Ever since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed employment discrimination; governments, colleges, and corporations have tried to understand what the law means. Employers have tried to integrate workforces, some with more enthusiasm than others. Change has been slower than those who passed the...

Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim sought to understand modernity by comparing precapitalist societies with capitalism. Marx explored the transition from feudalism to capitalism; Weber the capitalist impulse that arose with Protestantism; and Durkheim the rise of capitalism's division of...

The worldwide spread of economic and political liberalism was the defining feature of the late twentieth century. Free-market-oriented economic reforms -- macroeconomic stabilization, liberalization of foreign economic policies, privatization, and deregulation -- took root in many parts of the...

Agency theorists diagnosed the economic malaise of the 1970s as the result of executive obsession with corporate stability over profitability. Management swallowed many of the pills agency theorists prescribed to increase entrepreneurialism and risk-taking; stock options, diversification, debt...

In Adam Smith in Beijing, Giovanni Arrighi has given us a sequel to The Long Twentieth Century (Verso, 1994), which traces the center of the economic world from Italy to Holland to Britain to America. In that book he argued that the key to being a hegemon was to control finance and capital, not...

Émile Durkheim's Division of Labor has palpably influenced students of organizations, occupations, and stratification. Chapter 11, by Paul Hirsch, Peer Fiss, and Amanda Hoel-Green, documents that influence by exploring his contribution to our understanding of the global division of labor. In...

While some U.S. corporations have adopted a host of diversity management programs, many have done little or nothing. We explore the forces promoting six diversity programs in a national sample of 816 firms over 23 years. Institutional theory suggests that external pressure for innovation...

Scholars long treated industrial policies as temporary expedients that help developing economies to catch up with rivals. A growing body of research suggests that public-policy interventions targeting particular industries play important but very different roles across developed economies....