The first compensation textbook written for California's distinctive legal and labor environment - fully updated through 2026. Most compensation textbooks treat pay as paperwork: a set of forms, formulas, and compliance boxes to check. Compensation: Rewarding and Retaining Talent - California Edition treats pay as a strategic system that decides who an organization can hire, who it can keep, and who it can develop into its next generation of leaders. Built around the DART model - Direction and Deployment, Assessment and Attraction, Rewarding and Retaining, and Teaching and Transforming of talent - this textbook brings California's most demanding pay laws, the contemporary coaching and continuous-performance-management literature, and current real-world cases into one coherent framework. What sets this textbook apart: California focus you won't find elsewhere. Detailed treatment of SB 1162 pay transparency, the California Equal Pay Act, AB 1066 agricultural overtime (fully implemented in 2025), Prop 22, pay-data reporting, and prevailing-wage rules. California Spotlight sidebars on CalPERS, the San Diego SDCERS pension crisis, the City of Bell scandal, and Long Beach's Olympic-Wage measures under Mayor Rex Richardson (CSUDH '20).
Current cases through 2026. What Followed sidebars trace Wells Fargo's decade-long reform arc (Federal Reserve asset cap lifted June 2025), Novartis's compensation-channel rewiring (ethics-scored variable pay, Sandoz spin-off), the VA wait-time scandal's mixed reform outcome, and the Purdue Pharma settlement (Harrington v. Purdue Pharma, U.S. Supreme Court, 2024).
Contemporary coaching thread. Doerr's OKRs and CFRs, Brown's Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, and Dare to Lead, Sinek's Start with Why and The Infinite Game, Duckworth's Grit, Buckingham and Clifton's strengths-based development, Clifton and Harter's It's the Manager, Bono and Froh's gratitude research, Guidara's Unreasonable Hospitality, and Lafley and Martin's Playing to Win - woven into the chapters where they matter most.
Author voice students remember. Seven From-the-Field sidebars from the author's career at Procter & Gamble (Beauty Care, 1992), US Bank (Minneapolis, late 1990s), Sun Microsystems (Silicon Valley HR salons), and Cal State Dominguez Hills - illustrating compensation principles in lived practice.
Built for the semester or quarter. Twelve chapters, each with learning objectives, key-terms glossary, discussion questions, applied California case, and APA-formatted references. Glossary of 200+ terms; alphabetical page-number index; Index by Chapter for rapid navigation. Who this book is for:
Undergraduate students in compensation, total rewards, or human resource management courses - accessible prose, contemporary examples, and a clear DART framework that organizes the material.
MBA students seeking a strategic-management lens on compensation - the front-matter "A Note on Sources" distinguishes peer-reviewed scholarship from practitioner literature, equipping students to evaluate claims rigorously.
Public-sector and HR practitioners in California's public agencies, school districts, healthcare systems, and tech-sector firms who need a working manager's reference on the state's compensation environment. About the Author: Thomas J. Norman, Ph.D., is Professor of Management at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He earned his A.B. at Harvard University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Human Resources and Industrial Relations at the University of Minnesota. Before academia, he held HR and management positions at Procter & Gamble, US Bank, and Sun Microsystems. Instructor resources available: Test bank (888 tagged items across 12 chapters), 12 chapter slide decks (ADA-accessible), film-clip guide, lecture transcripts, and sample syllabi. Contact the author directly.
