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 will appear in Du Bois Review in the spring.

Skrentny's future projects will for the short term focus on the comparative study of immigratin policy, particularly in east Asia, Europe and the US. Skrentny 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 policy. This involves a regional comparison between East Asia and Europe. 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 other 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.

With Dong-Hoon Seol, Skrentny is currently completing a paper on the implications of return migration of Korean Chinese to South Korea for conceptions of Korean nationhood. Another project with Seol seeks to explain the relative lack of immigrant settlement in Asia when compared to Europe.

Closer to home, Skrentny is working on a paper with his colleague Amy Binder 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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