Author: Tom Calvard

Publisher:

Published: 2019-10

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9781138633780

Decades of investigations into diversity in the workplace has created mixed answers about what kinds of effects it has on employees and teams, and whether or not it can be managed effectively to generate positive outcomes for organisations. It is known that workers in modern organisations vary according to demographic characteristics and many other individual differences, and that when they come together to work in groups and teams, various psychological processes can act to enhance or undermine how these differences shape performances in different contexts. However, trying to make exact predictions about which types of diversity will have particular effects under particular circumstances has, perhaps unsurprisingly, proved elusive. In contrast to much of this mainstream work from management and psychology, critical views on workplace diversity have emerged that arguably better acknowledge and emphasise the messy social and political realities of workplace diversity as they operate in context. Critical Perspectives on Diversity and Organizations therefore seeks to review, integrate and build upon these emerging critical perspectives on workplace diversity to help give a fuller understanding of how employee differences affect workplace interactions, relationships, employment, inequality, culture, and society. Critical perspectives help to fill in and openly recognise many of the more far-reaching issues that pure management and psychology approaches can leave out - issues of power, inequality, politics, history, culture, and lived experiences. If organisations don't try to take these issues into account and critically reflect on them, then diversity management is likely to remain a relatively blunt instrument or worse, a hollow piece of rhetoric.