Edeltraud Hanappi-Egger

The Triple M of Organizations: Man, Management and Myth

CHAPTER 1 Man and Management .- CHAPTER 2 Management and Myth.- CHAPTER 3. Myth and Man. - CHAPTER IV: Myth-building in management: intentional story telling? .- Concluding remarks.

Gender and diversity from a management perspective: Synonyms or complements?

Abstract Because of challenges in organizational environments such as the increasing heterogeneity of the work force new management concepts are being developed. There are many contributions such as gender mainstreaming, women promotion, diversity management, multi-cultural communication, inter-cultural teams and the like focusing on different social categories of people. Many of these concepts are used synonymously, even though there are important differences. Thus the paper will present and compare human resource management models focusing on gender and diversity and highlight the similarities, analogies and differences. Furthermore the role of intersectionality in terms of the mutual construction of social categories will be emphasized and practical implications discussed.

“Shall I stay or shall I go”?: On the role of diversity management for women's retention in SET professions

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss diversity management in the light of Bourdieus social theory. One question of particular interest is whether diversity management could – at least conceptually – lead to the retention of highly‐educated female engineers in their chosen professions in science, engineering and technology.Design/methodology/approach – An explorative empirical study was conducted. In total, 12 female computer scientists in Austria who voluntarily quit their jobs were interviewed with respect to motives, reasons and experiences in their rather male‐dominated organizations.Findings – The results show very clearly that diversity management could contribute to the retention of female engineers if changes in the “habitus” are realized.Research limitations/implications – Due to the small study sample, any conclusions are limited in their generality. However, the paper is a contribution to the discussion on how to attract and retain sustainably more women to the fields of science, e...

Gendered scripts: studying hidden assumptions in business contexts

Purpose – The papers aim is to make the a priori gender scripts visible in order to discuss their role in decision‐making processes in business contexts.Design/methodology/approach – In order to get access to hidden and unconscious gender scripts, an innovative qualitative method, called mind‐scripting, was applied. Mind‐scripting is a discursive method based on “memory work” and allows for analyzing and deconstructing implicit assumptions in social interactions.Findings – The selected results show on the one side that people are steadily using their hidden assumptions and scripts to make sense out of specific social situations. On the other side it could be shown that the application of sex‐based stereotypes does not depend on the sex of the person alone, but depends strongly on the gendered construction of the interaction. In the case of bargaining it could be shown that bargaining is (still) a rather masculine construction with respect to manly connoted scripts and schemata.Social implications – The p...

Diversitätsmanagement und CSR

Diversitatsmanagement ist ein inzwischen recht bekanntes Konzept geworden und wird auch von vielen deutschsprachigen Unternehmen zumindest punktuell umgesetzt. Des Weiteren werden Firmen fur ihr Engagement in Sachen Diversitat ausgezeichnet: Sei es, dass in Osterreich z.B. der DiverCity-Preis ausgelobt wird, sei es, dass in Deutschland zahlreiche Organisationen die Charta der Vielfalt unterschreiben, oder sei es, dass beispielsweise in der Schweiz sich Firmen um den „Top-Arbeitgeber“ Preis bemuhen. Das bedeutet, dass sich mehr und mehr Unternehmen zu Diversitatsmanagement bekennen und dies auch deutlich machen. Nichtsdestotrotz stellt sich die Frage, was denn nun unter Diversitatsmanagement zu verstehen ist und worin sich dieser Ansatz von anderen wie etwa CSR unterscheidet, insbesondere weil die Argumente fur (bzw. gegen) diese Konzepte oft sehr ahnlich erscheinen.

The development and implementation of a diversity management curriculum: Organizational change through exploration and exploitation

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide concepts and strategies to successfully introduce and implement curricular change; especially, related to incorporating diversity management into academic programs.Design/methodology/approach – Utilizing documents and accounts from two agents involved in the change process and an outside observer, an inductive‐deductive approach is applied employing concepts of exploration and exploitation from the organizational innovation literature in order to describe a 12‐month process and the resultant curriculum at a major European university.Findings – The paper demonstrates the importance of external conditions, organizational structures and their relationship to strategies that balance exploration and exploitation to graft a new academic concentration to existing academic programs.Practical implications – The paper offers concepts, strategies, and lessons to assist colleges and universities to assess the internal and external organizational environment and the av...

