Frank Dobbin

• Ph.D. Stanford 1987
• Professor at Harvard University

Every year America becomes more diverse, but change in the makeup of the management ranks has stalled. The problem has become an urgent matter of national debate. How do we fix it? Bestselling books preach moral reformation. Employers, however well intentioned, follow guesswork and whatever their peers happen to be doing. Arguing that it’s time to...

To succeed, almost every employee needs work/life support at some point. Women and people of color need it the most, research shows, because they face greater challenges and have fewer resources available to them. They are also the least likely to receive it, however, and as a result often are forced to change or leave jobs and lose out on opportun...

Work-life policies designed to accommodate mothers often undermine their career advancement. We propose a theory of “organizational policy universalism,” arguing that work-life policies will be more effective at reducing gender inequality when they are universally applied. We examine tenure-clock extensions, adopted to mitigate career penalties fac...

The civil rights and women's movements led to momentous changes in public policy and corporate practice that have made the United States the global paragon of equal opportunity. Yet diversity in the corporate hierarchy has increased incrementally. Lacking clear guidance from policymakers, personnel experts had devised their own arsenal of diversity...

Do workplace sexual harassment programs help? We have now given training and grievanceprocedures a good two decades to work—most companies had them by 1998 when the SupremeCourt endorsed them — and they don’t appear to have helped much. Surveys using probabilitysamples showed that about 40 percent of women circa 1980 faced specific forms of “unwant...

Sexual harassment flourishes in workplaces where men dominate in management and in fields where few women hold the “core” jobs (think law enforcement and tech). Research shows that bringing more women into these roles can solve the problem at its roots. But companies know they can get away with cosmetic fixes instead. They stay out of legal trouble...

At the turn of the century, regulators introduced policies to control bank risk-taking. Many banks appointed chief risk officers (CROs), yet bank holdings of new, complex, and untested financial derivatives subsequently soared. Why did banks expand use of new derivatives? We suggest that CROs encouraged the rise of new derivatives in two ways. Firs...

After Wall Street firms repeatedly had to shell out millions to settle discrimination lawsuits, businesses started to get serious about their efforts to increase diversity. But unfortunately, they don’t seem to be getting results: Women and minorities have not gained much ground in management over the past 20 years. The problem is, organizations a...

This paper reviews historical and comparative theories in economic sociology that seek to explain substantial differences in economic behavior across time and space. In order to develop a more integrative analytical framework, one should avoid the stance of mainstream economics that states a force of self-interest determines economic behavior exoge...

Scholars have long treated industrial policies as temporary expedients that help developing economies to catch up with rivals. A growing body of research suggests that public policy interventions targeting particular industries play important but very different roles across developed economies. Industrial policies can substitute for market coordina...

Cultural approaches to understanding the modern organization date back to the Human Relations studies of the 1920s. To understand the phenomenology of the modern firm, cultural theorists have explored the roles of power and meaning in the social construction of rational, and just, organizational practices. Neoinstitutionalists have recently turned...

Organization scholars since Max Weber have argued that formal personnel systems can prevent discrimination. We draw on sociological and psychological literatures to develop a theory of the varied effects of bureaucratic reforms on managerial motivation. Drawing on self-perception and cognitive-dissonance theories, we contend that initiatives that e...

Sociology, political science, and economics have undergone parallel revolutions since the late 1970s, following on the heels of the behavioral revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Four distinct institutional paradigms have emerged: sociological institutionalism, rational choice institutionalism in political science, historical institutionalism in the...

Organization scholars since Max Weber have argued that formal personnel systems can prevent discrimination. Studies show both positive and negative effects. We draw on sociological and psychological literatures to develop a nuanced theory of the effects of bureaucracy. Drawing on self-perception and contact theories, we contend that initiatives tha...

In 2000, Nancy Plankey-Videla began an ethnography at a high-end men’s suit factory in central Mexico. Three months later, reacting to layoffs, bonus cuts, and an effort to break the union contract, which managers blamed on global competition and the U.S. recession, the largely female workforce at Moctezuma went on strike. A corrupt union conspired...

During the civil rights era in the 1960s, the federal government passed a series of measures to end racial and gender discrimination in the workplace. Yet the laws and regulations did not clearly define what constituted illegal discrimination and gave only weak enforcement power to federal agencies. As a result, over the following decades, corporat...

While some U.S. corporations have adopted a host of diversity management programs, many have done little or nothing. We explore the forces promoting six diversity programs in a national sample of 816 firms over 23 years. Institutional theory suggests that external pressure for innovation reinforces internal advocacy. We argue that external pressure...

