Social innovation in managing diversity: COVID-19 as a catalyst for change

PurposeCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic had an adverse impact on workforce diversity internationally. While in the Global North, many countries have sophisticated laws and organizational mechanisms and discourses to deal with such adverse impacts on workforce diversity, such structures of diversity management are either ceremonial or poorly developed in the Global South. The global pandemic disproportionately impacted Global North and Global South increases the existing gap due to vaccine rollout inequality and divergence in recoveries. The authors explore social innovation as a possible option for responding to the challenges induced by the COVID-19 pandemic.Design/methodology/approachThe study draws on interviews in 26 distinctive organizations operating in various industries in Turkey. The authors have adopted a qualitative design to explore how social innovation helps to respond to diversity concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic.FindingsThe authors demonstrate that social innovation presents a viable option for a country with a poorly regulated context of diversity management. Social innovation could help overcome the challenge of the absence of supportive legislation, discourses and practices of diversity in poorly regulated contexts.Originality/valueThe field study revealed several distinct forms of social innovation for diversity management, which emerged as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors demonstrate that in the absence of supportive diversity management structures and frameworks, social innovation in diversity management at the organizational level could provide a viable response to the emergent needs in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Persistence of Racial Constructs in Spain: Bringing Race and Colorblindness into the Debate on Interculturalism

In this article, I argue that persisting racial constructs in Spain affect conceptions of national belonging and continue to shape and permeate contemporary discriminations. I begin by describing several recent political events that demonstrate the urgent need for a discussion about “race” and racialization in the country. Second, some conceptual foundations are provided concerning constructs of race and the corollary processes of racism and racialization. Third, I present data from various public surveys and also from ethnographic research conducted in Spain on mixedness and multiraciality to demonstrate that social constructs of race remain a significant boundary driving stigmatization and discrimination in Spain, where skin color and other perceived physical traits continue to be important markers for social interaction, perceived social belonging, and differential social treatment. Finally, I bring race into the debate on managing diversity, arguing that a post-racial approach—that is, race-neutral discourse and the adoption of colorblind public policies, both of which are characteristic of the interculturalist perspectives currently preferred by Spain as well as elsewhere in Europe—fails to confront the enduring effects of colonialism and the ongoing realities of structural racism. I conclude by emphasizing the importance of bringing race into national and regional policy discussions on how best to approach issues of diversity, equality, anti-discrimination, and social cohesion.

Managing Diversity Through Leadership and Emotional Intelligence in the Banking Sector of Pakistan: A Moderating Role of Organizational Culture

The moderation effect of organizational culture has also been examined. The quantitative approach has been used in data collection, and 182 sample responses have been gathered from the banking industry employees of Pakistan. The data has been analyzed by employing PLS-SEM. The results have shown that transformational and transactional leadership positively and insignificant affect workplace diversity. However, emotional intelligence has a positive and significant effect on workplace diversity. Besides, organizational culture has a positive and significant moderation effect between transactional leadership and workplace diversity. The organizational culture has a negative but insignificant moderation effect between transformational leadership and workplace diversity. The organizational culture has a negative but insignificant moderation effect between emotional intelligence and diversity. Managers are recommended to ensure transparency when identifying roles and expectations of the task amongst employees. Secondly, establish reward systems upon effective outcomes. Thirdly, state the punishments with utmost clarity.

Paradigm Shift in the Concept of Workforce Diversity: A Key to increase the Organizational Efficiency

Workplace diversity refers to the commonalities and contrasts among individuals at work in terms of class, nationality, age, ethnic heritage, academic background, physical capabilities and impairments, gender, interpersonal, and psychological variables. As a result, organizations must create an environment that is compatible with the diversification of their workforce in order to improve their efficiency in this globalised era. The goal of managing workforce diversity is to build and keep a favorable work environment where each employee's contributions are recognized. This reseаrсh рарer сritiсаlly аnаlyses wоrkfоrсe diversity аnd its раrаdigm shift оver time in the соntext оf аn оrgаnizаtiоn. Furthermore, this planned research intends to investigate of workplace diversity and its impact on an organization's efficiency. This study's research will be solely collected from secondary sources. The reseаrch study's findings will be beneficial to the organization since they provide some guidelines and recommendations that can be utilized to develop effective раrаdigms for managing diversity in the workplace. The proposed research study concludes with the belief that appropriate handling of workplace diversity may lead to more committed, pleased, and high-performing employees, as well as make the organization a more efficient workplace.

