[gsf_emergency_2]

There's something of a tension between the informal institutions (if I may call it that) of the better-off whites and the formal institutions of the less-privileged ones

Rhyming, as I see it, to how laws are either binding or protective.

Somewhere to start thinking about women-in-tech, to return to the topic

To be more concrete, it's the formal rule changes for diversity that attracts most outrage, but the informal ones tend to be more salient. We don't really have good abstractions for thinking about the interactions between factions, institutions, and their structure of rules.

As to the crab mentality.. you've probably heard of the concept of feline pugnacity (intragender jealousy)

To me, it sounds rather like, poorly calibrated system of informal rules beget poorly evaluated system of formal rules

[PaulHoule]

Yeah, formal vs informal is the way to think about it.

Your identity can complicate informality (I’m not afraid of getting a person of the same gender drunk, but very afraid of the opposite) but identity politics tends to center the formal which is a rigged game where victory as most partial as the formal route preclude recourse to the informal.

The informal route is dangerous but at least you have interesting stories to tell in the end. If your co-worker feel like they are being treated unfairly at the expense of a nepo baby, for instance, the adults will likely have too much guile for it to be worth talking to them. Befriend the nepo baby, however, and you might get a huge amount of insider information about what’s going on. I was lucky to have some mentors that didn’t teach me the secrets of informality in certain tribes but rather certain principles of informal politics that my not be universal but that are widespread, such as an Asian woman sysadmin who taught me tactics for getting good customer service from unreliable vendors —- tactics, funny enough, that quit working when central IT at my Uni got more reliable but then I didn’t need them.

[gsf_emergency_2]

Just thinking out loud:

-Informal rules are useful. Funny when you see the gap between "people are people" and the formal rules. Intention vs effect.

-Formal rules can also be useful (usually of the save you some thinking type, when they are). But that's overshadowed by their moral weight, their legible consequences. They are not easy to change! If we see the work that went into them, we can forgive. But not forget.

-The deliberations are mostly secret. From all sorts of distrust.

-so for formal rules: transparency (in both intention and reasoning), usefulness, & malleability are knobs to tweak. Sounds obvious, though.

Alongside negotiation skills, and less obvious, "moral identity". It's hard to hire people who are more or less aligned in those dimensions