The Social Identity and Social Networks of Ethnic Minority Groups in Organizations: A Crucial Test of Distinctiveness Theory Distinctiveness theory posits that patterns of social identity and friendship are based on numeric rarity

* We thank Bernie Milano and Tara Perino for their unflagging support and encouragement; and we are grateful to the student members of the PhD Project for their participation. Thanks also to and two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their constructive criticism and advice. Earlier versions of this paper were presented to helpful audiences at the Audencia Ecole de Management, the Distinctiveness theory posits that patterns of social identity and friendship are based on numeric rarity within specific contexts. In ethnically diverse organizations, the theory predicts that members of the smaller ethnic group (relative to members of the larger ethnic group) will: (a) tend to identify and form friendships within their own ethnic group; and (b) lack access to well-connected individuals in the network of friendship relations. Prior tests have supported these predictions, but they have been unable to rule out the possibility that it was chronic differences in social status and numeric representation in society at large (rather than numeric distinctiveness within specific contexts) that explained the observed patterns of social identity and friendship. In this field-based study, we examined an organization whose social composition effectively controlled for these confounds. We found that members of the smaller ethnic group tended to identify and form friendships within group, as predicted by distinctiveness theory. However, in contrast to previous work, we found that members of the smaller ethnic group were equally well-connected to the center of the friendship network as were the members of the larger ethnic group. The study of informal relations between members of different ethnic groups has been the focus of sustained sociological analysis in the United States for decades (e.g., Park, 1939/1950). The topic has received less attention in organizational studies, but this state of affairs appears to be changing rapidly (for a review, see Proudford & Nkomo, 2006). A key reason that the study of ethnic relations is moving from the margins to a more central place in organizational scholarship is that the workforce has become markedly more diverse, and this has fuelled vigorous interest in the consequences of ethnic diversity in organizational settings. Given the importance of informal social interactions in organizational life (e. question that deserves greater attention from organizational researchers is: How does ethnic diversity within an organization influence informal relations among its members? Perhaps the most influential theoretical approach to this question draws on the " homophily " principle (Lazarsfeld & …