Employers have experimented with three broad approaches to promoting diversity. Some programs are designed to establish organizational responsibility for diversity, others to moderate managerial bias through training and feedback, and still others to reduce the social isolation of women and minority workers. These approaches find support in academic theories of how organizations achieve goals, how stereotyping shapes hiring and promotion, and how networks influence careers. This is the first systematic analysis of their efficacy. The analyses rely on federal data describing the workforces of 708 private sector establishments from 1971 to 2002, coupled with survey data on their employment practices. Efforts to moderate managerial bias through diversity training and diversity evaluations are least effective at increasing the share of white women, black women, and black men in management. Efforts to attack social isolation through mentoring and networking show modest effects. Efforts to establish responsibility for diversity lead to the broadest increases in managerial diversity. Moreover, organizations that establish responsibility see better effects from diversity training and evaluations, networking, and mentoring. Employers subject to federal affirmative action edicts, who typically assign responsibility for compliance to a manager, also see stronger effects from some programs. This work lays the foundation for an institutional theory of the remediation of workplace inequality.

Social scientists have sketched four distinct theories to explain a phenomenon that appears to have ramped up in recent years, the diffusion of policies across countries. Constructivists trace policy norms to expert epistemic communities and international organizations, who define economic progress and human rights. Coercion theorists point to powerful nation-states, and international financial institutions, that threaten sanctions or promise aid in return for fiscal conservatism, free trade, etc. Competition theorists argue that countries compete to attract investment and to sell exports by lowering the cost of doing business, reducing constraints on investment, or reducing tariff barriers in the hope of reciprocity. Learning theorists suggest that countries learn from their own experiences and, as well, from the policy experiments of their peers. We review the large body of research from sociologists and political scientists, as well as the growing body of work from economists and psychologists, pointing to the diverse mechanisms that are theorized and to promising avenues for distinguishing among causal mechanisms.

Political scientists, sociologists, and economists have all sought to analyze the spread of economic and political liberalism across countries in recent decades+ This article documents this diffusion of liberal policies and politics and proposes four distinct theories to explain how the prior choices of some countries and international actors affect the subsequent behavior of others: coercion, competition, learning, and emulation+ These theories are explored empirically in the symposium articles that follow+ The goal of the symposium is to bring quite different and often isolated schools of thought into contact and communication with one another, and to define common metrics by which we can judge the utility of the contending approaches to diffusion across different policy domains+The worldwide spread of economic and political liberalism was the defining feature of the late twentieth century+ Free-market-oriented economic reformsmacroeconomic stabilization, liberalization of foreign economic policies, privatization, and deregulation-took root in many parts of the world+ At more or less the same time, a "third wave" of democratization and liberal constitutionalism washed over much of the globe+ Most economists believe the gains to developing countries from the liberalization of economic policies to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars+ But they also acknowledge the instability and human insecurity sometimes left in liberalization's wake+ 1 Political scientists argue that the rise of democracy has contributed to the betterment of both human rights and international security+ 2 While the precise effects of these twin waves of liberalization are still debated, it is hard to deny that they have had a tremendous impact on the For helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article, the authors wish to thank

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