Frank Dobbin

Professor of Sociology and
Director of Graduate Studies

Biographical Note

NEW BOOK!

"Inventing Equal Opportunity is the most important work of organizational sociology of the last quarter century. Challenging many of our basic assumptions about social movements and organizational change, this book is a must-read for sociologists concerned with inequality and those attempting to influence corporate responsibility activities in corporations."--David A. Thomas, coauthor of Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America

More endorsements for Inventing Equal Opportunity.

FRANK DOBBIN joined the Harvard sociology department in February of 2003, after spending fifteen years in the sociology department at Princeton. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1980 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1987.

Professor Dobbin studies organizations, economic behavior, and public policy. His Inventing Equal Opportunity shows how American employers defined what it meant to discriminate, through an historical survey of what employers were doing to practice “equal opportunity” and later “diversity management.”

In his most recent work, with Alexandra Kalev, Dobbin has been developing an evidence-based approach to diversity management. Time describes some of the key findings about the efficacy of programs that make managers part of the solution, such as mentoring programs and diversity taskforces, and the failure of programs that label them as part of the problem, such as diversity training and diversity performance evaluations for managers. Those findings are summarized in an article in Contexts. The Washington Post reported on their findings about why diversity training programs often fail. Time describes some of the key findings, which are also summarized in Contexts

Dobbin’s work in economic sociology more generally is both historical and contemporary. His book, Forging Industrial Policy: United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age (winner of the American Sociological Association's 1996 Max Weber Award), traces nations' modern industrial strategies to early differences in their political systems. In 2004 he published two edited volumes. The New Economic Sociology: A Reader contains old and new classics in economic sociology, and begins with a synthetic overview of the field. The Sociology of the Economy, Russell Sage Foundation Press, compiles new research in economic sociology from leading scholars. In The Global Diffusion of Markets and Democracy (coedited with Beth Simmons and Geoffrey Garrett), Dobbin and colleagues explore the conditions that favored the rise of neoliberal policies in the post-war period.

On-line Curriculum Vitae

10/30/2009

Curriculum Vitae

Courses Offered This Academic Year

Soc 205 ( fall 2009 )	Sociological Research Design	Catalog #8972
Sociology 308 ( year )	Workshop on Economic Sociology	Catalog #0086

A Sampling of Courses Offered in Other Years

Soc 25	Intro to Sociology of Organizations
Sociology 224	Organizational Analysis
Sociology 243	Economic Sociology
Sociology 306r	Colloquium in Sociology
Freshman Seminar 46w	Affirmative Action at Work
Sociology 310	Sociological Research Design