Inventing Equal Opportunity
By admin • Oct 14th, 2009 • Category: Business
Inventing Equal Opportunity
by: Frank Dobbin
Inventing Equal Opportunity
By Frank Dobbin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: 2009-06-15
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0691137439
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780691137438
Product Description:
Equal opportunity in the workplace is thought to be the direct legacy of the civil rights and feminist movements and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet, as Frank Dobbin demonstrates, corporate personnel experts–not Congress or the courts–were the ones who determined what equal opportunity meant in practice, designing changes in how employers hire, promote, and fire workers, and ultimately defining what discrimination is, and is not, in the American imagination.
Dobbin shows how Congress and the courts merely endorsed programs devised by corporate personnel. He traces how the first measures were adopted by military contractors worried that the Kennedy administration would cancel their contracts if they didn’t take "affirmative action" to end discrimination. These measures built on existing personnel programs, many designed to prevent bias against unionists. Dobbin follows the changes in the law as personnel experts invented one wave after another of equal opportunity programs. He examines how corporate personnel formalized hiring and promotion practices in the 1970s to eradicate bias by managers; how in the 1980s they answered Ronald Reagan’s threat to end affirmative action by recasting their efforts as diversity-management programs; and how the growing presence of women in the newly named human resources profession has contributed to a focus on sexual harassment and work/life issues.
Inventing Equal Opportunity reveals how the personnel profession devised–and ultimately transformed–our understanding of discrimination.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
ix
1 Regulating Discrimination
The Paradox of aWeak State
1
2 Washington Outlaws Discrimination with a Broad Brush
22
3 The End of Jim Crow
The Personnel Arsenal Put to New Purposes
41
4 Washington Means Business
Personnel Experts Fashion a System of Compliance
75
5 Fighting Bias with Bureaucracy
101
6 The Reagan Revolution and
the Rise of Diversity Management
133
7 The Feminization of HR and Work-Family Programs
161
8 Sexual Harassment as Employment Discrimination
190
9 How Personnel Defined Equal Opportunity
220
Notes
235
Bibliography
261
Index
289
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My generation grew up with the civil rights movement and civil unrest, with demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and with the women’s movement. My parents demonstrated for civil rights in the South and the North when I was small, and dinner table conversation revolved around Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as much as around the Kennedy boys. Soon it revolved around Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and Daniel Ellsberg and the Vietnam War, and around Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and the women’s movement.
Civil rights and women’s movement protesters took to the streets, but before long the energy of the demonstrations was absorbed. Absorbed in school desegregation actions. Absorbed in college open admissions programs and gender integration in the Ivy League. Absorbed in affirmative action at work. What happened to the civil rights and women’s movements when they were absorbed has been a driving question for my generation. Did the movements change the world?
My interest in what employers were doing began when my graduate school mentors John Meyer, Dick Scott, and Ann Swidler asked me and my colleague Lauren Edelman to collaborate on a study of due process mechanisms in workplaces, mechanisms that we soon learned had been boosted by the Civil Rights Act. We saw that the civil rights movement had been institutionalized in personnel departments, under personnel executives who went willingly or sometimes kicking and screaming down the path of equal employment opportunity. The grievance procedures
we studied were an unexpected result of the movement, and it is that early insight—that civil rights law had unanticipated and unrecognized consequences—that drives this book.
Much of the story in this book is drawn from surveys and in-depth interviews with managers I conducted, along with several collaborators, between 1983 and 2007. I owe collaborators, research assistants, and foundations thanks for their roles in employer surveys in 1983, 1986, 1997, and 2002. Each survey traced the history of employment practices in hundreds of American workplaces, over time. My collaborators in 1983 were Lauren Edelman, John Meyer, Dick Scott, and Ann Swidler.
My collaborators in 1986 were John Meyer, Dick Scott, and John Sutton, and assistants in conducting the survey were Jessica Torres and Roberta Stich. My collaborator in 1997 was Erin Kelly, and the survey was conducted
by the Maryland Survey Research Center, where Johnny Blair and Elena Tracy carried the project through. My collaborator in 2002 was Alexandra Kalev, and the survey was conducted by the Princeton Survey Research Center under the direction of Edward Freeland. Nicole Esparza and Leslie Hinkson helped with that survey.
These surveys, and research reports stemming from them, were generously supported by foundations and sabbatical fellowships over the years. Thanks to the University Committee at Princeton for providing several seed grants to fund different parts of the project.
Thanks to the Russell Sage Foundation for a residential fellowship leave, and particularly to Eric Wanner, Madge Spitaleri, and Auri Martinez. For research assistance at the Russell Sage Foundation, thanks to Lisa Kahraman
and John Smelcer. Special thanks to Reynolds Farley for advice. Thanks to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for a sabbatical leave. Thanks to the Russell Sage Foundation for supporting the
1983 survey and the 2002 survey, to the National Science Foundation for supporting the 1985 and 2002 surveys, and to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for supporting the 1997 survey. Thanks to Kathleen Christensen
at the Sloan Foundation for her input and support. Thanks to the Radcliffe Institute and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for the sabbatical leave that allowed me to complete this book. Thousands of personnel specialists have generously participated in interviews over the years. I’m particularly grateful for their time and wisdom.
Thanks go to several people who read the manuscript and offered comments: Anthony Chen, Erin Kelly, Michèle Lamont, Daniel Sabbagh, John Skrentny. I owe my various collaborators gratitude, as well, for ideas presented
here that we worked out together. The seeds of many ideas can be found in studies I worked on with James Baron, Lauren Edelman, P. Devereaux Jennings, Alexandra Kalev, Erin Kelly, John Meyer, W. Richard Scott,
John Sutton, and Ann Swidler over the years.1 I thank them for helping me to grasp the big picture, piece by piece. Thanks also to Laura Thomas and Melissa Rico, who helped with notes and manuscript preparation and made the book readable. Tim Sullivan at Princeton University Press gave me very useful suggestions about structure and substance, and the book is better for his input. Richard Isomaki and Jessica Matteson repaired
my stylistic gaffes and smoothed out the prose.
I dedicate this book to Michèle Lamont, who for more than twenty years has shared my life, and for twenty years has been my colleague as well. For being my intellectual heroine, as well as my partner in life
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