Critical Perspectives on Diversity in Organizations (Routledge Studies in Organizational Change & Development)

Decades of investigations into diversity in the workplace have 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 organizations. In contrast to mainstream work from management and psychology, critical views on workplace diversity have emerged that seek to grasp more fully the messy social and political realities of workplace diversity as they operate in context.

Critical Perspectives on Diversity in Organizations therefore seeks to review, integrate and build upon 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 recognize 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 organizations do not 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.

This book will be of interest to international graduate students and researchers working on topics associated with equality, diversity and inclusion in organizations, as well as various organizational practitioners and activists engaged with these issues.

Thomas Calvard is Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management in the Organization Studies Group at the University of Edinburgh Business School, UK.