John D. Skrentny

Policy‐Elite Perceptions and Social Movement Success: Understanding Variations in Group Inclusion in Affirmative Action1

Using historical analysis of the inclusiveness of Labor Department affirmative action regulations for African‐Americans, American Indians, Asian Americans, Latinos, women, and white ethnics, this article shows that understanding variations in social movement success requires understanding policy‐elite perceptions of the meanings of social movements and the groups they represent. Variation in perceived meanings along dimensions of definition, morality, or threat helps explain the speed of group inclusion, the amount of mobilization needed, and possiblity for failure. Ethnoracial minorities benefited from perceptions of definitional and moral similarity to blacks, but elites perceived women as different definitionally and white ethnics as different definitionally and morally. Policy‐elite perceptions create obstacles for some groups, forcing them to struggle longer and harder for the same policy outcome.

Defining nations in Asia and Europe : A comparative analysis of ethnic return migration policy

We argue that regional comparison of East Asian and European ethnic return migration policy offers important new perspectives on nationhood, nondiscrimination norms, and trans-nationality. We find that despite international nondiscrimination norms, preferential ethnic return policy is common in both regions. These policies at least implicitly define the nation as existing across borders. However, there are significant regional differences. East Asian states use co-ethnic preferences instrumentally for economic goals and also offer preferential treatment of co-ethnic foreign investors. European states offer preferences to coethnics to protect these populations or express symbolic ties, sometimes at great expense. Thus, in Europe the state has an obligation to assist coethnics abroad, but in Asia, foreign coethnics assist the state.

Why Is There So Little Migrant Settlement in East Asia

Unlike states in Europe, East Asia settles very few migrants and has not developed a European-style multicultural society. We seek to explain this variation using comparative analysis of two of the most advanced states in East Asia, South Korea and Japan, with several states in Europe. Focusing on family reunification - almost always the precursor to migrant settlement - we examine the effects of several independent variables, including supranational institutions, independent courts, interest groups, political culture, and the perceptions of migrants. We conclude that both Korea and Japan have less migrant settlement because of the lack of regional institutions pushing for family reunification rights, an elite political culture that still maintains the assumptions and repertoires of a “developmental state,” where rights may be sacrificed for economic growth and order, and migrant perceptions of greater immigration control in Asia.

The effect of the Cold War on African-American civil rights: America and the world audience, 1945–1968

The social movement for African-American civil rights is one of the most studied and celebrated social phenomena of the twentieth century. One factor in explaining the movements successes, however, is usually given little if any explicit attention by civil rights scholars, and has not been explained adequately. This is the impact of the Cold War on domestic United States race politics, and the process through which the Cold War lessened resistance to civil rights movement demands. While past studies of the civil rights movement have properly emphasized such variables as democraphic shifts, changes in the economy, and social-movement organizational dynamics, the purpose of this article is (1) to stress the contributing importance of Americas Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union in the development of black civil rights; and (2) to demonstrate with this important case how the politicalprocess model for the study of social movements can be clarified and made more precise through insights from neoinstitutional theory, now mostly identified with the cultural analysis of organizations. Combining the political-process models emphasis on agency and opportunity with neoinstitutional theorys stress on legitimacy can help develop the language to explain the Cold War/civil rights connection.

Culture and Race/Ethnicity: Bolder, Deeper, and Broader

The role of cultural analysis in the sociology of race, ethnicity, and immigration varies across subject matter. Primarily for political reasons, it has been marginalized in the study of ethnic/racial inequality, though new work is reclaiming culture in this important context. It has an unacknowledged presence in studies of discrimination and domination, but is explicit in macro and historical studies. This article surveys these subfields and makes a call for bolder, deeper, and broader cultural analysis in the field. More work is needed on cultural assimilation, how inequality and discrimination produce racial and ethnic meanings, how ethnic and racial cultures affect interests through variations in conceptions of the meaning of life, how sending state cultures affect immigrant and ethnic cultures in the United States, and how globalization is Americanizing immigrants before they even leave their homelands.

Color Lines: Affirmative Action, Immigration, and Civil Rights Options for America

The growing number of Latinos and Asians in America has caused the creation of a new ethnic order. This text consists of essays that re-examine the role of affirmative action and civil rights in the light of this important shift in American demographics. The book explores issues of public policy, equal opportunity, diversity, multiculturalism, pathways to better work and higher learning, and attempts in countries outside the United States to protect minority civil rights.

Administering Success: The Legitimacy Imperative and the Implementation of Welfare Reform

Based on a case study of Floridas Family Transition Program (FTP), the first time-limited welfare program implemented in the United States, we argue that extra-legal “rules” and popular definitions of success can constrain bureaucratic action and shape policy outcomes. On paper, the FTP permitted considerable discretion in the administration of post-time-limit benefits and included a job guarantee for compliant participants; yet, as the program was implemented both the job guarantee and the benefit extensions were virtually eliminated through administrative procedures. In contrast to what we would expect from current theories of bureaucracy, the unwillingness of administrators to make use of their formal capacity could not be accounted for by the actions of interest groups or street-level bureaucrats, nor could it be explained solely by a lack of resources. Using a combination of insights from historical institutionalism in political sociology and neo-institutionalism in organizational analysis and bringing a new emphasis on the power of the media to define programmatic success, we argue that the legitimacy of the FTP would have been threatened if administrators made use of some of the policy options permitted by law. We conclude by offering three hypotheses on the relationship between media attention and bureaucratic action.

Coalition-Building and the Politics of Electoral Capture During the Nixon Administration: African Americans, Labor, Latinos

In November of 1968, Richard Nixon became only the second Republican in four decades to win control of the Executive Office.1 Unlike the administration of his party’s predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon’s presidency would ultimately display a willingness to aggressively confront the thendominant New Deal order of the Democratic party and, in the process, attempt to forge a new electoral majority. In many ways, Nixon’s efforts were shaped by historical and institutional circumstances. The civil rights movement of the early 1960s had successfully pushed Democratic party leaders to take legislative action against racial discrimination in the southern United States, effectively shattering their party’s century-old alliance with white segregationists in the region. Meanwhile, efforts by the Supreme Court and Democratic legislators to provide substantive civil rights in areas of the country outside of the South strained their party’s relationship with urban and blue-collar white-ethnic voters.2 Nixon courted these disaffected Democrats in the 1968 campaign through both the “Southern Strategy” and appeals to the so-called “Silent Majority,” a symbolic reference meant

After civil rights : racial realism in the new American workplace

List of Figures and Tables ix Preface xi Chapter 1 Managing Race in the American Workplace 1 Chapter 2 Leverage Racial Realism in the Professions and Business 38 Chapter 3 We the People Racial Realism in Politics and Government 89 Chapter 4 Displaying Race for Dollars Racial Realism in Media and Entertainment 153 Chapter 5 The Jungle Revisited? Racial Realism in the Low-Skilled Sector 216 Chapter 6 Bringing Practice, Law, and Values Together 265 Notes 291 Index 383

Pragmatism, institutionalism, and the construction of employment discrimination

This paper uses ideas from neoinstitutional theory, as well as insights from the philosophy of pragmatism, to explain the construction of employment discrimination to include a model based on race differences in employment statistics.” While some suggest the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the middle 1960s was the site of an ideological takeover or capture, this paper instead highlights the practical difficulties resulting from the commissions classically liberal founding institutional rules. The raceconscious, statistical model was constructed unintentionally, the result of the pragmatic pursuit of the original goal of effective and expedient enforcement of nondiscrimination.