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The purpose of this paper is to explore the experiences of a significant group of retail employees, specifically the African‐American operations and service workers that worked behind the scenes in department stores during the Jim Crow era, defined here as 1890‐1965.

Department stores have rightly occupied a prominent place in business historiography. This wealth of scholarship can be explained partly by substantial archival resources, but especially by department stores' significance to US business, cultural, and social history. Yet, despite this rich historiography, a significant number of department store employees have been overlooked, and this omission has distorted the picture of the work culture and marketing strategies of these massive and influential retail institutions. Department stores employ a large number of operations and service staff, such as delivery people, housekeeping and maintenance workers, elevator operators, stock workers, packers, and warehouse workers. These positions make up roughly one‐fifth of all department store work. This paper presents a close study of the two most prominent department stores of early and mid‐twentieth century Richmond, Virginia – Thalhimers and Miller & Rhoads – to offer insight into the work culture and workplace experiences of these employees.

Ultimately, this paper shows that African‐American employees played an important role in the maintenance and image of Richmond department stores. Store managers place high demands for “loyalty” and “faithfulness” on their black staff to demonstrate their lavish services to the buying public. For black employees, this means that the work environment can be highly stressful, as they seek to meet competing demands from customers and co‐workers. However, department store work offers opportunities, in particular, steady employment among a close network of African‐American coworkers. Finally, the presence of segregated black employees undermines managements' attempts to convey their workforce as one “happy family.”

The research is entirely based on two high‐end department stores, Miller & Rhoads and Thalhimers, both based in Richmond, Virginia. Two store archives – available at the Valentine Richmond History Center and the Virginia Historical Society – are the primary resources for this project. Because, the papers in these archives are donated by store managers, a limitation to this study is the dearth of unmediated voices of the employees themselves.

This research adds to the historiography of department stores by shedding light on employees who are expected by employers to remain nearly invisible in their jobs, and unfortunately, have been fairly invisible in the historical record as well.

Racially traumatic events – such as police violence and brutality toward Blacks – affect individuals in and outside of work. Black employees may “call in Black” to avoid interacting with coworkers in organizations that lack resources and perceived identity and psychological safety. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The paper integrates event system theory (EST), resourcing, and psychological safety frameworks to understand how external, racially traumatic events impact Black employees and organizations. As racially traumatic events are linked to experienced racial identity threat, the authors discuss the importance of both the availability and creation of resources to help employees to maintain effective workplace functioning, despite such difficult circumstances.

Organizational and social-identity resourcing may cultivate social, material, and cognitive resources for black employees to cope with threats to their racial identity after racially traumatic events occur. The integration of organizational and social-identity resourcing may foster identity and psychologically safe workplaces where black employees may feel valued and reduce feelings of racial identity threats.

Implications for both employees’ social-identity resourcing practice and organizational resource readiness and response options are discussed.

The authors present a novel perspective for managing diversity and inclusion through EST. Further, the authors identify the interaction of individual agency and organizational resources to support Black employees.

Modern prejudice was examined as a potential predictor of overestimating proportions of minority employees in gender-typed occupations. Strength of conjunction error was considered as an indicator of distorted perceptions of these proportions. Furthermore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the association between modern prejudice and strength of conjunction error was weaker for gender-untypical than for gender-typical targets.

Modern prejudice was considered as a predictor of overestimations of black female employees in Study 1 (n=183) and black female older employees in Study 2 (n=409). Data were collected using internet-mediated questionnaires.

In Study 1, modern racism, but not modern sexism, was associated with greater strength of conjunction error when respondents were presented with gender-typical targets. In Study 2, using a sample scoring higher on modern prejudice than in Study 1, modern racism, but not modern sexism and modern ageism, was associated with greater strength of conjunction error, irrespective of target occupation. Furthermore, there was an unexpected association between lower sexism and greater strength of conjunction error for gender-typical targets, but not for gender-untypical targets.

The findings lend support to the ethnic-prominence hypothesis in that modern racism, but not modern sexism or modern ageism, was associated with greater strength of conjunction error. Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that target non-prototypicality can dilute the effect of modern prejudice on strength of conjunction error.

This is one of the rare studies examining attitudes and conjunction error in a work-relevant context, thereby bridging the gap between social cognition and applied psychology.

United States government statistics have shown that although women and minorities have made impressive gains in employment during 1980s, they continue to be underrepresented in positions of power and responsibility, especially at the senior management and executive positions. This trend has also been observed in the Information Systems (IS) field (Wilson, 1990). It has been reported that women and blacks encounter a glass ceiling that prevents them from reaching the top levels of IS positions (Johnson, 1990; Morrison and Glinow, 1990). A number of potential causes of this glass ceiling effect have been suggested:

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of employee race on the validity of commonly used selection procedures over three time periods after hire.

Data on employee race, cognitive ability, psychomotor ability, and previous work experience, as well as objective measures of performance, were collected from 932 sewing machine operators in the USA. Performance data were collected over three time periods (nine months total) after hire.

