Negotiating Legal Compliance and Social Commitments in Graduate Admissions

This comparative organizational ethnography examines how two physical science PhD programs, operating under state affirmative action bans, navigate legal compliance while sustaining their commitments to diversity. Drawing on inhabited institutionalism and legal endogeneity, we show how, despite similar policy and disciplinary environments, each program interpreted the law differently and constructed distinctive admissions routines. One program broadened its definition of merit to emphasize community contribution, while the other leveraged evaluative technologies to standardize evaluations, incorporating race-neutral indicators associated with broadening participation. Findings reveal how committees navigated legal ambiguity, activated local culture to enable compliant adaptation, and expanded conceptions of merit. We offer a framework of race-neutral compliance logics to advance theory on how organizations enact law while pursuing equity.