John D. Skrentny Professor of Sociology, University of California-San Diego

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John D. Skrentny
Professor of Sociology
University of California-San Diego
9500 Gilman Dr.
Department of Sociology 0533
La Jolla, CA 92093-0533

Phone: 858-534-0484
Fax:     858-534-4753
Email:  jskrentn@ucsd.edu

John Skrentny received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University and a BA in Sociology and Philosophy from Indiana University. His research focuses on public policy, law and inequality.

He has written two books and edited another on the historical development of laws and policies to protect the rights and opportunities of minorities in the US. These studies have included a wide variety of groups, including African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and white ethnics, as well as immigrants, the disabled, gays/lesbians and women of all races and ethnicities. This research has sought to bring a cultural approach to the fields of historical institutionalism and American political development. Starting with the premise that no policy is developed without the decisions of policy makers, Skrentny has focused his research on the worldviews and actions of policy-making elites, situating them in their historical, local and global contexts.

Specifically, Skrentny's books have included The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture and Justice in America (University of Chicago Press, 1996), a study of the development and politics of affirmative action in employment for African Americans. This book was featured in a author-meets-critics panel at the conference of the Social Science History Association, and was reviewed in a wide variety of academic journals, as well as The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Philadelphia Inquirer. More recent is The Minority Rights Revolution (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), which won the Distinguished Book Award from the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and was a finalist for the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award of the Organization of American Historians. The book was featured in author-meets-critics panels at meetings of the American Sociological Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, and the Western Political Science Association. This work was also widely reviewed in academic journals, as well as The Washington Post Book World, The Boston Globe, and The Nation. Skrentny's work has also appeared in a variety of leading academic journals.

Skrentny's current research is focusing more on contemporary policy politics and legal dilemmas, though retaining an interest in culture and inequality. Supported by a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, he is now writing a book to bring the civil rights story in the U.S. up to date. It will examine the meaning of race in the workplace and the relevance, or lack of relevance, of civil rights law in regulating equal opportunity in employment. This study will have important implications for current civil rights law, the meaning of race in America, immigration, multiculturalism and equal opportunity. Work from this project was published in 2004 in Connecticut Law Review and another piece appeared in Du Bois Review in the spring 2007 issue.

Skrentny has started a future project on the comparative study of immigration law and policy, particularly in east Asia, Europe and the US. The goal here is to understand and explain regional variations in immigration law, policies and patterns.

He recently published an article in International Migration Review with Stephanie Chan (UCSD Sociology doctoral candidate), Denis Kim (Sogang University, South Korea) and Jon Fox (University of Bristol, Sociology) on how states in Asia and Europe implicitly define their national boundaries through their ethnic return migration laws and policies. This project shows how states in different regions effectively define the nation across borders by using ethnic preferences in immigration policy, allowing co-ethnic foreigners opportunities for visas or citizenship that are denied to foreigners with no ethnic/ancestral ties to the receiving state. These kinds of policies can be found in both Asia and Europe, but are practiced differently and have very different rationales.

He extends this argument in an article with Dong-Hoon Seol, forthcoming in Ethnicities, on the implications of ethnic return migration for conceptions of nationhood. Focusing on the Korean case, the article shows the complex hierarchical structure of nations that is revealed when we examine how states and societies treat co-ethnic foreigners.

With the support of the Social Science Research Council, Skrentny has another article with Seol, forthcoming in International Migration Review, that explains why there are so many migrant workers and refugees who settle in Europe and relatively few in industrialized East Asia. The comparison is especially interesting when we consider that Chinese migrants travel much farther to get to Europe, and to newer European countries of immigration with economies that are smaller than Japan or Korea. Consider this: there are more Chinese children in schools in Madrid than there are foreign children in school in all of South Korea.

Closer to home, Skrentny is working on a paper with his colleague Amy Binder and PhD candidate Meghan Duffy on social movement theory. The question here is whether these theoretical concepts can be used to understand the behavior and successes of entities that push for some political change but are not normally considered to be social movements. The focus is on an elite philanthropic organization that sought goals of urban reform.

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