![]() | Inventing Equal Opportunity Subjects: Personnel management; Civil rights; Sexual harassment of women; Diversity in the workplace; Affirmative action programs; Discrimination in employment; 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. Frank Dobbin is professor of sociology at Harvard University. His books include Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain , and France in the Railway Age; The New Economic Sociology: A Reader (Princeton); and The Global Diffusion of Markets and Democracy . |
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