MANAGING DIVERSITY IN ORGANISATIONS TO GAIN COMPETITIVENESS

Organizations the world over is increasingly finding themselves coping with the changes taking place in their environment. There are two sets of forces that are changing the once familiar organizational landscape increasing reliance on teams and the changing workforce. This is bringing more and more people from diverse backgrounds into contact with one another. In general, diversity refers to the ways that people in organizations differ. That sounds simple, but defining it more specifically is a challenge because people in organizations differ in many ways-races, gender, ethnic group, age, personality, cognitive style, tenure, organizational function, and more. Managing diversity means establishing a heterogeneous workforce to perform to its potential in an equitable work environment where no member or group of members has an advantage or a disadvantage. Effectively managing diversity helps organizations to identify and capitalize on opportunities to improve products and services, attract, retain, motivate and utilize talented people effectively improve the quality of decision-making at all organizational levels and reap the many benefits from being perceived as a socially conscious and progressive organization. The paper attempts to analyze the mechanism of leveraging and unleash the powerful benefit of a diverse workforce in work organization.

What Keeps a Vibrant Population Together?

Managing diversity is a challenging problem for organizations and governments. Diversity in a population may be of two kinds—acquired and innate. The former refers to diversity acquired by pre-existing social or organizational environments, attracting employees or immigrants because of their wealth and opportunities. Innate diversity, on the other hand, refers to a collection of pre-existing communities having to interact with one another and to build an overarching social or organizational identity. While acquired diversity has a prior element of common identity, innate diversity needs to build a common identity from a number of disparate regional or local identities. Diversity in any large population may have different extents of acquired and innate elements. In this paper, innate and acquired diversity are modeled in terms of two factors, namely: insularity and homophily, respectively. Insularity is the tendency of agents to act cooperatively only with others from the same community, which is often the primary challenge of innate diversity; while homophily is the tendency of agents to prefer members from their own community to start new social or business connections, which is often the primary challenge in acquired diversity. The emergence of network structure is studied when insularity and homophily are varied. In order to promote cooperation in a diverse population, the role played by a subset of agents called “global” agents who are not affected by homophily and insularity considerations is also studied. Simulation results show several interesting emergent properties. While the global agents are shown to acquire high betweenness, they are by no means the wealthiest or the most powerful in the network. However, the presence of global agents is important for the regional agents whose own wealth prospects increase because of their interaction with global agents.

Antecedents and Consequents of Multiculturalism and Social Diversity among Law Enforcement Workplace in Metro Manila

This study describes the antecedents and consequents of multiculturalism and social diversity, and the perceptions of law enforcement personnel towards the consequents of multiculturalism and social diversity in the law enforcement workplace. This quantitative descriptive research determined the perceptions of 100 law enforcement personnel from the purposively selected law enforcement workplaces in Metro Manila. Data were analyzed using frequency and percentage distribution, mean and rank. The majority of the respondents recognized the utmost importance of multiculturalism and social diversity in a Law Enforcement workplace. Managing diversity in the law enforcement workplace means creating conditions that maximize the potential of its personnel to enhance organizational performance; and Multiculturalism promotes the integration of different cultures and the sharing of one's ideas and perspectives that lead to innovations have the highest mean scores of 3.75, respectively. On the other hand, Inclusive organizations can screen out highly prejudiced individuals and will find it easy to manage diverse employees with a mean score of 2.69. It can be gleaned that the majority of the respondents perceived that employing a culturally diverse law enforcement workforce has positive consequences to its people, workplace culture, and organizational climate. Therefore, law enforcement officers should support heterogeneous workplace advocacies, and that policymakers should reinvigorate the rigor of existing policies to sustain multicultural and social diversity in the entire organization.

How to Repurpose the University: A Resilience Lens on Sustainability Governance

Universities have an important role in moving society towards a more sustainable future. However, this will require us to repurpose universities, reorienting and refocusing the different university domains (education, research, campus, and outreach) towards sustainability. The governance structures and processes used to embed sustainability into the activities and operations of the institution are critical to achieving the required transformation. Our current university systems which are seen as contributing to socio-ecological system unsustainability are resilient to change due to slow variables such as organisational and sector-wide prevailing paradigms and culture. Therefore, to repurpose a university requires us to destabilise our prevailing system, crossing a threshold into a new stable system of a ‘sustainable university' across all its domains. This paper utilises an adaptation of Biggs et al. (2012) resilience principles for the governance of social-ecological systems to provide a framework to consider aspects of university governance for sustainability that can be utilised to repurpose universities towards sustainability, and destabilize unsustainable elements of the system. This paper draws out examples relating to sustainability governance within universities with regards to the four principles of (i) managing diversity and redundancy, (ii) managing connectivity, (iii) managing slow variables and feedbacks, and (iv) encouraging learning and experimentation within the context of complex adaptive systems. In this article, we have shown that using resilience in a non-normative way is possible (to decrease resilience of an unsustainable system), and that it can also be valuable to help understand how to shift organisational governance towards a particular end-state (in this case, university governance that advances sustainability). This paper provides an example of how to operationalise resilience principles of relevance to the resilience literature as well as providing a practical framework to guide higher education institution governance for sustainability.