Affirmative Action at Work: Corporate Compliance Activites and Workforce Composition

1964年，国会通过了《民权法案》，禁止就业歧视，但没有概述具体的遵守手段。 雇主们尝试了几十种不同的合规措施。 其中许多主要是象征性的，如反歧视政策，而另一些则提供平等待遇的程序保障，如处理性骚扰和正式晋升。 还有一些更具有实质性，因为它们涉及增加多样性的积极步骤，例如对妇女的特别管理培训和少数民族指导方案。这些措施中哪些起了作用？ 法律有何重要性？它通过何种方式对就业实践产生影响？ 这个项目建立在组织行动的制度理论，以解决这些问题。 它区分了象征性的、程序性的和实质性的反歧视活动，并详细说明了关于每种战略相对有效性的假设，该项目使用412家大雇主从1978年到1993年提交给政府的年度报告中的就业数据来检验这些假设。 这些公开的报告详细介绍了九个职业类别中按种族、民族和性别分列的就业情况。 它还对这些公司进行调查，以绘制其人事实践的历史，并将调查数据与年度报告合并。 然后，它分析了公司的特定雇佣做法（从调查数据中获得）如何影响其员工的性别，种族和民族构成（从年度报告中获得）。 该项目是第一次持续努力，以理清就业做法对劳动力构成的影响，并衡量旨在满足反歧视法律要求的活动在使劳动力更加多样化方面的有效性。

In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed employment discrimination, but did not outline specific means of compliance. Employers experimented with dozens of different compliance measures. Many were largely symbolic, such as anti-discrimination policies, while others offered procedural guarantees of equal treatment, such as in dealing with sexual harassment and formal promotion. Still others were more substantive in that they involved positive steps to increase diversity, such as special management training for women and minority mentoring programs. Which of these measures have worked? How did the law matter, and through what kinds of changes in employment practices did it have influence? This project builds on institutional theories of organizational action to address these questions. It distinguishes between symbolic, procedural, and substantive anti-discrimination activities, and specifies hypotheses about the relative effectiveness of each strategy.The project tests the hypotheses using employment data from the annual reports that 412 large employers submitted to the government from 1978 through 1993. These publicly available reports detail employment by race, ethnicity, and gender in nine occupational categories. It also surveys these companies to chart the history of their personnel practices, and merges the survey data with the annual reports. It then analyzes how particular employment practices of the companies (obtained from the survey data) affect the gender, racial, and ethnic composition of their workforce (obtained from the annual reports). The project represents the first sustained effort to sort out the effects of employment practices on workforce composition, and to measure the effectiveness of activities designed to satisfy anti-discrimination laws in making the workforce more diverse.