Corporations have implemented a wide range of equal opportunity and diversity programs since the 1960s. This chapter reviews studies of the origins of these programs, surveys that assess the popularity of different programs, and research on the effects of programs on the workforce. Human resources managers championed several waves of innovations, f...

Frank Dobbin's Inventing equal opportunities, published by Princeton University Press in 2009, has arrived at just the right time in a France where the theme of “diversity” has permeated big firms and where equal opportunity policies are being debated in the educational system, which, from kindergarten to university, is being accused of fostering i...

Review Essay on Terrence Halliday and Bruce Carruthers, Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis.In 1998, Bruce Carruthers and Terence Halliday published a magisterial 600-page tome on the reform of bankruptcy law in the United States (1978) and Britain (1985). Rescuing Business was really two books in one. It detailed how instituti...

Agency theorists diagnosed the economic malaise of the 1970s as the result of executive obsession with corporate stability over profitability. Management swallowed many of the pills agency theorists prescribed to increase entrepreneurialism and risk-taking; stock options, dediversification, debt financing, and outsider board members. Management did...

In 1981, W. Richard (Dick) Scott of Stanford's sociology department described a paradigmatic revolution in organizational sociology that had occurred in the preceding decade. In Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems (Scott, 1981), he depicted the first wave of organizational theory as based in rational models of human action that focus...

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 employ...

Émile Durkheim's Division of Labor has palpably influenced students of organizations, occupations, and stratification. Durkheim's influence has been documented by exploring his contribution to our understanding of the global division of labor. This article examines the influence of Durkheim's theory of meaning on organizational sociology, which has...

the state's capacity to fully control its own administration and even to raise more money. The somewhat exceptional case of England as a "bal­ ancer" in early modern Western Europe is ascribed in large part to its remarkably effective early overhaul ofits system of public finances, which enabled it to punch militarily-and navally-far above its intr...

American organizational theorists have not taken up the call to apply Bourdieu’s approach in all of its richness in part because, for better or worse, evidentiary traditions render untenable the kind of sweeping analysis that makes Bourdieu’s classics compelling. Yet many of the insights found in Bourdieu are being pursued piecemeal, in distinct pa...

The worldwide spread of economic and political liberalism was one of the defining features of the late twentieth century. Free-market oriented economic reforms – macroeconomic stabilization, liberalization of foreign economic policies, privatization, and deregulation – took root in many parts of the world. At more or less the same time, a “third wa...

The concurrent rise of liberal politics and free market economics around the world was a defining feature of the latter part of the twentieth century. The social sciences were not well positioned to explain this global phenomenon. Models of policymaking and political change had privileged domestic factors for at least half a century. From Lipset's...

The diffusion of markets and democracy around the world was a defining feature of the late twentieth century. Many social scientists view this economic and political liberalization as the product of independent choices by national governments. This book argues that policy and political changes were influenced heavily by prior actions of external ac...

Do America's costly diversity-management programs work? Some do and some don't. The best idea is to assign clear responsibility for change.

Social scientists have sketched four distinct theories to explain a phenomenon that appears to have ramped up in recent years, the diffusion of policies across countries. Constructivists trace policy norms to expert epistemic communities and international organizations, who define economic progress and human rights. Coercion theorists point to powe...

Ever since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed employment discrimi-nation, governments, colleges, and corporations have tried to understand what the law means.' Employers have tried to integrate workforces, some with more enthusiasm than ~ t h e r s . ~ Change has been slower than1 those who passed the Civil Rights Act might have imagined it woul...

Most employers installed sexual harassment grievance procedures and sensitivity training by the late 1990s. It was personnel experts, not courts, legislatures, or lawyers, who promoted these antiharassment strategies, drawn from the profession’s tool kit. Personnel succeeded because it was executives, not public officials, who defined professional...

Without Abstract

Has federal antidiscrimination law been effective in moving women and minorities into management? Early studies show that government affirmative action reviews improved the numbers, and rank, of blacks, but evidence of what has happened since 1980 is sparse. There is little evidence that civil rights lawsuits improved the employment status of women...

Political scientists, sociologists, and economists have all sought to analyze the spread of economic and political liberalism across countries in recent decades. This article documents this diffusion of liberal policies and politics and proposes four distinct theories to explain how the prior choices of some countries and international actors affec...

Employers have experimented with three broad approaches to promoting diversity. Some programs are designed to establish organizational responsibility for diversity, others to moderate managerial bias through training and feedback, and still others to reduce the social isolation of women and minority workers. These approaches find support in academi...

Employers have experimented with three broad approaches to promoting diversity. Some programs are designed to establish organizational responsibility for diversity, others to moderate managerial bias through training and feedback, and still others to reduce the social isolation of women and minority workers. These approaches find support in academi...

