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The objective of this chapter is to outline an integrating picture of the situation, representativeness, contradictions, and challenges that the treatment of diversity assumes in Brazilian society and in its organizations. The aim is to reply to the research question: “How are public policies and organizational practices constructing ways of inserting and valuing the diversity of Brazilians?” We provide a brief background of the changes in the global and Brazilian contexts over the last few decades and analyze the demographic data presented in the 2010 Census and in studies on diversity that were published in the main periodicals in the Administration area in Brazil, between 2000 and 2014 with regard to the segments most widely studied in the academic literature: Afro-descendants, homosexuals, the elderly, Indians, women, and people with a disability. The conclusion reached is that, in a short period of time, Brazil has made great strides in constructing the mechanisms and legal devices for recognizing the rights of its diverse population and that private companies are in the initial stages of introducing diversity programs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Brazilian organizations have handled diversity.

This study draws upon the historical analysis by focusing essentially on secondary sources of data, surface-level indicators, namely, race, gender and age. Accordingly, the major sources of information used in this study are the rankings of the Great Place to Work® Institute Brazil (between 2005 and 2013) and from the Brazilian Ministry of Labor and Employment’s reports (between 2009 and 2013).

The evidence gathered from the Great Place to Work® Institute Brazil’s lists and the Brazilian Ministry of Labor and Employment’s reports produced mixed results regarding the moral imperative derived from the acculturation of a broad diversity mindset.

This study is not free from limitations. Both sources used in this inquiry do not depict other relevant data that could provide more accurate results.

Overall, the findings of this study suggest that training programs and sound work values revision are necessary steps to reduce discrimination, stereotypes, gender bias and to promote diversity and inclusion inside Brazilian organizations.

It contributes to the understanding of the current diversity scenario in Brazilian organizations by drawing on a historical analysis method. It relied on two germane secondary sources of data.

The objective of this study was to analyze the major challenges and benefits of diversity management in Brazilian companies by assessing the role of human resources.

A total of 15 case studies were carried out on companies that operate in Brazil. Brazil is a country with considerable diversity and multiracial backgrounds.

It was found that diversity management in Brazilian companies is still an emerging issue, and the major challenges are related to discriminatory actions taken by coworkers. Among the 15 companies studied, only four had adopted a consistent set of diversity management and human resources practices. These four companies were the only companies to affirm that diversity management requires the strong support of top management and continuous organization to sustain efforts toward incorporating diversity.

Research studies on diversity management in Brazil are scarce. The findings of this study, however, can be useful to academic professionals and company directors in countries that exhibit similar characteristics to those of Brazil, or to those who are interested in learning more about Brazil.

The purpose of this paper is to present the evolution of Brazilian food patterns, based on the 2002-2003 and 2008-2009 Brazilian Household Budget Surveys (POFs), and to evaluate similarities in food acquisition among the Brazilian states, in search for the main drivers of the changes.

Using the data gathered from the 17 food groups within the POFs and multidimensional scaling, the Brazilian states were divided into groups and analysed according to their similarities in terms of annual per capita household food acquisition.

The study’s results point to five groups with similarities in terms of food acquisition among the Brazilian states. Additionally, the issues that reflect Brazil’s diversity were discussed, highlighting possible factors that caused the movement of some states between groups during the analysis period. The heterogeneity observed in food acquisition in Brazil emphasises Brazilian agribusiness development and underscores the influence of the food supply chains on the regional food patterns.

This research presents the geographic changes in the Brazilian agribusiness, and how these changes are reflected in the population food patterns and in the heterogeneity in food acquisition among the Brazilian states. Concerning this work, supply chains of agri-industrial products focussed on the domestic market can be analysed in depth, offering guidelines for future research in logistics and agri-industrial economy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine gender issues in Brazil from the perceptions, experiences, and discourses of professional women in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

The study is based on 26 in-depth interviews with female professionals. The methodology consists of an exploratory approach through content analysis.

Despite the fact that Brazil demonstrates an idealized national ethos that promotes equality, gender roles are still very traditional. Participants recognized gender issues at work, including covert discrimination, though most did not acknowledge experiencing them personally.

There is dissonance between global trends and the actual experience of female professionals in Brazil. Although participants rejected the idea of personally experiencing inequality, they acknowledge its existence in human resources (HR) practices. This leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy where gender inequality is perpetuated and organizations and HR departments do not seem to have a proactive role as change agents.

The purpose of this paper is to report empirical research conducted in Saudi Arabia on the impacts of organizational policies and practices on the diversity management of the Saudi private sector. To this end, the Saudization policy and views of key respondents have been tested and discussed.

