Minority-Owned Suppliers A Growing Global Supply Base

The increased focus on globalization, corporate social responsibility, sustainability, supplier diversity and other socially responsible initiatives have made minority-owned businesses an important supply base for buyers. Moreover, this emphasis has established a need for buyers to develop long-term effective relationships with minority owned firms. Businesses seeking to increase their global supplier diversity need to understand the global challenges of defining “minority” and other critical relational issues in order to increase effectiveness. Based on a review of the literature, and interviews with a minority supplier director this chapter discusses these challenges and offers practical implications.

Diversity Management

Despite twenty-five years of debates and researches on how to devise efficient, effective and equitable ways to manage people's diversities in organizations, professionals and academics have produced neither a shared definition of diversity management nor a general accepted assessment on the outcomes that diversity management can deliver for organizations and persons. Very often the concept of diversity management remains unexpressed and unexplained leaving people unsure on its meaning. The aim of this chapter is to expand the understanding of diversity management by systematizing it on the basis of McGregor's new human relations framework. The proposed definition implies to bring equality of opportunities, equity and inclusion in the workplace and allows to revise three causes of criticism ascribed to diversity management, namely, the lack of theoretical foundation, the vagueness of the concept, the reduced anti-discrimination force compared to equal employment opportunities.

Which Matters More?

This chapter reviews what we know about the effects of surface-level diversity (age, sex, and ethnicity) and deep-level diversity (personality characteristics such as conscientiousness, openness to experience, extraversion, emotional stability, and agreeableness) in organizational teams. It also outlines challenges to today's diversity management and Human Resource (HR) practices, such as the lack of definite conclusions from research results, the mismatch between team diversity research designs and organizations' needs, and the lack of research examining simultaneously different aspects of diversity. Drawing from analysis results of team data from 55 teams of volunteers from Shanghai, the author recommends that HR training and selection take specific team contexts into account and increase attention on functions that support important team processes such as communication and mutual support among team members.

Higher Education and Current E-Learning Potential in the MENA Region

Project management theory provides an organized, cost-effective approach to providing an accessible e-learning environment. Such a collaborative project has the opportunity to bring together such professionals as instructional designers, disability services staff, and institutional researchers. Accessibility as an afterthought is a costly approach, and disabled students are a large enough minority to seek equality of opportunity. E-learning accessibility empowers the individual by providing educational content in formats that not only encourage collaboration and learning, but also reduce frustration and develop a sense of inclusiveness. A project manager who understands the importance of e-learning accessibility will be able to grow the project from the ground up in a manner that empowers the disabled, while benefiting all learners. In the MENA region, urban and rural, poor and rich, all contribute to the possibilities of being able to access education and technological factors inhibit or allow access to online or e-learning.

New Trends in Leveraging Workforce Diversity through Human Resource Management Initiatives

Tremendous forces are radically reshaping the world of work and workforce diversity is steadily growing. If effective diversity management can only be achieved by means of the use of appropriate human resources strategies, HRM need to change his role. This chapter intends to explore such new trends and new practices on HRM, analyze which of them can be employed and which are more appropriate for an optimal management of workforce diversity and to obtain a competitive advantage for companies in the global economy.

