Book Review: Work Performance and Satisfaction: A Matter of Dignity: Inquiries into the Humanization of Work

all social scientists, regardless of discipline. Two papers attempt to review past research on employment discrimination. The first, by Annette LaMond, briefly reviews economists' contributions. She summarizes the work of Gary Becker (although incorrectly stating that Becker's model predicts that employee discrimination leads to an integrated work force with premium pay for whites), as well as that of other neoclassical economists who have refined the Becker model and that of dual labor market theorists, along with other institutionalist extensions. Surprisingly, there is no mention of the role of the new "signaling" models in the economic theory of discrimination. In the second paper, Patricia Gurin reviews models of discrimination from the perspective of a psychologist, emphasizing the role of worker expectations in determining race and sex differentials in work outcomes. The papers by Judith Long Laws and Barbara Bergmann suggest new research questions appropriate to psychological and economic inquiry. Laws suggests that psychologists focus on: (1) the development of a work orientation for women over the female life cycle; (2) the effect of sex ratios within a work group on the group's dynamics; and (3) the attitudes of employers toward female workers. Bergmann criticizes past efforts by economists to determine how discrimination works, suggesting a move away from basic science and toward applications to particular situations. It is not clear, however, how economists can suggest methods to eliminate discrimination unless the complex sources of race and sex differentials are clearly understood. Although it is reasonable to argue that industrial engineers and personnel managers could provide useful insights, I am not convinced that all economists who seek to understand discrimination need switch to these occupations. The next four papers constitute the actual research reported in this volume. Included are a paper by Ray Marshall summarizing some of the findings from his "Negro Employment in the South" project; a paper by Charles Holt summarizing the Urban Institute's labor market microsimulation model; a reprint of Solomon Polacheck's paper on the effect of differential investment in human capital on wage differentials; and a paper by Glenn Loury developing a dynamic theory of racial income differences. The Marshall paper too briefly summarizes the results of his extensive study. The interested reader will require the fuller explanation from Marshall's book, The Employment of Blacks in the South. Similarly Holt's paper has taken on too large a task in too few pages. The model's structure is presented with no definition of variables or discussion of equations, and empirical results are presented but not interpreted. The model developed by Polacheck is similar to that used in his previous work. Ronald Oaxaca, who is the discussant for Polacheck's paper, does a particularly good job of pointing out several difficulties in his analysis. As Oaxaca argues, Polacheck accurately observes that women experience both less on-the-job training (flatter age-earnings profiles) and higher turnover rates than men, but he has not discerned the cause-and-effect relationship. The Loury paper, based on his dissertation, is an innovative analysis of the intergenerational transfer of economic opportunity. Arguing that the production of human capital is a social process, Loury models the interactions of home, community environment, and educational institution in converting innate capabilities into marketable characteristics. To the extent that community environment plays a significant role in human capital development and communities are stratified by race, Loury rigorously demonstrates that equivalent home and school environments will not produce equal opportunities to acquire skills for members of different racial groups. Therefore, even if the labor market were nondiscriminatory in the sense that individuals with the same characteristics have the same employment opportunities and rewards, racial disparities would persist. Loury's analysis is truly groundbreaking. He is the first to demonstrate rigorously how racial disparity could persist in a competitive economy. This work must be read by anyone interested in the economics of discrimination. As a final note, it is unfortunate that a volume reporting "new research" in 1974 took three yars to publish and that typographical errors are numerous and serious enough to confuse the reader. Janice Fanning Madden Assistant Professor Regional Science Department University of Pennsylvania