Joana Vassilopoulou

The role of regulatory and temporal context in the construction of diversity discourses: The case of the UK, France and Germany:

Despite growing interest in how the concept of diversity management is reinterpreted as it crosses national boundaries, there has been little study of this process in Europe. To bridge this knowledge gap, this article explores the construction of diversity discourses in the context of the UK, France and Germany. We use the discursive politics approach to investigate the ways in which the meaning of diversity is shrunk, bent and stretched. We demonstrate that the concept of diversity has no universal fixed meaning but is contextual, contested and temporal. Temporarily fixed definitions and frames of diversity are path-dependent and shaped by the regulatory context. Thus unique national histories and the context of regulation are key determinants of the ways in which the concept is redefined as it crosses national and regional borders.

Understanding career experiences of skilled minority ethnic workers in France and Germany

Human resource management literature pays little attention to the agency of skilled ethnic minorities in Europe in terms of explaining their career choices and outcomes. As a step towards addressing this gap, we draw on two field studies based on qualitative interviews. One of these studies draws on interviews with 49 participants in France, and the other is based on interviews with 30 participants in Germany. Through a Bourdieuan analysis, we contribute to the human resource management literature, and demonstrate the varied forms that the agency of highly skilled ethnic minorities takes, in terms of their work experiences, in the context of structures of inequality in both countries.

A Bourdieuan Relational Perspective for Entrepreneurship Research

In this paper, we illustrate the possibilities a relational perspective offers for overcoming the dominant dichotomies (e.g., qualitative versus quantitative, agency versus structure) that exist in the study of entrepreneurial phenomena. Relational perspective is an approach to research that allows the exploration of a phenomenon, such as entrepreneurship, as irreducibly interconnected sets of relationships. We demonstrate how ierre ourdieus concepts may be mobilized to offer an exemplary toolkit for a relational perspective in entrepreneurship research.

Global Diversity Management

Managing diversity is an imperative for organisations of all sectors and sizes. If managed effectively, workforce diversity promises to have positive social, economic and environmental consequences by removing barriers to contributions of individuals from diverse backgrounds; by transforming ways of thinking, structures and routines of work; and by regulating work and life in unprecedented ways. As the literature on diversity management is littered with narrow rationales, it may seem as if workforce diversity does not have intrinsic merit or wider purpose (social, economic and environment) than that. This chapter brings together a wider range of rationales than just organisational longevity and sustainability alone in pursuing diversity management. It explores the practice of global diversity management (GDM) through models of change and brings evidence together from field studies and organisational case studies. The chapter discusses the three main challenges that face GDM: individualism, deregulation and financialisation. In response to these challenges, the chapter introduces three innovative approaches as contemporary remedies: intersectional solidarity, global value chain and synchronicity, respectively. Intersectional solidarity can help organisations to overcome the individualist tendency that renders diversity management practices ineffectual. The global value chain approach can help organisations to have a more robust and meaningful accounting of diversity interventions across their value chain. Finally, the synchronicity approach challenges the domination of financial decisions on business case arguments, alerting practitioners to the wider possibilities of social, economic and environmental benefits in acausal forms of togetherness and coexistence.

A Multi-level Understanding of the Careers of Minority Ethnic Elites

The purpose of this chapter is to theorise the experience of minority ethnic elites in their host countries. We frame the notion of ‘minority ethnic elite’ as workers who possess high levels of education and who sometimes are able to gain access to elite forms of professional education and employment. We also demonstrate that the link between their skills and career success is not simply unidirectional as identified by human capital theorists. We adopt a multi-level perspective through which we frame experiences of minority ethnic elites in pursuit of their careers. We identify a gap in and contribute to the literature on careers, which to date, we argue, fails to capture the experiences of minority ethnic elites. In order to capture the experiences of minority ethnic elites, we ask two key questions: First, what are the coping strategies of migrant elites in their efforts to develop their careers? To address this question we draw on findings of a field study examining the career experience of migrant elites in France. Second, we ask how the abilities and skills of ethnic minority elites are undermined across various job criteria by the majority ethnic group?. The field study from Germany seeks to explain the experiences of minority ethnic elites in the context of organizational structures. These two studies are presented in this same order. We make a distinction between migrant and minority ethnic workers. As many minority ethnic workers themselves do not have migration experience. Nevertheless, they face similar and sometimes even stronger barriers to labour market entry. The first study uses the term migrant as the participants are drawn from groups who have personally experienced migration, with a focus on migrants from Lebanon to France. However, the second study focuses on minority ethnic workers who were born and educated in Germany. We use the term minority ethnic as an overarching concept to refer to individuals who are not from majority ethnic groups

Relational Methods in Organization Studies: A Critical Overview

Organizational studies research often falls into the trap of dealing with individuals, organizations, and the macro context in which they are placed independently. Relational perspectives seek to counteract this tendency in organization studies by proposing an approach to research which captures the complexity of organizational phenomena by exploring them as irreducibly interconnected sets of relationships. In this chapter, we do not only examine the essentials of ontology and epistemology of relational methods but also provide examples from field studies which are underpinned by relational thinking.