Affirmative Action at Work: Corporate Compliance Activites and Workforce Composition

1964年，国会通过了《民权法案》，宣布就业歧视为非法，但没有概述具体的遵守方式。雇主们试验了数十种不同的合规措施。其中许多主要是象征性的，例如反歧视政策，而另一些则提供了平等待遇的程序性保障，例如在处理性骚扰和正式晋升方面。还有一些更具实质性，因为它们涉及增加多样性的积极步骤，例如为妇女提供特别管理培训和少数群体辅导方案。这些措施中有哪些奏效了？这项法律是如何发挥作用的，它通过什么样的就业实践变化产生了影响？这个项目建立在组织行动的制度理论基础上，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，并具体说明了关于每种战略相对有效性的假设。该项目使用412家大型雇主从1978年到1993年向政府提交的年度报告中的就业数据来检验这些假设。这些公开提供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，以绘制其人事做法的历史图表，并将调查数据与年度报告合并。然后分析这些公司的特定雇佣做法(从调查数据中获得)如何影响其劳动力的性别、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.