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by Frank Dobbin

Sociology

Author:

Frank Dobbin
ISBN:

069114995X
ISBN13:

978-0691149950
Genre:

Social Sciences
Publisher:

Princeton University Press (June 20, 2011)
Pages:

360 pages
Subcategory:

Sociology
Language:

English
FB2 format

1928 kb
ePUB format

1190 kb
DJVU format

1741 kb
Rating:

4.6
Votes:

464
Formats:

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Frank Dobbin's impressive Inventing Equal Opportunity documents the crucial role played by the personnel profession in translating equal employment law into practice.

Frank Dobbin's impressive Inventing Equal Opportunity documents the crucial role played by the personnel profession in translating equal employment law into practice. Dobbin makes a powerful argument about the importance of long-overlooked personnel managers in creating the legal environment that governs so much of an American's working life. In this superb book, Dobbin explains the process through which white males have now become 'victims' of a system intended to uplift disadvantaged groups; at the same time, it reveals the fallacy of judicial neutrality.

X, 310 pages : 24 cm. The author demonstrates how corporate personnel experts, not Congress or the courts, determined what equal opportunity meant in practice, designing changes in how employers hire, promote, and fire workers, and ultimately definin. The author demonstrates how corporate personnel experts, not Congress or the courts, 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. He shows how Congress and the courts merely endorsed programs devised by corporate personnel.

Inventing Equal Opportunity reveals how the personnel profession devised-and ultimately transformed-our understanding of discrimination. Inventing Equal Opportunity - Frank Dobbin. Read on the Scribd mobile app. Download the free Scribd mobile app to read anytime, anywhere. Publisher: Princeton University PressReleased: May 26, 2009ISBN: 9781400830893Format: book. carousel previous carousel next. Inventing equal opportunity. Princeton University Press. Princeton and Oxford.

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.

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.

Frank Dobbin's Inventing equal opportunities, published by Princeton University Press in 2009, has arrived at just the right time in a France where the theme of diversity has permeated big firms and where equal opportunity policies are being debated in the educational system, which, from kindergarten to university, is being accused of fostering inequality. This book provides a stimulating,. innovative contribution to our understanding not only of these questions in the United States but also of the French case

Home Browse Books Book details, Inventing Equal Opportunity. 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.

Home Browse Books Book details, Inventing Equal Opportunity.

Equal opportunity law and the construction of internal labor markets. F Dobbin, JR Sutton, JW Meyer, R Scott. Princeton University Press, 2009. American journal of Sociology 99 (2), 396-427, 1993. 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.

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.

Hasirri

Dobbin presents a thorough and academically solid review of the relevant innerworkings of this thread of American history. He has carefully braided the strands of democracy, policy, law, capitalism and socio-economic histories into a powerful cord that binds together the pieces of iron and clay that comprise the realities of EEO as we know it today. Dobbin had me anticipating his next book before I was done with section two of this one. Having lived much of the history he's reviewed, I readily recognized the picture he's painted. It makes sense. Whether you end up agreeing with his portrayals and perspectives or not, Dobbin presents a view that cannot be ignored for serious students of the "Diversity" game.

TheJonnyTest

Frank Dobbin, documenting the entire transformation process of equal opportunity from law to practice, challenges conventional wisdom that it was politicians, activists and judges who brought equal opportunity in to being. Instead, personnel managers and professionals were to be surveyed.
　　
　　In a lengthy study of equal opportunity’s evolution, Dobbin found that in a sweeping executive and legislative ban of discrimination, neither President John F. Kennedy nor the Congress or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) bothered to clearly define the term (pp.23-35). Corporate executives, on the other hand, had to charge their personnel directors with the task of figuring out how to rule out discrimination in employment. They first attempted to expand the practice of union welfare policies and increased recruitment in historically black colleges (pp. 41-60) and led to an increase of black male workers in industrial plants. In the 1970s, to adapt to stringent requirements of federal contracts, personnel managers also began to produce more detailed outlines for practices, such as clear description of job skills required, job posting and new schemes of salary classifications. These practices, however, were mostly transformed from older customs (pp. 98-100), and were legitimized by courts only after they were produced, most typically in the case of grievance procedures (pp. 91-97).
　　
　　In the 1980s, facing the Ronald Regan government and the “neoliberal” turn of American political economy, many of the racial-based practice were either abandoned or were given less attention from courts, legislatures and popular opinions. Hence personnel professionals not only transformed themselves into “human resources” professionals, but also switched the focus of equal opportunity to production efficiency and sexual/gender equality, under the name of “diversity management” (pp.143-158). Dobbin argues that since the 1980s, equal opportunity policies designed and diffused by mostly white female human resource profession tilted more towards sexual and gender equality (pp.161-166). Ironically, for Dobbin, the originally racial/ethnic-based civil rights movement eventually settled on sex/gender biases (pp.187-189).
　　
　　All in all, for Dobbin, executive policies of equal opportunity did not automatically created equal employment opportunity, but they had to be adopted and invented by personnel experts in “wave upon wave of corporate programs” (p.13). Courts, EEOC and CEOs only confirmed the selections of such practices later, which became the common institutions in corporations. On the other hand, this whole historical process might have had the effect of circumventing the equal opportunity movement in to a mere question of certain types of equality, corporate practices and production efficiency, denying further moral and legal debates and popular supervision (pp.227-233). The book’s combination of documentary research and data collection successfully combines sociological analytics with economic insights. This book not only reveals the interaction between social activism, bureaucracy, institutions and social practices, but also stirs reflections upon the operation of the hierarchical, highly mechanized and institutionalized democracy of America.
　　

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