Racial Integration in Corporate America, 1940-1990

Erscheinungsjahr 2009
ISBN: 978-0-521-51509-2
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 646 g

In the space of about thirty years - from 1964 to 1994 - American corporations abandoned racially exclusionary employment policies and embraced some form of affirmative action to diversify their workforces. It was an extraordinary transformation, which most historians attribute to civil rights activists, federal legislation, and labor unions. This is the first book to examine the role of corporations in that transformation. Whereas others emphasize corporate obstruction, this book argues that there were corporate executives and managers who promoted fair employment and equal employment opportunity long before the federal government required it, and who thereby helped prepare the corporate world for racial integration. The book examines the pioneering corporations that experimented with integration in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as corporate responses to the civil rights movement and urban crisis in the 1960s and 1970s and the widespread adoption of affirmative action in the 1980s and 1990s.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Delton, Jennifer

Fachgebiete

• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Betriebswirtschaft Organisationstheorie, Organisationssoziologie, Organisationspsychologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Soziologie von Migranten und Minderheiten
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Minderheiten, Interkulturelle & Multikulturelle Fragen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction; Part I. Color-Blind Groundwork, 1940-61: 1. The African American struggle for jobs; 2. Fair employment is good business; 3. Racial liberalism and the mid-twentieth century executive; 4. Human relations in management; 5. Human relations at International Harvester and Pitney-Bowes; Part II. Color-Conscious Ascendancy, 1961-1990: 6. How compliance became voluntarism; 7. The National Association of Manufacturers helps out; 8. Changing hiring criteria; 9. The Du Pont company's affirmative action efforts; Epilogue: from affirmative action to diversity.

Über Autor(innen)

Delton, Jennifer
Jennifer Delton received her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and is currently Associate Professor of History at Skidmore College. She is the author of Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (2002) and several articles on race, politics, and labor. She is a regular contributor to Salmagundi Magazine.