What is it about?
The article applies classical concepts of organizational structure and extends them to contemporary challenges of diversity to explore why unequal opportunity structures persist in an organization despite its commitment to diversity and employing highly skilled ethnic minority employees.
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Why is it important?
This study offers a dynamic view of organizational structure based on how it is experienced, navigated, and reshaped by employees of different ethnicities. Linking micro-interactions to structural triggers and outcomes points to situated caveats about inequalities ingrained in the organizational structural set-up. Tapping into employees’ sentiments and interactions furthermore gives the possibility to mobilize collective change in favor of equal opportunities.
Perspectives
This article tap into the historical debate on whether bureaucratic, formal organizations or flat, organic and team based organizations enable or contrain equal opportunities for a diverse group of employees. Combining organizational theory on structure and form with critical diversity research this article put together an interesting theoretical fremwork to try and grasp some of the problems comtemporary diverse workplaces struggle with.
Lotte Holck
Copenhagen Business School
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Unequal by structure: Exploring the structural embeddedness of organizational diversity, Organization, July 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1350508417721337.
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