Geography of Female Suicide

Suicide is a complex structure and also affects the families whose members commit suicide, health care professionals and society. Suicide is accepted as a form of death of external causes. It can be predicted and majority of suicides can be prevented. Suicide shows a big amount of differences depending on time, region, age level, gender and race. In order to understand and prevent suicide, several geographical, medical, psychosocial, cultural and socioeconomic factors have been studied. A tiny disorder in one of these factors may cause a significant change that results in severe outcomes. In preventing suicide, it is important to determine the subgroups that have high risk. Strategies to prevent suicide can be developed through searching and understanding the suicide geography. In this study, the spatial pattern of female suicide is examined with suicide maps. With suicide maps, it is aimed to clarify the spatial alteration of the deaths caused by female suicide, to help in focusing on female suicide, to increase the awareness of the specific regions and groups that have a high risk and to guide those who are dealing with decreasing the death ratios, public health experts and decision makers. In Turkey, according to the suicide rate averages of ten years (2002-2011), mostly the young age groups are at risk among women. The ratio of suicides caused by family incompatibility, educational failure and emotional relationship and not forced marriage is higher in females than in males. Turkey is a northern hemisphere country and features subtropical climate types, where females mostly commit suicide in summer and spring seasons. It is observed that there is no peak period in female suicide in Turkey. When the distribution of suicide based death ratios are examined, it is seen that the highest ratios are in the eastern and western parts of Turkey. It is seen that suicide occurs in the provinces with low socioeconomic status as well as the provinces with high socioeconomic status and in provinces with both a large population and a small population. And also it is determined that for those provinces, detailed studies should immediately be started. It is seen that the ratio of female suicide is getting higher and approaching to the ratio of male suicide from western parts to eastern parts of Turkey. Between these years, 75% of the suicides were committed by means of violent methods and 25% of them were committed by means of nonviolent methods. The provinces where the ratio of using violent suicide methods is higher than the standard deviation are located in the eastern part of the country. It is noteworthy that the ratio of female suicide victims who are single is close to the ratio of those who are married. The suicide ratio of married women is decreasing from west to east.

Social Work with Refugee Women

In this chapter on resettlement social work with women refugees, they are portrayed as resilient yet reluctant users of social work services. While the field of social work with refugees has already been widely introduced and discussed, less attention has been paid to resettlement work with women refugees. In order to contextualise this discussion, key terms are briefly defined, and relevant legislation together with demographic features are covered. The chapter includes a case study, presented by one of the authors, herself an expert by experience. We present open source as well as current research published in academic journals relating to this field of practice. Research methods and ethical issues including practice dilemmas associated with the concept of empowerment are discussed. Practical applications and cultural concerns derived from the research suggest how practitioners and refugee women may work together using participatory methods to draw on the strengths and experience of the refugee women to achieve goals which are consistent with those set out by the United Nations High Commission.

Is Gender Equality a Reality after a Change in the Political Agenda?

After a decade of meaningful advances in legal framework, education and political agendas, gender equality should be a reality in Spain. However, something is not working in the Spanish industry, compared to other European countries. In this chapter we analyse some organizational dynamics that allows understand why the situation of inequality of women managers for gender reasons persists in spite of the positive discrimination measures recommended by the legislative framework. A new translation between the political and the economical language is necessary in order to get a change of behaviour in the industry. This analysis has allowed a proposal of a bunch of measures that allow organisations to exploit all their managerial talent, independently of whether this talent is owned by men or women.

Workforce Diversity in Volunteerism and the Peace Corps

This chapter will discuss the subject of workforce diversity as it directly relates to volunteerism, using the Peace Corps as an example. The aim of the chapter is to illustrate how nonprofit institutions can draw upon the value of workforce diversity in order to obtain competitive advantages. The Peace Corps' three-fold mission includes helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women, helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the people served and helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans (Peace Corps, 2011a). This chapter will specifically discuss how the Peace Corps incorporate diversity in their volunteer program. “The agency has always reflected the diversity of America and is actively recruiting the next generation of Peace Corps Volunteers” (Peace Corps, 2011b). In addition, it will make a case for diversity in nonprofits and will provide guidance on how to build diversity.

Learning Organizations

Learning organizations are environments promoting individual and team learning capabilities. A growing number of organizations throughout the world are embracing these concepts as strategies for competing in dynamic economic environments. Globally, leaders across varying industries continue to strive to build learning organizations to improve effectiveness, and continuously evolve. Learning organizations depend on effective communication; a chief component of leadership influence. They also require thinking from as many perspectives as possible, in order to change and grow in response to anticipated and existing external pressures. These perspectives emerge from the variety of experiences coming from diverse individuals, and leaders must recognize these as critical resources in organizations' ability to learn, manage change and facilitate innovation. The present analysis explores learning organization variables, arguing that diversity and leadership communication are important co-factors in successfully implementing learning organization principles leading to innovation.