Charlotte Holgersson

Diversity Management and the Scandinavian Model: Illustrations from Denmark and Sweden

Abstract This chapter presents the principal interpretations that took place in Denmark and Sweden regarding the discourse on ‘Diversity Management’. We organise our presentation around three major themes that are central to the local Scandinavian context: gender equality, migration and moral grounds. This chapter shows the important role of gender equality work practices and how these practices now tend to be progressively incorporated in a broad Diversity Management construct, possibly leading to a less radical stance. Moreover, the comparison between Denmark and Sweden reveals the political associations with Diversity Management and migration in Denmark, but not in Sweden. Our third contribution unveils the tensions between the value of equality, which remains strong in the Scandinavian welfare state model, and the actual practices of Diversity Management.

Executive search as ethnosociality: A cross-cultural comparison

In this article, we explore how executive search consultants in Austria, Finland and Sweden address ethnicity. Our findings suggest that while consultants working in these different sociocultural settings may attribute different meanings to ethnicity, they share a tendency to evade questions of ethnicity with regard to the search process. We specify three discursive practices that serve to eliminate questions of ethnicity from executive search: constructing whiteness as self-evident, constructing varieties of whiteness (articulating deficiency and lack for those not belonging to Us), and distancing responsibility for the current situation to clients and society. In view of these findings, we argue that executive search can be understood as an arena for ethnosociality that stops cultural diversity at the door of management suites and serves to undermine efforts to promote cross-cultural understanding in organizations. Our study indicates that sustaining whiteness as a privileged ethnicity takes multiple forms. While executive search consultants play an important role in these processes, it is suggested that they inherit a more fundamental problem in society and they have few opportunities to change the ethnic status quo at the top.

Interventions for Improving Working Environment in Home Care Work in Sweden – Preliminary Findings from the First Year: A Gender Perspective

Home care services are an important part of the Swedish social welfare system. Considering the size of the sector and the increasing future needs for home care, due to growing elderly populations, it is worrisome that problems in terms of injuries, sick leave and staff turnover appear common in this occupation. A problem for managing the situation is, however, that the current knowledgebase is fragmented and not much developed being characterized by a homogenous workforce in terms of gender, dominated by women. A common perception is that this work is low skilled and something that can be done part time in parallel with household work. To improve the working environment in home care work, we initiated a project in which one of the goals was to create a better overview of published results of interventions and examples from community practice. Accordingly, we undertook a systematic review of the scientific literature with the purpose to find and map practical examples of interventions. The preliminary result suggests that there is a considerable lack of knowledge and often lacking, or poor, analyses of the consequences of the unequal gender balance in home care work. Interventions could be grouped into four types of interventions: scheduling, education and training, organizational change and digitization. Interestingly, it seems as if single problems at the workplace level to a larger extent are covered in the scientific literature while problems on the system level are more seldom addressed.

Assessing the other: a study on recruiting practices of high skilled ethnic minorities

Research on recruitment of ethnic minorities is often focused on discrimination and hinders for entering organizations. In contrast to existing literature, this study investigates an inclusive orga...

Sweden: Work for Change and Political Threats

The issue of gender equality in working life, and in top decision-making positions in the private sector in particular, has been the subject of much debate in Sweden since the 1990s. Although women currently represent approximately half of the labor force, women are underrepresented on corporate boards. Despite comprehensive legislation concerning gender-discrimination, no legislated gender quotas have been implemented in order to rectify the gender imbalance on corporate boards. The Government has nevertheless “threatened” on a couple of occasions to implement legislated quotas. These threats have sparked resistance, mainly from representatives in the private sector. However, gender equality practices in organizations have increased awareness and knowledge among both employees and managers regarding gendered power relations. This is seen as an important issue that cannot be dismissed with arguments that there are no competent women for board positions. It has also contributed to a mobilization within the private sector in favor of both voluntary and legislated measures to increase the number of women on corporate boards. Moreover, work for change has played an important part in the increase of women’s representation on corporate boards, from 2 percent in 1993 to 23 percent in 2013.

Women as Power Resources : Putting Theory into Practice

The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to our knowledge of working for gender equality in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) organizations by describing the design and pe ...