Equal Opportunity Law and the Construction of Internal Labor Markets
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Firms with human resources departments, diversity staff and HR consultants became significantly more likely than their peers to adopt a range of different diversity measures.
“As personnel departments took charge of diversity management, and became dominated by women, the profession became the leading local advocate of diversity programs in most companies; firms with human resources departments, diversity staff and HR consultants became significantly more likely than their peers to adopt a range of different diversity measures (Dobbin et al., 1993, Dobbin andKelly, 2007”
From Are Diversity Programs Merely Ceremonial? Evidence-Free Institutionalization (2017) · cites this paper as Dobbin et al., 1993
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Kalev, A., Dobbin, F., & Kelly, E. (2006) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.1177/000312240607100404 · Cited by 2,052 · see citing works
Self-citationDiscrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment
Pager, D., Bonikowski, B., & Western, B. (2009) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.1177/000312240907400505 · Cited by 1,022 · see citing works
Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing
Brayne, S. (2020) · doi:10.1093/oso/9780190684099.001.0001 · Cited by 334 · see citing works
Are Diversity Programs Merely Ceremonial? Evidence-Free Institutionalization
Dobbin, F., & Kalev, A. (2017) · The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism · doi:10.4135/9781446280669.n32 · Cited by 56 · see citing works
Self-citation
- Authors
- Dobbin, F., Sutton, J. R., Meyer, J. W., & Scott, R.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- University of California, Santa Barbara (US)
- Stanford University (US)
- ORCID
- Meyer, John W.
- Venue
- American Journal of Sociology
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1993-09
- Volume
- 99
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 396-427
- ISSN
- 0002-9602 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5390
- OpenAlex
- W2068096349
- Cited by
- 613
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 24 · 2020: 32 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 19 · 2016: 29 · 2015: 26 · 2014: 20 · 2013: 14 · 2012: 11
- FWCI
- 9.83
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- nrs.harvard.edu
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- American Journal of Sociology (publishedVersion)
- Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (8511250)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Management and Organizational Studies
- Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Gender Diversity and Inequality
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Employment, Labor, and Gender Studies
- Keywords
- Equal Employment Opportunity Act, internal labor markets, federal employment policy, organizational diffusion, personnel management, judicial enforcement, racial discrimination in employment, achievement orientation
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