Frank Dobbin

Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies

Employers have experimented with three broad approaches to promoting diversity. Some programs are designed to establish organizational responsibility for diversity, others to moderate managerial bias through training and feedback, and still others to reduce the social isolation of women and minority workers. These approaches find support in academic theories of how organizations achieve goals, how stereotyping shapes hiring and promotion, and how networks influence careers. This is the first systematic analysis of their efficacy. The analyses rely on federal data describing the workforces of 708 private sector establishments from 1971 to 2002, coupled with survey data on their employment practices. Efforts to moderate managerial bias through diversity training and diversity evaluations are least effective at increasing the share of white women, black women, and black men in management. Efforts to attack social isolation through mentoring and networking show modest effects. Efforts to establish responsibility for diversity lead to the broadest increases in managerial diversity. Moreover, organizations that establish responsibility see better effects from diversity training and evaluations, networking, and mentoring. Employers subject to federal affirmative action edicts, who typically assign responsibility for compliance to a manager, also see stronger effects from some programs. This work lays the foundation for an institutional theory of the remediation of workplace inequality.

Introduction: The International Diffusion of Liberalism

Political scientists, sociologists, and economists have all sought to ana- lyze the spread of economic and political liberalism across countries in recent decades+ This article documents this diffusion of liberal policies and politics and proposes four distinct theories to explain how the prior choices of some countries and inter- national actors affect the subsequent behavior of others: coercion, competition, learn- ing, and emulation+ These theories are explored empirically in the symposium articles that follow+ The goal of the symposium is to bring quite different and often isolated schools of thought into contact and communication with one another, and to define common metrics by which we can judge the utility of the contending approaches to diffusion across different policy domains+

Equal Opportunity Law and the Construction of Internal Labor Markets

Internal labor markets have been explained with efficiency and control arguments; however, retrospective event-history data from 279 organizations suggest that federal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) law was the force behind the spread of formal promotion mechanisms after 1964. The findings highlight the way in which American public policy, with its broad outcome-oriented guidelines for organizations, stimulates managers to experiment with compliance mechanisms with and eye to judicial sanction. In response to EEO legislation and case law, personnel managers devised and diffused employment practices that treat all classes of workers as ambitious and achievement oriented in the process of formalizing and rationalizing promotion decisions.

The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, federal policy has revolutionized employment rights. Equal employment opportunity law, occupational safety and health legislation, and fringe benefits regulation were designed to create employee rights to equal protection, to health and safety, and to the benefits employers promise. In event‐history analyses of data from 279 organizations, this research finds that these legal changes stimulated organizations to create personnel, antidiscrimination, safety, and benefits departments to manage compliance. Yet as institutionalization proceeded, middle managers came to disassociate these new offices from policy and to justify them in purely economic terms, as part of the new human resources management paradigm. This pattern is typical in the United States, where the Constitution symbolizes government rule of industry as illegitimate. It may help to explain the long absence of a theory of the state in organizational analysis and to explain a conundrum noted by state theorists: the federal state is administratively weak but normatively strong.

How Affirmative Action Became Diversity Management Employer Response to Antidiscrimination Law, 1961 to 1996

How did corporate affirmative action programs become diversity programs? During the 1970s, active federal enforcement of equal employment opportunity (EEO) and affirmative action (AA) law, coupled with ambiguity about the terms of compliance, stimulated employers to hire antidiscrimination specialists to fashion EEO/AA programs. In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration curtailed enforcement, but as Philip Selznicks band of early institutionalists might have predicted, EEO/AA program practices had developed an organizational constituency in EEO/AA specialists and thus survived Reagans enforcement cutbacks. As John Meyers band of neoinstitutionalists might have predicted, that constituency collectively retheorized antidiscrimination practices through professional returns in terms of efficiency, using the rhetoric of diversity management..

The Legalization of the Workplace

This study uses longitudinal data on nearly 300 American employmers over the period 1955-85 to analyze the adoption of disciplinary hearings and grievance procedures for nonunion salaried and hourly emplyees. Hypotheses are developed from an institutional perspective that focuses, first, on uncertainty arisin from government mandates concerning equal employment opportunity and affirmative action and, second, on the role of the human relations professsions in constructing employment-relations law and prescribing models of compliance. Event-history techniques are used to test these hypotheses against competing arguments concerning the internatural structure and labor market position of employing organizations. Results on all outcomes strongly support the institutionalist model.

The Dynamics of Rules: Change in Written Organizational Codes

This is a unique book. March, Schulz, and Zhou have developed an entirely new field of organizational research, which amounts to a sort of ecology of organizational rules, and have developed an elegant theory of that field. One of this books most important contributions is to bring insights from population ecology theory to the internal operation of the firm. Another is to build on Marchs ideas about organizational learning. The authors not only develop a new organizational genre and a theory to go with it, but introduce a new kind of data: demographic data on organizational rules. They track every rule created at Stanford over a period of 100 years.

How Policy Shapes Competition: Early Railroad Foundings in Massachusetts

To examine the effects of policy on markets and competition we outline hypotheses about the effects of three common policy regimes -- public capitalization, pro-cartel, and antitrust -- on competition and the founding of new firms.

The Global Diffusion of Markets and Democracy

1. Introduction: the diffusion of liberalization Beth Simmons, Frank Dobbin and Geoffrey Garrett 2. Tax policy in an era of internationalization: an assessment of a conditional diffusion model of the spread of neoliberalism Duane Swank 3. The decision to privatize: economists and the construction of ideas and policies Bruce Kogut and J. Muir Macpherson 4. The international diffusion of public sector downsizing: network emulation and theory-driven learning Chang Kil Lee and David Strang 5. Global ideology and voter sentiment as determinants of international financial liberalization Dennis P. Quinn and A. Maria Toyoda 6. Competing for capital: the diffusion of bilateral investment treaties, 1960-2000 Zachary Elkins, Andrew T. Guzman and Beth A. Simmons 7. Diffusion and the spread of democratic institutions Kristian Skrede Gleditsch and Michael D. Ward 8. World society and human rights: an event history analysis of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women Christine Min Wotipka and Francisco O. Ramirez 9. Conclusion Geoffrey Garrett, Frank Dobbin and Beth Simmons.

Civil Rights Law at Work: Sex Discrimination and the Rise of Maternity Leave Policies

By the time Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, many employers had created maternity leave programs. Analysts argue that they did so in response to the feminization of the workforce. This study charts the spread of maternity leave policies between 1955 and 1985 in a sample of 279 organizations. Sex discrimination law played a key role in the rise of maternity leave policies. Building on neoinstitutional theory, this article explores how the separation of powers shapes employer response to law. Details of the law are often specified in administrative rulings‐the weakest link in the law because they can be overturned by the courts and by Congress. Yet an administrative ruling requiring employers with disability leave programs to permit maternity leave, which employers successfully fought in the courts, was at least as effective as the identical congressional statute that replaced it. In the American context, the legal vulnerability of administrative rulings can draw attention to them, thus making the weakest link in the law surprisingly powerful.