Backstage: The organizational gendered agenda in science, engineering and technology professions

Science, engineering and technology (SET) are still male-dominated fields, and thus all over Europe much effort is expended on activities which, it is hoped, will lead to a sustainable gender balance. Scholarly work has frequently focused on the topic of how to motivate women to enter SET fields or to choose a corresponding education. In contrast to this one-sided approach, recent scholarly contributions have begun to emphasize the vital role of gendered structures and indirect exclusion mechanisms of technological institutions and their professional self-understandings which discourage women from entering or staying in SET organizations. In particular, taken-for-granted knowledge as a mechanism for maintaining specific norms and values is considered a primary hindrance towards more inclusive and less oppressive organizational cultures. Since this taken-for-granted knowledge is often implicit, a primary goal of research can be said to make the invisible visible. Thus this article presents selected empirical results of a research project which makes use of an investigative tool called mind-scripting. Here the aim is to identify the main barriers, in terms of unquestioned taken-for granted knowledge, currently hindering an open and critical review of gendered structures and gender codes in the SET field, or in organizations in general, particularly with respect to professional norms.

Managing Gender and Diversity in Organizations

Organizations of the twenty-first century demand managers who are culturally and gender and diversity sensitive, internationally focused, and capable of dealing with complexity. This means taking a different view of organizations and adding words to our management vocabulary in order to have a future-oriented way of seeing our responsibilities within organizations (Rosado, 2006). Gender and diversity management (GDM) is that paradigm which enables business to begin to effectively address the complexities of developing and sustaining a competitive and diverse workforce in a global economy. In this chapter we provide information and resources to assist managers in becoming highly competent and effective in engaging and managing a diverse workplace.

Gender- und Diversitätsmanagement: Qualifikationsbedürfnisse in der betriebswirtschaftlichen Universitätsausbildung

Obwohl gegenwartig viel uber ein neues Verstandnis von Geschlechterrollen und -verhaltnissen diskutiert wird, ist es bis dato nicht gelungen, die Geschlechtssegmentierungen in sozialen Bereichen, Ausbildung und Erwerbstatigkeit zu uberbrucken und Diversitatsfaktoren entsprechend zu berucksichtigen. Vielmehr sind nach wie vor traditionelle Rollenbilder, Zuschreibungen und Ausgrenzungsmechanismen vorzufinden. Dies ist nicht nur aus gesellschaftspolitischer Sicht alarmierend, sondern auch hinsichtlich okonomischer und betriebswirtschaftlicher Zusammenhange, Strukturen und Prozesse, wodurch geschlechtsspezifische Forschung und Diversitatsforschung auch fur die betreffenden „scientific communities“ zunehmend an Bedeutung gewinnt. Nicht zuletzt durch die Vorgaben der EU zur Umsetzung des Gendermainstreaming wachst auch international der Bedarf an der Erarbeitung wissenschaftlich fundierter Konzepte und Methoden im Bereich der „Gender- und Diversitatsstudien“. Zwar sind Masnahmen zum Gendermainstreaming bisher nur im offentlichen Bereich bindend zu implementieren, angesichts der absehbaren demographischen Entwicklungen und rechtlichen Veranderungen (Ausbau der Antidiskriminierungsgesetzgebung) treten mehr und mehr auch Non-/Profit-Organisationen in diese Entwicklung ein, denn sie bewegen sich in neuen Spannungsfeldern: Zum einen ist es eben bis dato noch nicht gelungen, geschlechtsspezifische Segmentierungen im Arbeitsmarkt und in Organisationen aufzuweichen und die damit verbundenen Nachteile zu beseitigen.

Bringing participatory design to practical application: the interrelation between LCD projection, facilitation, and participatory design

Typically, technical support for groups is discussed in terms of Group Decision Support Systems and Group Support Systems. Nevertheless, the diffusion of these technically sophisticated systems is rather low. This paper fertilizes a simpler technology for participatory design purposes namely LCD-projectors. LCD-projectors are used to project the content of a monitor on the wall to make it visible to all participants. A severe number of concrete projects – in which this technology was used on a professional basis – allow for an empirically profound presentation of the benefits of LCD-projection. As it is shown, LCD brings substantial advantages in terms of cost, time, structuring, and participation. Practical issues of application are discussed in detail.