Vague legal mandates let personnel professionals build compliance structures that substitute for results

Evidence

Since the laws and executive orders creating affirmative action did not detail concrete compliance mechanisms, managers have constructed a wide variety of practices and structures. “Personnel professionals, in particular, saw opportunities in these new areas of law and promoted responses that would expand their power and numbers” (Dobbin, 1996). The elaborate array of rules, offices, grievance procedures, plans, tests, and other mechanisms has come to have a life of its own; “over time, these structures, more than any particular substantive result, tend to be equated with compliance” (Edelman, 1996). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1984

Categorization

• XREF: Performativity of institutional compliance — echoes the chapter’s ‘symbolic over substantive’ theme and connects to Edelman’s institutional theory of organizations, broadly resonant with DiMaggio/Powell institutional isomorphism.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘structures equated with compliance’ dynamic parallels how ritual sacrifice functions as symbolic stabilization — form substituting for substance.