In the late 1970s, neoinstitutional and organizational culture theorists challenged prevailing rationalist organizational paradigms by introducing social constructionism to the field of organizations. Despite their common foundation, these approaches built on seemingly contradictory empirical observations. Institutionalists observed that organizati...

Thirty years ago, new institutional theory challenged the then dominant functionalist explanations of organizational behavior by pointing to the role of meaning in the production and reproduction of organizational practices (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Meyer & Scott, 1983). But new institutional theory was soon subject to both internal and external critic...

The bankruptcy of Enron in December 2001 marked the beginning of broad awareness that American corporations had left behind the strategy of expanding through diversification that was the hallmark of the 1950s through the early 1980s. CEOs now made it job one to meet the earnings projections of securities analysts, such that by the year 2000 they we...

These commentaries, from five of the sharpest minds in sociology, confirm our belief that economic sociology is developing a coherent and powerful set of concepts and methods for analyzing major economic and business trends. Economics as a field has not done much to address the most important changes in corporate strategy and structure over the cou...

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, American employers have installed a host of different anti-discrimination mechanisms. They have built those mechanisms with an eye to changing ideas about discrimination found in the social sciences, at first forbidding explicit discrimination, then tackling structural forms of discrimination by ch...

IN RECENT years, sociologists have returned to study the field’s first subject, economic behavior. Beginning in the 1840s, Karl Marx tried to understand the economic underpinnings of class relations and political activity. Forty years later, Émile Durkheim explored how work was divided up in modern societies and the implications for occupational be...

Financial markets have often been seen by economists as efficient mechanisms that fulfill vital functions within economies. But do financial markets really operate in such a straightforward manner? The Sociology of Financial Markets approaches financial markets from a sociological perspective. It seeks to provide an adequate sociological coneptuali...

The new economic sociology is based on the theory that patterns of economic behavior are shaped by social factors. The Sociology of the Economy brings together a dozen path-breaking empirical studies that explore how social forces-such as shifts in political power, the influence of social networks, or the spread of new economic ideas-shape real-wor...

In 1950, T. H. Marshall suggested that “social citizenship” rights were the last frontier in formal citizenship protections. First came civil rights and basic freedoms in the eighteenth century, second came political rights with the extension of suffrage during the nineteenth century, and third came social rights with the development of national so...

Social Forces 79.4 (2001) 1521-1523 Organizations Evolving. By Howard Aldrich. Sage, 1999. 413 pp. Paper, $29.95. Howard Aldrich's tour de force illustrates the potential of the evolutionary approach to explain change within organizations, within sectors, and across sectors. His 1979 Organizations and Environments set the stage for this new piece,...

This chapter provides a commentary that sketches the transformation of passionate action into calculative interest-driven action, not merely within social movements but across social realms. The aim is not to romanticize the past but to note a wider trend in which human action is increasingly framed as driven by interest and calculation, even in re...

When the economist Michael Piore (1996, p. 742) looked out over the field of economic sociology he saw "an enormous hodge-podge of ideas and insights, existing at all sorts of different levels of abstraction, possibly in contradiction with one another, possibly just incommensurate, without a basic theory or structure to sort them out, or order them...

It is my pleasure to present the fifth guest editorial of the 2000-2001 school-year. This editorial is contributed by Professor Frank Dobbin, Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. Professor Dobbin is the author of Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain and France in the Railway Age (1994). Recent articles by Professor Dobbi...

Neo-liberalism has two components. One is historical, and it revolves around the idea that advanced economies -- particularly those of Britain and the US -- developed under conditions that are best characterized as laissez-faire. The other is definitional, and revolves around the idea that one group of policies can be defined as "non-interventionis...

How do new business models emerge? Neoinstitutionalists argue that the process often begins when a policy shift undermines the status quo; groups then vie to define the best alternative. The authors explore the role of power in selecting between two alternative business models available to railroads from 1987, when antitrust laws banned the cartel-...

First, they view the firm from different standpoints. In a nutshell, strategists explore efficiency from the perspective of the firm, developing theories of why one strategy is more successful than another, given product, firm, and industry characteristics. Sociologists focus on efficiency from the perspective of the corporate environment, developi...

Why do firms do what they do? Why does one cut prices while its neighbor buys out competitors? Why does one diversify into new industries while its neighbor spins off subsidiaries to focus on its core competence? Why do some strategies rise while others fall? These are central concerns of both strategic management theorists and economic sociologist...

By the time Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, many employers had created maternity leave programs. Ana- lysts argue that they did so in response to the feminization of the workforce. This study charts the spread of maternity leave policies between 1955 and 1985 in a sample of 279 organizations. Sex dis- crimination law playe...