Equal Opportunity Law and the Construction of Internal Labor Markets

Which foot first: diversity management and affirmative action in Brazilian business

“…Even if the Wagner Act of 1935 had already signalized a new direction for relationship of the public sector and private organizations, since it established some mechanisms to protect trade union workers from being dismissed, affirmative action as it is discussed today was a result of title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This prompted employers to experiment with a number of antidiscrimination approaches, including numerical employment quotas for disadvantaged groups and making it illegal for employers with 100 or more employees to discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, and religion (Dobbin et al, 1993;Dobbin, 2009). Nevertheless, despite such forceful arguments, affirmative action began to loose popularity amongst the criticism that it had led to a lowering of educational standards -for example in college access -, and that, by threatening the principle of equality it was meant to produce, had exacerbated rather than relieved racial tension (Dworkin, 2002, p. 387;Chanlat;Dameron , 2009).…”

State activism and the hidden incentives behind bank acquisitions

“…For example, Fligstein (1990) showed how the Celler-Kefauver Act of 1950, which prohibited vertical mergers, limited the options available to corporations and how one result was increased cross-industry acquisition activity and the rise of conglomerates. On the normative side, a number of studies have shown how changes in the legal environment in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 disposed organizations in the 1960s and early 1970s to adopt different organizational structures that signaled normative compliance with the emerging regulatory regime (Dobbin et al, 1993;Edelman, 1990Edelman, , 1992Sutton et al, 1994).…”

“…This body of work suggests that there are important state-level effects. For example, in their study of firm responses to federal legislation, the Dobbin and Sutton team (Dobbin et al, 1993;Dobbin and Sutton, 1998;Sutton et al, 1994;Sutton and Dobbin, 1996) draw their sample of firms from three different states to test the hypothesis that state-level legislative environments will cause firms to behave differently above and beyond the impact of federal legislative change. They consistently find that location in the State of California-with its comparatively liberal laws in support of workers' rights (compared to Virginia and New Jersey)-has a significant positive impact on the firm-level adoption of a variety of labor-oriented practices.…”

“…Shifts in federal laws have been shown to cause corporations to interpret their environments differently and to influence the economic decisions of organizations. Research has shown that firm structure (Fligstein, 1990;Roy, 1997;Zorn, 2004), strategy (Davis et al, 1994), and even internal policy (Dobbin et al, 1993;Edelman, 1990Edelman, , 1992Sutton et al, 1994) are shaped by legal changes at the federal level. For example, Fligstein (1990) showed how a number of federal regulatory changes in the twentieth century drove the evolution of the corporate form.…”

“…Other researchers have shown that federal law is typically ambiguous and that firms are often interpreters and shapers of law (e.g. Dobbin et al, 1993;Dobbin and Sutton, 1998;Edelman, 1992). For instance, prior analyses suggest that firm response to law is a result of organizational trial and error or of the adoption of ''best practices'' (Kalev et al, 2006).…”