This book has the potential to change CEO mindsets, human resource practices, manager behavior, and employee well-being--if only enough people grab it and heed its powerful messages. --Rosabeth Moss Kanter, author of Think Outside the Building

Dobbin and Kalev have spent their careers studying why diversity initiatives fail and what it takes to fix them. Their data-driven book doesn't just spotlight the problems--it's packed with solutions. --Adam Grant

Essential reading for anyone who wants to learn which practices can actually improve managerial diversity in organizations.--Edward Chang, Science

Too many companies don't know how to walk the walk of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Getting to Diversity shows them how.--Lori George Billingsley, former Global Chief DEI Officer, Coca-Cola Company

This is the book all leaders need to read to achieve results.--Adia Wingfield, author of Flatlining

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?

Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev draw on more than thirty years of data from eight hundred companies as well as in-depth interviews with managers to show just how little companies gain from standard practice: sending managers to diversity training to reveal their biases, then following up with hiring and promotion rules, and sanctions, to shape their behavior. Almost nothing changes. It's time, Dobbin and Kalev argue, to focus on changing the management systems that make it hard for women and people of color to succeed. They demonstrate how the best firms are pioneering new recruitment, mentoring, and skill training systems, and implementing strategies for mixing segregated work groups to increase diversity. And they argue that as firms adopt new systems, the key to making them work is to make them accessible to all--not just the favored few.

Powerful, authoritative, and driven by a commitment to change, Getting to Diversity is the book we need now to address constructively one of the most fraught challenges in American life.

Too many companies don't know how to walk the walk of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Getting to Diversity shows them how.
--Lori George Billingsley, former Global Chief DEI Officer, Coca-Cola Company

In an authoritative, data-driven account, two of the world's leading management experts challenge dominant approaches to increasing workplace diversity and provide a comprehensive account of what really works.

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 focus on changing systems rather than individuals, two of the world's leading experts on workplace diversity show us a better way in the first comprehensive, data-driven analysis of what succeeds and what fails. The surprising results will change how America works.

Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev draw on more than thirty years of data from eight hundred companies as well as in-depth interviews with managers. The research shows just how little companies gain from standard practice: sending managers to diversity training to reveal their biases, then following up with hiring and promotion rules, and sanctions, to shape their behavior. Almost nothing changes. It's time, Dobbin and Kalev argue, to focus on changing the management systems that make it hard for women and people of color to succeed. They show us how the best firms are pioneering new recruitment, mentoring, and skill training systems, and implementing strategies for mixing segregated work groups to increase diversity. They explain what a difference ambitious work-life programs make. And they argue that as firms adopt new systems, the key to making them work is to make them accessible to all--not just the favored few.

Powerful, authoritative, and driven by a commitment to change, Getting to Diversity is the book we need now to address constructively one of the most fraught challenges in American life.

The United States, France, and Britain use markedly different kinds of industrial policies to foster economic growth. To understand the origins of these different policies, this book examines the evolution of public policies governing one of the first modern industries, the railroads. The author challenges conventional thinking in economics, political science, and sociology by arguing that cultural meaning plays an important role in the development of purportedly rational policies designed to promote industrial growth. This book has implications for the study of rational institutions of all sorts, including science, management, and economics, as well as for the study of culture.

Economic sociology is a rapidly expanding field, applying sociology's core insight--that individuals behave according to scripts that are tied to social roles--to economic behavior. It places homo economicus (that tried-and-true fictive actor who is completely rational, acts only out of self-interest, and has perfect information) in context. In this way, it places a construct into a framework that more closely approximates the world in which we live. But, as an academic field, economic sociology has lost focus. The New Economic Sociology remedies this.

The book comprises twenty of the most representative and widely read articles in the field's history--its classics--and organizes them according to four themes at the heart of sociology: institutions, networks, power, and cognition. Dobbin's substantial and engagingly written introduction (including his rich comparison of Yanomamo chest-beaters and Wall Street bond-traders) sets a clear framework for what follows. Gathering force throughout is Dobbin's argument that economic practices emerge through distinctly social processes, in which social networks and power resources play roles in the social construction of certain behaviors as rational or optimal. Not only does Dobbin provide a consummate introduction to the field and its history to students approaching the subject for the first time, but he also establishes a schema for interpreting the field based on an understanding of what economic sociology aims to achieve.

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 employers hire, promote, and fire workers, and ultimately defining what discrimination is, and is not, in the American imagination.

Dobbin shows how Congress and the courts merely endorsed programs devised by corporate personnel. He traces how the first measures were adopted by military contractors worried that the Kennedy administration would cancel their contracts if they didn't take affirmative action to end discrimination. These measures built on existing personnel programs, many designed to prevent bias against unionists. Dobbin follows the changes in the law as personnel experts invented one wave after another of equal opportunity programs. He examines how corporate personnel formalized hiring and promotion practices in the 1970s to eradicate bias by managers; how in the 1980s they answered Ronald Reagan's threat to end affirmative action by recasting their efforts as diversity-management programs; and how the growing presence of women in the newly named human resources profession has contributed to a focus on sexual harassment and work/life issues.

Inventing Equal Opportunity reveals how the personnel profession devised--and ultimately transformed--our understanding of discrimination.

The United States, France, and Britain use markedly different kinds of industrial policies to foster economic growth. To understand the origins of these different policies, this book examines the evolution of public policies governing one of the first modern industries, the railroads. The author challenges conventional thinking in economics, political science, and sociology by arguing that cultural meaning plays an important role in the development of purportedly rational policies designed to promote industrial growth. This book has implications for the study of rational institutions of all sorts, including science, management, and economics, as well as for the study of culture.

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-world economic behavior. The contributors--all leading economic sociologists--show these social forces at work in a diverse range of international settings and historical circumstances. Examining why so many American banks followed industry leaders into foreign markets in the 1970s, only to pull back within a few years, Mark Mizruchi and Gerald Davis suggest that social emulation rather than rational calculation led banks to expand globally before there was any evidence that foreign offices paid off. William Schneper and Mauro Guill show that despite the international diffusion of the hostile takeover during the last twenty years, the practice became widespread only in countries with political institutions conducive to buying and selling entire companies. Thus during the 1990s, the United States and United Kingdom. saw hundreds of hostile takeover bids, while Germany had only a handful, and Japan just one. Deborah Davis explores resistance to the globalization of Western ideas about real-estate ownership--particularly in China where the government has had little success in instituting a market system in place of traditional, family-based real-estate inheritance. And Richard Scott examines the controversial rise of managed care in the American healthcare system, as the quest for market efficiency collided with the ideal of equity in access to health care. Together, these studies provide compelling evidence that economic behavior is not ruled by immutable laws, and is but one realm of social behavior, with its own conventions, roles, and social structures. The Sociology of the Economy demonstrates the vitality of empirical research in the field of economic sociology and the power of sociological models in explaining how markets operate.

Between 1970 and 2000, Stanford University enabled and supported a vigorous interdisciplinary community of organizations training, research, and theory building. Important breakthroughs occurred in theory development, and a couple of generations of doctoral and post-doctoral students received enhanced training and an extraordinary opportunity to build collegial networks. The model spread to other universities and work done at that time and place continues to exercise influence up to the present time. This volume both summarizes the contributions of the main paradigms that emerged at Stanford in those three decades, and describes the sociological conditions under which this remarkable, generative, environment came about. A series of chapters by some of the key contributors to these paradigms, who studied at Stanford between 1970 and 2000, are followed by brief comments on the conditions that fostered the development of these different paradigms, and on the development of the paradigms themselves.