Race moderated the validity of cognitive ability in predicting performance for all three time periods. Race did not significantly moderate the validity of psychomotor ability or previous work experience in predicting performance.

This research is limited by the fact that only non‐complex jobs, and only women, were included in the study. Future research should attempt to replicate these results with a wider variety of jobs, as well as with the inclusion of men in their samples.

To ensure fairness, managers should examine effects of employee race on selection procedure validity when feasible.

Employers have a moral as well as a legal obligation to ensure the fairness of their employee selection procedures. They should ensure that all of their selection procedures are free from differential validity based upon race, as well as other demographic variables (gender, age, disability, etc.).

This is the first study to examine effects of race on selection procedure validity over an extended period of time.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the complex and shifting relationship between the Anglo American Corporation (Anglo) and the South African State (“the State”) as reflected in Anglo’s annual reports.

This paper builds on research on the role of annual reports in ideological conflict. To examine the ongoing relationship between Anglo and the State, the authors read all the annual reports published by Anglo American from 1917 to 1975, looking for instances in which the corporation appeared to be attempting to address, criticise, compliment, or implore the State.

During the period under study, despite the apparent struggles between the South African State and Anglo American, the relationship between the two was primarily symbiotic. The symbolic confrontation engaged in by these two behemoths perpetuated the real, physical violence perpetrated on the oppressed workers. By appearing to be a liberal opponent of apartheid, Anglo was able to ensure continued investment in South Africa.

The examination of decades’ worth of annual reports provides an example of how these supposedly neutral instruments were used to contest and sustain power. Thereby, Anglo could continue to exploit workers, reap enormous profits, and maintain a fiction of opposition to the oppressive State. The State also benefited from its support of Anglo, which provided a plurality of tax revenue and economic expansion during the period.

This paper provides insights into the ways the State and other institutions sustain each other in the pursuit of economic and political power in the face of visible and widely condemned injustices. Although they frequently contested each other’s primacy, both benefited while black South African miners suffered.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an assessment of employment equity, Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) and associated human resource management policies in South Africa. Polices and practices, and progress in representation of formerly disadvantaged groups are evaluated.

The paper comprises a general review using descriptive primary and secondary data and qualitative organizational factors.

The pace of representation and diversity at organisational levels is incremental rather than transformational. Conclusions for policy makers and organizational leaders are drawn, taking into consideration socio‐historical, political and demographic context of this jurisdiction.

The paper's findings and conclusions are pertinent for public and organizational policy and practice.

Black people, as members of a historically underrepresented and marginalized racial identity group in the workplace, are often confronted with identity references – face-to-face encounters in which their race is referenced by a White colleague in a comment, question or joke. Identity references can be interpreted by a Black colleague in a variety of ways (e.g. as hostile and insulting or well-intentioned, even flattering). Identity references can derail the building of relationships across difference, but under certain conditions may open the door for deeper understanding and connection. The conceptual framework in this article delineates conditions under which an identity reference may elicit an initial negative reaction, yet, when engaged directly, may lead to generative experiences and promote higher connection and learning in relationships across difference.

This article builds theory on identity references by incorporating relevant research on race, identity, diversity, attribution and interpersonal relationships at work.

The framework identifies a common precursor to identity references and three factors that are likely to influence the attribution a Black person makes for a White colleague's identity reference. It then describes how, based on that attribution, a Black person is likely to respond to the White referencer, and how that response is likely to affect their interpersonal relationship over time.

By explicating how a single identity reference can have significant implications for relationships across difference, the framework deepens understanding of how race affects the development of interpersonal relationships between Black and White colleagues at work. In doing so, this article advances research on race, diversity, workplace relationships and positive organizational scholarship.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze organizational diversity with a focus on the concept of socially sustained practices, grounding the analyses in a practice-based approach.

Based on data from ethnographic research, the author seeks to explain how the body and embodied marks that indicate an unequal distribution of power in society interfere with access to knowledge and in the organization of work.

Data analyses suggest that embodied prejudices affect the division of labor and access to knowledge in organizational settings, contributing to perpetuating cultural and historical structures of domination that spark conscious attempts to manage race and gender diversity.

Little research has investigated diversity from a practice-based standpoint. The originality of this paper is in its adoption of a phenomenological perspective to explain the experience of diversity as an ongoing bodily and embodied process.

The paper aims to examine the effect of employees' perceived physical attractiveness on the extent to which their voices are “listened to” by management.

Using an experimental research design, the paper estimates main effects of employee attractiveness and possible moderating effects of employee race and gender as well as the gender of their “managers.”

The results suggest that, with few exceptions, more physically attractive employees are significantly more likely to have their suggestions acted upon by managers than less attractive employees, pointing to a powerful form of workplace discrimination. This finding holds across races, with more attractive white, black, and Asian employees exerting a more impactful voice than their less attractive counterparts, although the moderation appears to be stronger for whites than ethnic minorities.

The results have important implications for the extant literatures on employee voice, diversity and discrimination.

This is among the first studies to demonstrate that less attractive employees suffer from an “employee voice deficit” vis-à-vis their more attractive counterparts.