Abstract
Internal labor markets have been explained with efficiency and control arguments; however, retrospective event-history data from 279 organizations suggest that federal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) law was the force behind the spread of formal promotion mechanisms after 1964. The findings highlight the way in which American public policy, with its broad outcome-oriented guidelines for organizations, stimulates managers to experiment with compliance mechanisms with and eye to judicial sanction. In response to EEO legislation and case law, personnel managers devised and diffused employment practices that treat all classes of workers as ambitious and achievement oriented in the process of formalizing and rationalizing promotion decisions.
Highlights
Do the policies of America's notoriously "weak" federal state have any effect on organizational practices a t all? Until recently organizational theorists seemed to agree that they only affected management behavior at the margins
Internal labor markets have been explained with efficiency and control arguments; retrospective event-history data from 279 organizations suggest that federal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) law was the force behind the spread of formal promotion mechanisms after 1964
In response to EEO legislation and case law, personnel managers devised and diffused employment practices that treat all classes of workers as ambitious and achievement oriented in the process of formalizing and rationalizing promotion decisions
Summary
Equal opportunity law and the construction of internal labor markets. Equal Opportunity Law and the Construction of Internal Labor Markets Frank Dobbin; John R. Meyer; Richard Scott The American Journal of Sociology, Vol 99, No 2. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-9602%28199309%2999%3A2%3C396%3AEOLATC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9 The American Journal of Sociology is currently published by The University of Chicago Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/ucpress.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission
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