Shiao shows how two local foundation offices produce different diversity policies and funding profiles in Cleveland and San Francisco three decades after the Civil Rights movement.

"Diversity" has become a mantra in corporate boardrooms, higher education, and government hiring and contracting. In "Identifying Talent, Institutionalizing Diversity," Jiannbin Lee Shiao explains the leading role that large philanthropies have played in establishing diversity as a goal throughout American society in the post-civil rights era. By creating and institutionalizing diversity policies, these private organizations have quietly transformed the practice of affirmative action. Shiao describes how, from the 1960s through the 1990s, philanthropies responded to immigration, the...