Thread by @MattGrossmann

Corporate personnel experts led the adoption & expansion of affirmative action recruitment & evaluation, diversity training, work/life balance policies, & harassment grievance procedures, with law & movements following

Finished this great book suggestion:
amazon.com/Inventing-Equa…

Who codified Affirmative Action policies & procedures? Lockheed Martin
Companies with federal contracts were vaguely pushed to improve & they developed the recruiting, hiring, & supervisor assessment tools, diffusing them so they were accepted by law as key good faith efforts 2/n

The personnel profession found new uses for their union-era procedures as private unions declined, vastly increasing their workforce (& with more women). In turn, they became advocates & institutional homes for more equal opportunity programs & enlarging their focus to women 3/n

When Affirmative Action came under attack, personnel managers rebranded efforts & made business cases for diversity management, networking, & training; they responded to family leave legal threats with broad work/life balance programs & separate managers & task forces
4/n

Companies institutionalized sexual harassment procedures to get ahead of court rulings, using grievance procedures from union days; their procedures eventually shaped the law as they diffused widely & were accepted as defenses; they again broadened training & staff
5/n

They 1st drew on social science in scientific management & institutional design & then on the cognitive revolution in addressing biases & customs; but the actual programs & trainings they developed often had much less evidentiary support & did not solve discrimination
6/n

These corporate procedures helped to diffuse social science ideas in the minds of educated Americans, increasing support for diversity & belief in structural discrimination; but also may have provided grounds for backlash from some & disappointment in low efficacy from others
7/7