Vol. 11 No. 7 (July 2001) pp. 360-362.

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT LAW by Mia L. Cahill. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2001. 125 pp. Cloth $79.95. ISBN: 0-7546-2120-0

Reviewed by Trish Oberweis, American Justice Institute, San Francisco.

Mia Cahill presents an empirical study of how several layers of culture-individual, organizational, and ational-interact with individual's interpretations of law, specifically sexual harassment law. Her purpose is to provide "a detailed empirical study of how law is understood through three levels of social context" (p. 88) and she focuses the study on an area of law where context is of particular import.

Cahill presents a concise and clear history of sexual harassment law. The first chapter is rich with details about the merican creation of laws prohibiting sexual harassment and their ensuing development in Austria. She includes a comparison of the claims process in each nation, including punishment ranges. Her faithfulness to the exact verbiage of the law and her discussion of the frequencies of various outcomes of sexual harassment cases serve to interrupt common assumptions about the magnitude of employer risks in sexual harassment cases. Cahill's presentation attempts to demystify the law without claiming to clear up its ambiguity.

The author presents interview data from the managers of five companies of the same industry, three in the U. S. and two in Austria. On the basis of these, she reveals three "templates" of management orientation to sexual harassment law: the Legitimacy Challenge template, the Bureaucratic Compliance Template and the Risk Management template. Each of these templates marks a distinct organizational style in complying with the law. In the first template, the response challenges the legitimacy of such laws for context in which the managers are operating; in the second, seldom-used rules influence managerial responses, and with the third, steps are taken by management to reduce the potential for negative consequences for the company, either financial or in terms of employee morale.

In the most methodologically interesting part of the study, Cahill moves beyond the managerial orientation to examine workers' interpretations of policy and law. The workers at these five companies were surveyed about their responses to three vignettes, each of which presented a situation that could qualify for sexual harassment violations of either law or policy (if the organization had one) depending on interpretation of the situation and the law or policy. For example, one vignette presents a male supervisor who asks a female subordinate details about her undergarments. Workers are asked to identify the behaviors as legal or not, and to indicate how strongly they support various responses from the female employee, ranging from little response to invoking the full power of law or policy. Workers are also asked about their general attitudes about sexual harassment laws to determine overall support for or disagreement with such laws. The rigor of her methods, particularly in this portion, lends itself to an interesting and less reductionist analysis of the interaction of several levels of culture-individual, organizational and national-that she sometimes calls "context."

Cahill's data reveal that individual values (p. 87), national values (p. 85), and perhaps most of all in this case, organizational values (p. 86) each play a role in workers' perceptions of how and whether certain behaviors violate national law or organizational policy.

The methodology is interesting in that it asks employees to define the actions in the vignettes along of continuum of acceptability and to project what their consequences should be, again along a continuum. The data were examined for correlations between cultures or contexts and interpretations of the law. The findings indeed show interactions between the various contexts--organizational, national and individual-and workers' characterizations of the behaviors in the vignettes and their interpretations of the consequences that should be attached to the behaviors.

Cahill found "that it was the perceptions of organizational rules, RATHER THAN EXTERNAL LAW, that were most important in explaining individual understandings of law" (p. 84, emphasis hers). Specifically, she suggests that, "Employers look to the organization to determine what is illegal under national law" (p. 86). At the same time, Cahill found that respondents whose company had a policy to address sexual harassment were LESS likely to identify behaviors in the vignettes as "illegal" (pp. 69-70). Implicit in these two findings is a notion that the lack of specification in the policies and law render behaviors ambiguous in terms of whether they violate law or policy. Moreover, when a policy is available, behaviors are defined as organizational problems rather than legal problems.

What is novel about the text is that methodical data collection across five companies in two nations provides data that may shed light in general on how law becomes interpreted through culture-and not a monolithic culture, but rather a layering of national, organizational, and social cultures. What the author also does is provide empirical evidence to support her assertion that "We should expect that the defining issues of old battles won in the passing of laws will again reappear when individuals give their own, contextual interpretations to the law" (p. 84). It is therefore an engaging text in sociolegal classrooms, bound to provoke thought and discussion about law, social change, and social control.

The material is well organized and the early discussion of the formation of national law is particularly helpful. Her thesis is clearly articulated and repeated at useful points in the text. However, some of the quantitative analysis could be more clearly fleshed out for an undergraduate audience. At times, the correlations she finds are slightly confusing and could be difficult for those without either some quantitative background or a thorough class discussion of the main points. Certainly a Master's level readership could consume this text, and with some teaching support and discussion, it could also be appropriate for undergraduates.

The one critique I can offer extends from this brevity in the text. Cahill has two interesting findings: one, that employees who work where there is a sexual harassment policy in place are less likely to identify behaviors as illegal; and two, that when employees do define actions as violating policy, they are also likely to define the behavior as a law violation as well. Reading these two findings together would have fleshed out a line of reasoning that appears in glimpses throughout the text, and would lend theoretical support to questions about whether and how company policies relate to relieving employees from harassment. Although she leads the reader to these questions by presenting these findings together in the book, she never explicitly takes the last step in fleshing out the argument.

I found the book to be quite accessible, well-organized and easy to consume. Moreover, her choice of sexual harassment law lent itself very well to this discussion of the influence of context as laws are interpreted and the broader issues of social change and social control. The book would be a great addition to sociolegal courses with or without a feminist orientation.

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