Frank Dobbin

Frank Dobbin, associate professor of sociology at Princeton University, will write a history of employer anti-discrimination practices that describes how corporate managers and lawyers continually redefined discrimination in response to the changing legal climate of the past four decades. Dobbin will study how the development of special recruitment and training programs, formal evaluation and promotion systems, grievance mechanisms, "culture audits," and diversity workshops affected the representation of women and minorities in the workforce. His research will survey the effectiveness of these practices, and examine the consequences of their being widely abandoned in the 1980s, just as the demand for low-skill workers was declining. (Fall 1998)