Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2008

Keywords

employment discrimination, racial discrimination, preferential inclusion, exclusion, affirmative action, assimilation, unconscious discrimination

Subject Category

Civil Rights and Discrimination | Labor and Employment Law | Law

Abstract

What forms of discrimination are likely to be salient in the coming decade? This review flags a cluster of problems that roughly fall under the rubric of inclusive exclusions or discrimination by inclusion. Much contemporary discrimination theory and empirical work is concerned not simply with mapping the forces that keep people out of the labor market but also with identifying the forces that push them into hierarchical structures within workplaces and labor markets. Underwriting this effort is the notion that, although determining what happens before and during the moment in which a prospective employee is excluded from an employment opportunity remains crucial to antidiscrimination theory and practice, significant employment discrimination problems can occur after a person is hired and becomes an employee. These problems transcend racial and sexual harassment. They include a range of subtle institutional practices and interpersonal dynamics that create systemic advantages for some employees and disadvantages for others. We predict that the next generation of race discrimination scholarship will engage these “after inclusion” workplace difficulties theoretically, empirically, and doctrinally.

Comments

authors' manuscript available freely online through Duke subscription but only for "personal use" at http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.lawsocsci.4.110707.172323