John R. Sutton

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.

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.

Imprisonment and social classification in five common-law democracies, 1955-1985

Rates of imprisonment have risen in many Western democracies over the past few decades, most dramatically in the United States. The development of a systematic and general explanation of imprisonment trends has been impeded because of the theoretical and methodological limitations of prior quantitative studies. Most use data from a single country or jurisdiction and focus narrowly on the Rusche‐Kirchheimer “labor surplus” hypothesis, with little attention to alternative explanations. This study takes a cross‐national perspective, using longitudinal data from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States to offer an institutional account of imprisonment rates. The labor surplus effect is treated as a special case of a more general process by which individuals are allocated among alternative life‐course paths. This allocation process is likely to be influenced by macrolevel institutional arrangements and contests for political power. Hypotheses are tested using pooled time‐series cross‐section regression techniques. Results support this broadened perspective: prison growth is driven not only by crime rates and unemployment rates, but also by welfare spending and the power of right parties.

The Political Economy of Imprisonment in Affluent Western Democracies, 1960–1990

Research showing an association between business cycles and imprisonment is suspect on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Most research on this topic uses an impoverished notion of business cycles and pays no attention to differences in the institutional contexts of economic policymaking. This article reexamines this issue using data from 15 affluent capitalist democracies observed over 30 years, from 1960 to 1990. Pooled regression techniques are used to test hypotheses regarding the effects of business cycles, political power, and the structure of labor market institutions. Results from simple models show the expected associations between business cycles and imprisonment rates, but these associations disappear in models that include measures of politics and institutional structure. This suggests that the business cycle-imprisonment relationship is not causal but is instead an artifact of antecedent differences between neoliberal and corporatist societies.

The two faces of governance : Responses to legal uncertainty in U.S. firms, 1955 to 1985

Recent neoinstitutional analyses have associated the rapid diffusion of due-process governance mechanisms in the American workplace with government pressure for equal employment opportunity and affirmative action.

Structural Bias in the Sentencing of Felony Defendants

As incarceration rates have risen in the US, so has the overrepresentation of African Americans and Latinos among prison inmates. Whether and to what degree these disparities are due to bias in the criminal courts remains a contentious issue. This article pursues two lines of argument toward a structural account of bias in the criminal law, focusing on (1) cumulative disadvantages that may accrue over successive stages of the criminal justice process, and (2) the contexts of racial disadvantage in which courts are embedded. These arguments are tested using case-level data on male defendants charged with felony crimes in urban US counties in 2000. Multilevel binary and ordinal logit models are used to estimate contextual effects on pretrial detention, guilty pleas, and sentence severity, and cumulative effects are estimated as conditional probabilities that are allowed to vary by race across all three outcomes. Results yield strong, but qualified, evidence of cumulative disadvantage accruing to black and Latino defendants, but do not support the contextual hypotheses. When the cumulative effects of bias are taken into account, the estimated probability of the average African American or Latino felon going to prison is 26% higher than that of the average Anglo.

Exploring the Social Sources of Denominationalism: Schisms in American Protestant Denominations, 1890-1980

Schisms are a major source of new religious denominations in America, but have received little attention in the sociological literature. This study is critical of the conventional assumption that schisms arise primarily from internal doctrinal disputes. Drawing on the resource mobilization literature, we offer an alternative argument that vulnerability to schism is related to the organizational characteristics of denominations. We apply dynamic quantitative techniques to longitudinal data on Protestant denominations in the U.S. to test hypotheses about denominational centralization, linkages to the wider environment, and demographic characteristics. Findings suggest that the larger the denomination, the greater the tendency to schism; the size effect is inhibited, however, when denominations are linked to interorganizational federations.

The Political Economy of Madness: The Expansion of the Asylum in Progressive America

In the United States between 1880 and the 1920s, unprecedented numbers of people were confined in mental hospitals, leading many contemporary observers to conclude that the nation was experiencing an epidemic of madness. I analyze the expansion of asylums as a product of organizational and political forces rather than an increase in insanity. The analysis is based on Grobs (1983) historical argument that asylums were forced to absorb increasing numbers of the aged poor who could no longer be confined in almshouses. This analysis is supplemented by a more comprehensive model that treats political factors especially the fiscal capacities of state governments and the role of political parties as fundamental determinants of institutional policy. This model is tested using longitudinal quantitative data for U.S. states. Results confirm the direct effects of almshouse capacities in an attenuated way, and show further that political organization influenced the production of insanity.

Bureaucrats and Entrepreneurs: Institutional Responses to Deviant Children in the United States, 1890-1920s'

Child welfare was a central item on the Progressive reform agenda. But contrary to the professed goals of leading reformers, institutions for delinquent and dependent children expanded rapidly around the turn of the century. Nationwide, private agencies gres faster than those in the public sector. This article attemps to account both for the general rise in juvenile incarceration and for the trend toward privatization. It begins by exploring potential accounts of institutional expansion based on socioeconomic resource flows and social movement influence. The main concern however, is to develop a political model that focuses, first, on the internecine politics of the national charity organization movement and, second, on variation in patterns of state building among the American states. Dynamic quantitative methods are used to test these approaches. Results suggest strongly that the relative growth of public and private institutions was determined largely by political issues, including previous social policy commitments and patronage.