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Sponsored by The Laidley Centre for Business Ethics & Equity (LCBEE)

Aharon Cohen Mohliver

London Business School

How Social Upheaval Shaped DEI Hiring Practices

Date: Friday, February 13, 2026
Time:10:30 AM -12:00 PM
Location: Bronfman 210

All are cordially invited to attend.

Abstract:

Partisan divides increasingly shape how Americans—and the organizations they work for—respond to salient social issues, yet evidence directly connecting partisanship to substantive organizational decisions remains limited. We analyze how the partisan orientation of employees, measured via political donations, relates to firms’ adoption of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) hiring practices at 705 Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies following the murder of George Floyd, a pivotal event that heightened the salience of race relations and triggered widespread calls for change. Tracking DEI job creation, we find a threefold increase almost exclusively among liberal-leaning firms, while conservative-leaning firms showed little change, breaking previously parallel trends. Institutional theory expects convergence around best practices, but our findings reveal that legitimacy signals can fracture under polarization, refracting through partisan moral frames and producing durable divergence rather than isomorphic diffusion. This split is driven by the political composition of employees and management, not industry or geography, and is robust to multiple alternative explanations. The study extends research on contested practices by showing polarization can invert legitimacy signals, qualifying neo-institutional theory with new boundary conditions for mimetic diffusion, and demonstrating that shocks induce cleavages in direction, not merely degree. More broadly, the results reveal a non-monolithic institutional environment, where salient events generate opposing organizational responses depending on stakeholder alignment, inviting new theorizing about contested practices and field-level change in polarized contexts.