Discriminations : la France et les Etats-Unis

Pour ceux qui lisent l'anglais, voici le résumé d'un article un peu ancien (2004) sur lequel je viens de tomber qui compare l'application des textes sur la lutte contre la discrimination en France et aux Etats-Unis. Conclusion de son auteur : la décentralisation américaine et l'appel systématique à la justice a été plus efficace que la centralisation française… Sans doute à lire avec un stylo à la main (ce que je n'ai pas encore fait), mais l'hypothèse mérite qu'on s'y attarde un instant.


Do the Social Sciences Shape Anti-Discrimination Practice? The United States and France

FRANK DOBBIN
Harvard University - Department of Sociology - Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 829-864, Spring 2002 (published February 18, 2004)


Abstract:
Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, American employers have installed a host of different anti-discrimination mechanisms. They have built those mechanisms with an eye to changing ideas about discrimination found in the social sciences, at first forbidding explicit discrimination, then tackling structural forms of discrimination by changing personnel systems, and then tackling cognitive sources of discrimination with diversity training and networking programs. France also outlawed employment discrimination, in July of 1972, in legislation that took much the same form as the Civil Rights Act. But in France, employer practice has changed little over time. I argue that state structure has produced two very different outcomes in these two cases. In the American case, state fragmentation and porousness allowed the courts and regional governments to elaborate on the definition of discrimination, and generated an industry of human resources specialists who promoted new anti-discrimination measures based in social science. In the French case, state centralization and insulation discouraged those who would have built upon the foundation of the law of July 1, 1972, because the courts and local governments could not elaborate the definition of discrimination. In consequence, French employment practices were little affected by the law.