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."