Inequality And Organizational Practice

Bringing together international authors, this edited collection addresses the need for greater inclusivity within organizational policy and practice, in order to tackle both visible and invisible inequalities amongst employees. Evidence suggests that more positive employment relationships can be brought about by tackling diversity issues, yet there are still ‘grey areas’ existing in the current legislative framework. Volume I explores the way that these hidden inequalities can be used to identify an individual as ‘other,’ and how this ultimately affects their wellbeing and welfare at work. Analysing social justice and stigma, as well as nuanced issues within the workplace, this book is a thought-provoking read for scholars of HRM, practitioners and policy-makers.

Bringing together international authors, this edited collection addresses the need for greater inclusivity within organizational policy and practice, in order to tackle both visible and invisible inequalities amongst employees. Volume II reflects the shift in thinking around organizations’ responsibility to recognize and value diversity and equality, and examines the wider implications for employment relations and working conditions. Providing strategic insight into diversity management, the authors aim to advance our understanding of informal discrimination in the workplace, offering practical suggestions for better leadership and allocation of resources. A useful guide for practitioners, policy-makers and scholars of HRM and organization, this book presents solutions to inequality issues in the workplace, with the goal to building stronger employment relations.

Organizations are the dominant social invention for generating resources and distributing them. Relational Inequalities develops a general sociological and organizational analysis of inequality, exploring the processes that generate inequalities in access to respect, resources, and rewards. Framing their analysis through a relational account of social and economic life, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Dustin Avent-Holt explain how resources are generated and distributed both within and between organizations. They show that inequalities are produced through generic processes that occur in all social relationships: categorization and their resulting status hierarchies, organizational resource pooling, exploitation, social closure, and claims-making. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt focus on the workplace as the primary organization for generating inequality and provide a series of global goals to advance both a comparative organizational research model and to challenge troubling inequalities.

At a time when some corporate women leaders are advocating for their aspiring sisters to ‘lean in’ for a bigger piece of the existing pie, this book puts the spotlight on the deep structures of organizational culture that hold gender inequality in place. Gender at Work: Theory and Practice for 21st Century Organizations makes a compelling case that transforming the unspoken, informal institutional norms that perpetuate gender inequality in organizations is key to achieving gender equitable outcomes for all. The book is based on the authors’ interviews with 30 leaders who broke new ground on gender equality in organizations, international case studies crafted from consultations and organizational evaluations, and lessons from nearly fifteen years of experience of Gender at Work, a learning collaborative of 30 gender equality experts. From the Dalit women’s groups in India who fought structural discrimination in the largest ‘right to work’ program in the world, to the intrepid activists who challenged the powerful members of the UN Security Council to define mass rape as a tactic of war, the trajectories and analysis in this book will inspire readers to understand and chip away at the deep structures of gender discrimination in organizational policies, practices and outcomes. Designed for practitioners, policy makers, donors, students and researchers looking at gender, development and organizational change, this book offers readers a widely tested tool of analysis – the Gender at Work Analytical Framework – to assess the often invisible structures of gender bias in organizations and to map desired strategies and change processes.

Employees expect organizations to offer an equitable distribution of rewards in promotion, compensation, and job challenge to those who work hard. According to Sonia Ospina, the realities of the workplace confound that expectation, since organizational practices oflabelling and ranking individuals create inequality. For this reason, Ospina suggests that an appreciation of how employees experience and resolve the contradiction between expectation and reality is prerequisite to understanding work attitudes in contemporary organizations. Illusions of Opportunity documents the pervasiveness of this contradiction by focusing on three groups of workers within a large public organization in a major city. Exploring individual and collective attempts to make sense of reward distribution, Ospina found that each group endorsed a different definition of merit. The definitions represented an attempt on the part of each group to justify the claims of its own members to being organizational citizen who deserved recognition. Drawing on the research traditions of organizational stratification, the social psychology of justice, and organizational behavior, Ospina operates within a conceptual framework that links objective opportunity structures to employees' subjective perceptions of justice. Through this merger of the structural and the subjective, she provides new insights into the social basis of work attitudes.

The book presents a critical framework for assessing whether organisational practice and function reinforces unseen potential differences amongst individuals in the workplace. It offers a comprehensive understanding and awareness of managerial and organisational practices that perpetuate social exclusion and discrimination towards individuals in the workplace. The book draws together themes of non-declared medical or physical conditions, voluntary and involuntary disclosure of difference, dietary requirements, lifestyle, organisational engagement and cognitive bias. As a result, the book provides a unique blend of scholarly and professional research, and brings those who have been affected by social stigmas and discrimination in the workplace to the fore. Hidden Inequalities in the Workplace also offers practical and strategic insights for practitioners, students and policy-makers, and delves the strategic nature of policy intervention and thought-provoking dialogue

The Academy of Management is proud to announce the inaugural volume of The Academy of Management Annals. This exciting new series follows one guiding principle: The advancement of knowledge is possible only by conducting a thorough examination of what is known and unknown in a given field. Such assessments can be accomplished through comprehensive, critical reviews of the literature--crafted by informed scholars who determine when a line of inquiry has gone astray, and how to steer the research back onto the proper path. The Academy of Management Annals provide just such essential reviews. Written by leading management scholars, the reviews are invaluable for ensuring the timeliness of advanced courses, for designing new investigative approaches, and for identifying faulty methodological or conceptual assumptions. The Annals strive each year to synthesize a vast array of primary research, recognizing past principal contributions while illuminating potential future avenues of inquiry. Volume 1 of the Annals explores a wide spectrum of research: corporate control; nonstandard employment; critical management; physical work environments; public administration team learning; emotions in organizations; leadership and health care; creativity at work; business and the environment; and bias in performance appraisals. Ultimately, academic scholars in management and allied fields (e.g., sociology of organizations and organizational psychology) will see The Academy of Management Annals as a valuable resource to turn to for comprehensive, up-to-date information--published in a single volume every year by the preeminent association for management research.