Laura Garbes has been awarded the National Science Foundation's Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant on Differentiating Effects of Particularistic Performance Standards in the Workplace.

This dissertation research project seeks to understand how performance standards in the workplace can unintentionally create structural barriers to inclusion. The project examines public broadcasting organizations in both the United States and Australia, with a focus on how sound and voice operate to limit policies of inclusion. National Public Radio in the U.S. and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation exist to provide programming to the broader public, the broadcaster supposedly a neutral mouthpiece in this process. Yet nonwhite broadcasters have challenged this assumption, citing the difficulties of constructing an on-air identity in public radio when for so long the norm of a “neutral” broadcaster was based on the voice of well-educated white men. Such struggles indicate continued white predominance despite mission statements to the contrary. 

This project will identify how public radio broadcast standards were created from a prevalently white perspective in both the United States and Australia, how and why such dominance endures despite an increasing number of nonwhite broadcasters on the air, and whether and how nonwhite broadcasters experience these standards as barriers in the workplace. The project highlights continued organizational limits to diversity and encourage the creation of more just and inclusive American and Australian workplaces. Such reform would enable both countries to progress closer towards their organizational ideals of pluralism. More broadly, the dissertation will deepen social scientific understandings of how racial inequities permeate organizations, and also the relationship sounds and other nonverbal cues have to the process of racialization.

Congratulations, Laura!