Search results

The sociological and demographic reality of recent decades has meant that western companies have seen an evolution towards greater diversification among their staff members. The implementing of a diversity policy in a company cannot be reduced to a managerial fashion or fad, to professional rhetoric or to a set of superficial or illusory initiatives, but it can aim at social transformation. That is why, in this chapter, the authors have chosen to portray the deployment of such an approach from the standpoint of an organisation-changing process, which can, at the same time, alter the language, the standards and the practices of the organisation and led them at the end to identify three managerial levers capable of transforming team diversity into performance enhancers.

This chapter focuses on diversity issues in France. It shows how these issues came historically in the French context and how the main tensions generated, notably the equality-diversity and universality-diversity tensions, are not understandable without a knowledge of the French Republicanism which gives to the foundations of the French social fabric its peculiarities.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between language, thinking and society for explaining the degree of visibility of the French organizational studies (OS) production.

This paper proposes a sociological analysis based on Bourdieu field to understand the variation of reception the French OS production have had among the Anglo-Saxon field. The paper aims to underline some key elements, which can explain the differences of reception experienced by the French OS scientists. The paper opted for a general review using historical data; reviews of OS literature; and Google scholar, Web of Science and major OS Journal data.

The paper provides some evidence about how the degree of visibility of the French OS production is related to translation, cognitive and social resonance, producer place in the scientific network and relationship between the fields. It suggests that the degree of visibility is the result of a complex set of socio-cognitive schemes, social issues raised by the scholar and the place occupied by the researcher in the field.

The paper brings interesting ideas concerning the international development of the OS field, the degree of visibility of diverse contributions coming from non-English speaking researchers, notably the French ones, and how the dialogue between different linguistic and social universes can be ameliorated.

French Republican Model and ‘laïcité, the French version of secularism’, are supposed to protect the citizens, at work or elsewhere, against any form of discrimination and France has a long history of immigration. Ethnical and racial discriminations at work are nevertheless observable towards visible minorities today. People from North African ascendance as well as those from French overseas territories ¹ ’ origins are heavily penalized in the job market. Neither direct and indirect laws nor the ‘voluntary initiatives’ introduced by companies seem able to solve this problem at a time when massive unemployment and terrorist Islamic attacks on the French soil are creating a situation of crisis.

Since Richard Florida’s book The Rise of the Creative Class published in 2000, our attention has been drawn towards a peculiar characteristic of the cities where such a creative class thrives, and that is tolerance. We intend to explore in this paper whether one can use Hofstede’s “Uncertainty Avoidance” dimension to ponder if societies that are “Uncertainty avoidant” can provide a nurturing soil for a creative class to emerge within their bosom. To discuss this question, we examine the case of the Province of Québec (Canada) and most specifically, that of the city of Montréal, a city that has been dubbed by many observers as a creative city. In other words, our question is can a creative class thrive in a city that is located in an “Uncertainty avoidant” cultural and political unit?