The strength of a weak state: The rights revolution and the rise of human resources management divisions

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, federal policy has revol utionized employment rights. Equal employment opportunity law, occupational safety and health legislation, and fringe benefits regulation were designe d to create employee rights to equal protection, to health and safety, and to the benefits employers promise. In event-history analyses of data from 2 79 organizations, this research finds that these legal changes stimulated o rganizations to create personnel, antidiscrimination, safety, and benefits departments to manage compliance. Yet as institutionalization proceeded, mi ddle managers came to disassociate these new offices from policy and to jus tify them in purely economic terms, as part of the new human resources mana gement paradigm. This pattern is typical in the United States, where the Co nstitution symbolizes government rule of industry as illegitimate. It may h elp to explain the long absence of a theory of the state in organizational analysis and to explain a conundrum noted by state theorists: the federal s tate is administratively weak but normatively strong.