HOW AFFIRMATIVE-ACTION BECAME DIVERSITY MANAGEMENT - EMPLOYER RESPONSE TO ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW, 1961 TO 1996

How did corporate affirmative action programs become diversity program s? During the 1970s, active federal enforcement of equal employment op portunity (EEO) and affirmative action (AA) law coupled with ambiguity about the terms of compliance, stimulated employers to hire antidiscr imination specialists to fashion EEO/AA programs. In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration curtailed enforcement, but as Philip Selznic k's band of early institutionalists might have predicted, EEO/AA progr am practices had developed an organizational constituency in EEO/AA sp ecialists and thus survived Reagan's enforcement cutbacks. As John Mey er's band of neoinstitutionalists might have predicted, that constitue ncy collectively retheorized antidiscrimination practices through prof essional returns in terms of efficiency, using the rhetoric of diversi ty management.