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Although employee race has been an actively investigated area of scientific inquiry for decades, a thorough and informed understanding of the role of race in the organizational sciences has eluded us for a number of reasons. The relationship of race and stress in organizations is a prime example of this neglect and deficiency in our knowledge base, as little work has been done in this area. We attempt to address this limitation in the literature by proposing an inductively derived, review-centric framework that attempts to articulate the multiple intermediate linkages that explain the process dynamics taking place in the relationship between employee race and health and well-being in organizations. We argue that socialization processes, social networks, information and resource access, and mentoring contribute to distance and differences between racial minorities and nonminorities concerning control, reputation, performance, and political understanding and skill, which in turn, creates barriers to success, and increased stress and strain for racial minorities. The implications of this framework along with directions for future theory and research are discussed in this chapter.

At the beginning of any conceptual work concerning communication management, there is a demand for a deeper understanding of the problem that needs to be addressed and for the context in which it occurs. Communication management practice mostly relies on instruments like briefings, structured interviews or classic controlling data, when it comes to an analysis of organisational structures. This chapter shows that the potentials of a more constructivist perspective and a qualitative methodology can be useful to find out what is really at stake. It presents creative visualisation of organisational contexts and visual grounded theory methodology by the example of internal communication management.

Organizational researchers studying well-being – as well as organizations themselves – often place much of the burden on employees to manage and preserve their own well-being. Missing from this discussion is how – from a human resources management (HRM) perspective – organizations and managers can directly and positively shape the well-being of their employees. The authors use this review to paint a picture of what organizations could be like if they valued people holistically and embraced the full experience of employees’ lives to promote well-being at work. In so doing, the authors tackle five challenges that managers may have to help their employees navigate, but to date have received more limited empirical and theoretical attention from an HRM perspective: (1) recovery at work; (2) women’s health; (3) concealable stigmas; (4) caregiving; and (5) coping with socio-environmental jolts. In each section, the authors highlight how past research has treated managerial or organizational support on these topics, and pave the way for where research needs to advance from an HRM perspective. The authors conclude with ideas for tackling these issues methodologically and analytically, highlighting ways to recruit and support more vulnerable samples that are encapsulated within these topics, as well as analytic approaches to study employee experiences more holistically. In sum, this review represents a call for organizations to now – more than ever – build thriving organizations.

Worker classification continues to be a highly litigated area of taxation. That is, the status of a worker as an employee or independent contractor remains a topic closely scrutinized by the Internal Revenue Service. This study examines factors that the judiciary deems relevant in ruling whether a worker is an employee or independent contractor. A backward stepwise logistic regression model is implemented to categorize the factors that best predict the court’s decision on whether a worker is either an employee or independent contractor pursuant to the factors in Revenue Ruling 87-41 (1987-1 CB 296), judge gender, and political affiliation. The results indicate three factors (supervision/instructions, continuing relationship, and the right to discharge) are capable of accurately predicting 93 percent of the decisions made by the US Tax Court. Other findings support notable statistical differences between male and female judges rendering decisions and reaching conclusions. Also, there is a statistically significant difference based on the type of industry. Political affiliation appears to have no significant impact on judicial rulings.

A study of the price discounts granted by Morton Salt Company and other producers of table salt in the U.S. on their sales of table salt to grocery wholesalers and retailers. The discounts were found to be illegal under the Robinson-Patman Act by the Federal Trade Commission and the Supreme Court. The Commission and the Court believed that the discounts were unjustified price concessions granted to “large” buyers, consistent with the concerns of the Robinson-Patman Act. However, the evidence indicates that the most common discount – the “carload discount” – was received by virtually all buyers, regardless of the buyer’s size; the other discounts – “annual volume” discounts – though received primarily by “large” buyers, were likely cost based. The history of the discounts and likely reasons why they were granted are explored in detail.