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  • Inventing Equal Opportunity
  • Edward Berkowitz
Inventing Equal Opportunity. By Frank Dobbin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. x plus 310 pp.).

In the compositions of historical sociologists, one often hears the clunk of German nouns striking the English language, causing many historians who are fans of the genre to think along Mark Twain's lines that "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." The work of Frank Dobbin, by way of contrast, refutes the stereotype. He delivers straightforward reports on the survey data he has collected from corporations on such matters as work place diversity and sexual harassment without neglecting the theoretical consequences of his findings. He concludes that historians [End Page 254] and others interested in the development of equal opportunity as an employment concept need to appreciate the crucial role of personnel officers and human relations specialists within the corporation. He explains that civil rights workers "fought for equal opportunity in employment," and that politicians "outlawed discrimination" through executive orders and legislation. "But it was personnel managers who defined what job discrimination was and was not" (p. 220).

Historians have told us a great deal about the grass roots activists and only a little less about the politicians who shaped our civil rights laws. Sociologists like John Skrentny and historians like the late great Hugh Graham have alerted us to the influence of government bureaucrats and the courts in expanding those laws. Historians writing about welfare capitalism such as Sanford Jacoby have reminded us of the survival of welfare capitalist practices, often emulated by the state, in the modern era. Frank Dobbin adds the personnel professionals to the list of influential players in America's powerful but fragmented state. Hence, in the matter of sexual harassment, Dobbin finds that the women's movement succeeded in making the case "that sexual harassment constituted sex discrimination" and that the courts "played a key role in defining harassment as sexual discrimination." "But neither decided how employers should fight harassment. Personnel experts made that decision" (p. 217).

Historians will find that Dobbin makes assertions along these lines without adding a lot of archival detail. His original data concentrate on corporate practice, and he leaves historical detail about the founding legislation, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to the historians who have come before him. Even without the historian's x-ray historical vision, he manages to illuminate the corporations' complex response to federal regulatory initiatives.

Uncertainty in the law, a common product of a legislative process that achieves consensus through ambiguity, led to the emergence of equal opportunity experts within firms who were entrusted with the job of keeping their company out of expensive trouble in the civil rights realm. The set up was like something out a John Le Carré novel with one bureaucracy mirroring another. But these experts had their own agenda that did not always mesh with that of the larger organizations they served. They pushed to end discretion on the part of managers and fremen in favor of what might be called "institutionalizing procedural justice," somewhat along the lines of post 1935 labor relations. In so doing, they fell back on tools from what Dobbin calls their "bureaucratic arsenal" such as validated job tests, performance evaluations and eventually such things as maternity leave and diversity training. They did their work well enough that their programs survived even after President Reagan signaled a loosening in affirmative action initiatives. With punitive damages no longer such a threat, the personnel experts simply turned around and talked in the age-old language of cost efficiency—diversity, like hiring the handicapped in the 1940s, was good business. A company needed to reflect the ethnic and racial composition of its customers.

This impressive book makes a convincing case for human resources professionals as key players in the implementation of civil rights laws. It also points to the importance of industrial grievance procedures and other institutional artifacts of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 as unstudied influences over recent American history. And, at least to me, it leaves open the question of whether the age that Dobbin describes is over. The big players in this book, such as General [End...

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