Primary data were collected through questionnaire surveys from the largest 11 private sector organizations listed on the Saudi Stock Market in the financial/banking, oil and gas, petrochemical, private higher education and private health service sectors. Statistical tools such as means and standard deviations and one-sample t-tests were used for analysis.

The findings suggest that Saudization, retention, pay with benefits and health insurance policies significantly affect the diversity management in the Saudi private sector. Therefore, there is a need to develop organizational policies that support the existence of foreign employees for private businesses in Saudi Arabia. Considering differences as strengths that can be utilized to enhance performance, a diverse workforce might better be able to serve diverse markets.

Collecting data from a closed environment such as Saudi Arabia is constrained by access difficulties, as well as inadequate literature on relevant diversity issues. However, the convenience sampling method and snowballing approach adopted in this study generated reliable data. As a result, this study has implications for both the multinational corporations operating in Saudi Arabia and Saudi owned companies operating in the West and intending to adopt and implement diversity management initiatives for branches in different countries. As such, further research on the gulf countries’ diversity management issues would be critical.

The current study is a first survey-based research endeavor on the topic of diversity management in the Saudi context. The findings contribute to the limited knowledge base on middle eastern countries, thus presenting new empirical evidence on the organizational policies and practices of Saudization, retention, pay and benefits and health insurance policies. The study of the Saudi case, thus adds value to the existing knowledge on diversity management.

The purpose of this paper is to identify whether there is some common pattern between organizations that give primacy either to younger workforce or to older one.

It depicts the empirical evidence of eight case studies and some theoretical contributions thereof. All case units are considered outstanding employers in Brazil business scenario, given the magnitude of their human resource (HR) feats and society acknowledgements. Taken together, they are eight representative cases derived from Época magazine and Great Place to Work® Institute 2013 list.

Case units exhibited strongest group age preferences on an ongoing basis. Rather, they depicted an unbalanced labor force demographic age frame for the sake of their own HR choices. As a result, they all could be labeled as age bias companies in a more or less degree. Given that their options (i.e. percentage of preferences) have been somewhat consistent during the period of analysis, one may therefore infer that such options have been buttressed by the leadership held values. Surprisingly, all case units had not provided logical arguments or wise explanations in light of their decisions related to it. Moreover, the companies had not offered compelling evidence that they were implementing robust diversity and inclusion polices aiming to provide an equalitarian treatment to all age groups or that they were at least paying attention to these issues in a coherent form. In fact, they have been astonishingly silent on these matters.

The purposeful sample strategy that was carried out in this study does not permit that the results be generalized. Actually, they are derived from only a specific cohort of companies – to some extent, they are outliers in the list of the best organizations to work for in Brazil – that has been noticeable for their extreme workforce age options.

The case units sample showed to have huge difficulties to mitigate organizational age bias effects in their headcount. In fact, the majority of the case units that were perused demonstrated to give a consistent priority for either having either younger workforce or older one.

Overall, it is expected that this study may contribute to diversity management theory by bringing further knowledge about how some of the best organizations to work for in Brazil implement their workforce demographic age policies.

Despite the extremely diversified cultural context in which Brazilian enterprises operate, the issue of cultural diversity is new in their agenda. The emergence of this theme is much more related to the need of creating competitive advantages by developing diversified competences, usually following policies which are established by the headquarters of local subsidiaries, than attending to legal procedures, as happens in the USA and Canada. Departing from a conceptual elaboration about cultural diversity and its management, this paper presents the results achieved in a research among leading Brazilian firms. The points that emerge as conclusions can be generalized for other countries.

This paper aims to analyze the influence of gender diversity on the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate governance (CG) and economic and financial performance of Brazilian publicly traded companies.

The sample comprises 68 non-financial public companies comprising the IBX100 index of BM&FBOVESPA. For that, it was used panel data modeling, correlation and ranking by TOPSIS method.

The results suggest a significant relationship between CG and economic–financial performance when mediated by gender diversity. This relationship was not observed between CSR and economic–financial performance. Thus, it can be concluded that in a diversified board of directors, in terms of gender, better monitoring of managers can occur because of the increase in their independence in decisions, as well as performance increase. These results diverge from the literature on the influence of women’s participation in corporate boards in CSR. It is assumed that this result is because of the fact that the participation of women is recent in Brazil.

The main limitations are the number of companies analyzed, the choice of ISE index to verify the CSR variable and the metric used to verify the CG mechanisms.

In general, this research contributes to the literature of the area, especially in Brazil, in confirming that the mediating variable gender diversity makes the relationship between CG and performance more significant.