2026/03/31 by Malte Reichelt, Christoph Müller · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Affect (linguistics) #Ambiguity #Middle East #Middle management #Mortality salience #Names, Identity, and Discrimination Research #Perception #Salience (neuroscience) #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Terrorism #Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence
paper · doi:10.1177/00031224261424488
published in American Sociological Review 91(2), 313-348 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2026/03/31 · openalex created_date 2026/04/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Islamist terrorist attacks evoke negative stereotypes and symbolic threat perceptions toward men perceived to be of Middle Eastern origin, yet evidence on the labor market consequences of these attacks remains inconsistent. We address this ambiguity by developing a framework that links external shocks to employment outcomes through salience shifts and managerial discretion within workplaces. Salience shifts arise when clusters of terrorist attacks—rather than isolated events—are amplified by media coverage, reinforcing or generating stereotypes and increasing the likelihood that ethnoracial categories become consequential in hiring decisions. Whether such shifts translate into exclusion depends on organizational contexts that mute or permit greater managerial discretion. We test this framework using monthly linked employer–employee data from Germany (1999 to 2019), data on terrorist attacks linked to Islamist motives, name-based measures of perceived origin, and topic-modeled newspaper coverage. Our analyses show that periods marked by multiple Islamist terrorist attacks and heightened media coverage significantly reduce the employment of men perceived to be of Middle Eastern origin. These effects are strongest in workplaces with a high share of non-complex jobs and in settings lacking formal hiring procedures or worker representation, but they are muted where Middle Eastern managers are present. Together, these findings indicate when and where politicized events translate into employment disparities, highlighting the need to account for temporal and organizational contexts.