The Role of Resources in the Success or Failure of Diverse Teams: Resource Scarcity Activates Negative Performance-Detracting Resource Dynamics in Social Category Diverse Teams

Increasing the social category diversity of work teams is top of mind for many organizations. However, such efforts may not always be sufficiently resourced, given the numerous resource demands facing organizations. In this paper, we offer a novel take on the relationship between social category diversity and team performance, seeking to understand the role resources may play in both altering and explaining the performance dynamics of diverse teams. Specifically, our resource framework explains how the effects of social category diversity on team performance can be explained by intrateam resource cognitions and behaviors and are dependent on team resource availability. We propose that in the face of scarcity in a focal resource (i.e., budget), diverse (but not homogenous) teams generalize this scarcity perception to fear that all resources (i.e., staff, time, etc.) are scarce, prompting performance-detracting power struggles over resources within the team. We find support for our model in three multimethod team-level studies, including two laboratory studies of interacting teams and a field study of work teams in research and development firms. Our resource framework provides a new lens to study the success or failure of diverse teams by illuminating a previously overlooked danger in diverse teams (negative resource cognitions (scarcity spillover bias) and behaviors (intrateam power struggles)), which offers enhanced explanatory power over prior explanations. This resource framework for the study of team diversity also yields insight into how to remove the roadblocks that may occur in diverse teams, highlighting the necessity of resource sufficiency for the success of diverse teams.

Managing gender diversity and board dynamics: The role of male chairpersons of large listed firms

To better understand the links between gender diversity and board dynamics, 45 male chairs of large Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) firms were interviewed to identify the impacts of the appointment of women on board functioning. Chairs held very positive perceptions about the influence of women board members, including improved dynamics around reflexivity, communication and debate which assisted chairs to promote a sense of shared group membership and cohesion. Every chair consciously worked to ensure that board member gender was not made a salient attribute or social category. Irrespective of gender, chairs encouraged board members to judge themselves as fulfilling specific components of the board skills matrix, while also identifying as a social category of highly qualified professionals rather than as unique individuals or factions categorised by gender difference or business track records. A preliminary social-psychological framework is proposed to guide future research and to promote improved boardroom practices. JEL classification: D23, D74, G41

Everything Seems So Illogical: Constructing Missingness Between Life and Death in Israel

This paper discusses the case of missing persons in Israel, to show how the category of “missingness” is constructed by the people who have been left behind, and how this may threaten the life-death dichotomy assumption. The field of missing persons in Israel is characterized not only by high uncertainty, but also by the absence of relevant cultural scripts. Based on a narrative ethnography of missingness in Israel, I claim that a new and subversive social category of “missingness” can be constructed following the absence of cultural scripts. The left-behinds fluctuate not only between different assumptions about the missing person’s fate; they also fluctuate between acceptance of the life-death dichotomy, thus yearning for a solution to a temporary in-between state, and blurring this dichotomy, and thus constructing “missingness” as a new stable and subversive ontological category. Under this category, new rites of passage are also negotiated and constructed.

Sociological Perspectives on Disability

This chapter outlines the roots of disability scholarship in sociology and how the sociology of disability subfield positions disability as an axis of inequality. The first part of the chapter argues that sociology is uniquely positioned to understand how disability as a social category is made through institutional structures, larger patterns of exclusion and inclusion, and emphasis on power and inequality. Yet it is often excluded in measurements and analyses in the discipline. The chapter then turns to the origins of disability scholarship in sociology, its influence on the interdisciplinary field of disability studies, and the emergent subfield of sociology of disability within the discipline. The remaining parts of the chapter survey how disability has been studied across subfields such as sociology of health and illness, sociology of body/embodiment, and feminist sociological scholarship. In discussing disability across these subfields, divergences between mainstream sociology and the sociology of disability are highlighted in an effort to map their departures and pinpoint why disability as a category or axis of inequality is persistently underresearched in sociology. The chapter concludes with thoughts about where new scholarship on disability might be going in sociology.

Evoking gender distinctiveness threat in cisgender women lowers their support for gender-inclusive bathroom policies

Some cisgender women oppose policies granting transgender women access to women-only bathrooms. We examined whether this opposition stems from perceiving that transgender women threaten the distinctiveness of the social category “women” (gender distinctiveness threat). Cisgender women ( N = 520) read about a state bill enabling transgender women to use women’s bathrooms. Participants further read that enacting the bill would mean their state officially believes that “transgender women are real women” or “transgender rights are human rights”; in the control condition, this information was omitted. Participants reported their support for the bill and level of gender distinctiveness threat. Cisgender women who read that the bill would imply their state believes transgender women are real women (vs. transgender rights are human rights) reported lower bill support, and this effect was mediated by distinctiveness threat. Perceived threat to the distinctiveness of womanhood may help explain cisgender women’s reluctance to include transgender women in women-only spaces.

Feminist approach to geriatric care: comprehensive geriatric assessment, diversity and intersectionality

Despite being a collection of holistic assessment tools, the comprehensive geriatric assessment primarily focuses on the social category of age during the assessment and disregards for example gender. This article critically reviews the standardized testing process of the comprehensive geriatric assessment in regard to diversity-sensitivity. I show that the focus on age as social category during the assessment process might potentially hinder positive outcomes for people with diverse backgrounds of older patients in relation to other social categories, such as race, gender or socio-economic background and their influence on the health of the patient as well as the assessment and its outcomes. I suggest that the feminist perspective of intersectionality with its multicategorical approach can enhance the diversity-sensitivity of the comprehensive geriatric assessment, and thus improve the treatment of older patients and their quality of life. By suggesting an intersectional-based approach, this article contributes to debates about justice and diversity in medical philosophy and advocates for the normative value of diversity in geriatric medicine.

Politicising digital labour through the politics of body

By analysing the recent emerging labour movement of Korean digital game workers, this article seeks to explore a relatively novel issue – the importance of a politics of body in digital labour. By employing Elaine Scarry’s concept of ‘language of agency’ and ‘analogical substantiation’, the article first investigates how digital game workers express their work experiences and their embodied pain by analysing the mechanism of ‘crunch’ practice. Second, by examining ‘karoshi (overwork to death)’ and a series of suicides of digital game workers in Korea, it seeks to explore the problem of death as the final form of bodily pain – focusing on how these death events led workers to develop new forms of politics and solidarity by organising labour unions. Finally, by analysing the newly established digital game worker unions’ opposition to the violation of worktime regulation as a ‘struggle for recognition’, this research illuminates how digital game workers not only acquire self-respect but also achieve social recognition for their bodies as working labour. By examining this labour union organisation practice in Korea, the study ultimately argues that recognising the politics of body in digital labour offers the possibility that an emerging social category of precariat can actually co-exist and connect with the existing social class of proletariat. JEL Codes: J50, J81, L86