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A few hours before the May 17, 2004 gala to commemorate the legal decision that ended “separate but equal” facilities for black and white U.S. citizens, comedian Bill Cosby heard a radio broadcast that was on his wavelength. As Cosby listened to “Ask the Chief” on May 17, 2004 Washington, DC Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey recounted the number of children who had been the victims of homicide (Schroeder, 2004). A few hours later, Cosby picked up on the discussion with a live audience at Constitution Hall to celebrate the historic verdict of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. During the event, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Howard University acknowledged Cosby for his multimillion dollar contributions to historically black colleges and universities.

Interest in generational research has garnered a lot of attention, as the workplace is seeing multiple generations (i.e., the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials) working side-by-side for the first time. However, it is unclear how multiple generations of workers interact with each other and affect the workplace. Although there is extant literature on generational differences, some scholars have argued that the effect sizes are small and the differences are not meaningful. The focal aim of this chapter is to present the current state of literature on generational research. We present the relevant conceptualizations and theoretical frameworks that establish generational research. We then review evidence from existing research studies to establish the areas of differences that may exist among the different generations. In our review, we identify the issues arising from generational differences that are relevant to human resource management (HRM) practices, including new workforce entrants, aging workers, the changing nature of work and organizations, and leadership development. We conclude with several directions for future research on modernizing workplace policies and practices, ensuring sustainability in current employment models, facilitating future empirical research, and integrating the effects of globalization in generational research.

The US Congress is a racialized governing institution that plays an important role structuring the racial hierarchy in the nation. Despite Congress’s influence, there is little theoretical and empirical research on its racialized structure – that is, how it operates and the racial processes that shape it. This lacuna has developed from a narrow conceptualization of Congress as a political institution, and it ignores how it is a multifaceted organization that features a large and complex workplace. Congressional staff are the invisible force in American policymaking, and it is through their assistance that members of Congress can fulfill their responsibilities. However, the congressional workplace is stratified along racial lines. In this chapter, I theorize how the congressional workplace became racialized, and I identify the racial processes that maintain a racialized workplace today. I investigate how lawmakers have organized their workplace and made decisions about which workers would be appropriate for different types of roles in the Capitol. Through a racial analysis of the congressional workplace, I show a connection between Congress as an institution and workplace and how racial domination is a thread that connects and animates both its formal and informal structures.

The intention of this article is to show possible contributions of the concept of autonomous cooperation to enable complex adaptive logistics systems (CALS) to cope with increasing complexity and dynamics and therefore to increase the systems' information-processing capacity by implementing autopoietic characteristics. In order to reach this target, the concepts of CALS and autopoietic systems will be introduced and connected. The underlying aim is to use the concept of self-organization as one of their essential similarities to lead over to the concept of autonomous cooperation as the most narrow view on self-organizing systems, which is discussed as a possible approach to enable systems to handle an increasing quantity of information. This will be analyzed from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view.