large fortunes. Philanthropy appears to be not primarily a means of supporting general welfare, but rather a further instrument of wealth protection of the super-rich through its role in legitimizing large fortunes and the reaping of tax benefits. The entrenched character of large fortunes opens up questions regarding the normative identity of contemporary societies.

Race, Geography, and School Choice Policy: A Critical Analysis of Detroit Students’ Suburban School Choices

The purpose of this study is to advance our thinking about race and racism in geospatial analyses of school choice policy. To do so, we present a critical race spatial analysis of Detroit students’ suburban school choices. To frame our study, we describe the racial and spatial dynamics of school choice, drawing in particular on the concepts of opportunity hoarding and predatory landscapes. We find that Detroit students’ suburban school choices were circumscribed by racial geography and concentrated in just a handful of schools and districts. We also find notable differences between students in different racial groups. For all Detroit exiters, their schools were significantly more segregated and lower quality than those of their suburban peers. We propose future directions for research on families’ school choices as well as school and district behavior at the intersection of race, geography, and school choice policy.

Secret Agencies: How a Critical Media Scholar Got Inside Advertising

Abstract: This access narrative recounts how I conducted ethnographic research on the lack of diversity within advertising agencies in New York City during the summer of 2010. It positions this effort as a response to the scholarly tendency to make semiotic analysis the dominant mode of critical advertising studies and follows cultural studies scholar Richard Johnson's call to "decenter the text" and move the attention of cultural studies toward what Marx called "the hidden abode of production." My hope is that this essay will help demystify my process for securing entrance to agency settings and thereby encourage emerging critical scholars to generate new methods of understanding (and disrupting) the closed social networks that enable and perpetuate White opportunity hoarding throughout the creative industries.