Search results

The purpose of this paper is to assess how employees from historically marginalized groups (men and women of color and white women) perceive Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For”® (BCWF) in terms of two outcomes that are related to diversity and inclusion: fairness and camaraderie. The authors focus on fairness as a way to measure perceptions of general treatment with respect to demographic characteristics associated with bias and discrimination, and on camaraderie as a way to measure perceptions of the inclusiveness of coworker relationships.

Hierarchical linear regression models are used to analyze survey responses from 620,802 employees in 1,054 companies that applied for the BCWF list between 2006 and 2011 in the USA. The authors compare the perceptions of employees in firms that are selected for the list to those of their demographic counterparts in firms not selected for the list. The authors also compare the perceptions of employees from historically marginalized groups to those of white men within firms that make the list and examine how these differences compare to the same differences within firms that do not make the list.

The findings reveal that the perceptions of men and women of color and white women in companies that make the “best” list are more positive than their demographic counterparts in companies that do not make the list. The authors also find, however, that the perceptions of employees from historically marginalized groups are more negative than those of white men in the “best” workplaces, and these patterns are similar to those in firms that do not make the list. For perceptions of fairness, the differences between employees from historically marginalized groups and white men are smaller in companies that make the list.

The findings are based on average effect sizes across a large number of companies and employees, and the data do not provide insight into the actual organizational processes that are driving employee perceptions. In addition, the employee survey data are self-reported, and may be subject to recall and self-serving biases. Finally, the authors use measures of fairness and camaraderie that have not been rigorously tested in past research.

Managers seeking to improve experiences of fairness and camaraderie should pay particular attention to how race/ethnicity and gender influence these experiences, and how they do so intersectionally. Attending to these differences is particularly important to the extent that experiences of fairness and camaraderie are related to organizational trust, the key metric on which companies are selected for the “best” workplaces list, and a quality of organizational relationships that previous research has found to be positively related to key individual and firm-level outcomes.

The paper provides the first assessment of demographic variation in the outcomes of employees in companies selected for the BCWF. Since selection to this list is based on the presence of trust, the authors’ findings also provide potential insight into how informal organizational processes that are associated with trust, such as leadership behaviors, peer relationships, and workplace norms, are viewed and experienced by men and women of color and white women. Finally, the authors analyze outcomes relating to camaraderie, a construct that has received little attention in the literature.

Previous studies of worker-owned firms claimed that participatory democracy only thrives in small, homogeneous groups. This article focuses on a successful 30-year-old worker-owned company with more than 200 employees to explain how broad and deep democratic control, a large workforce, and member diversity are brought together. Drawing attention to its combination of training, infrastructure, compensation for management functions, and workplace culture, I argue that an equitable distribution of power and resources does not require hierarchical management, friendship relations, size limits, or member homogeneity. The article highlights the need for greater scholarly attention to worker ownership possibilities for the current multiracial and multicultural working population.

Payal Banerjee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Syracuse University and is completing a dissertation on Indian immigrant IT workers in the U.S., which foregrounds the intersecting contexts of gender and race/ethnicity, U.S. immigration and visa policies, global economic restructuring, and transnational mobility of labor.

In 1933 two books on competitive structure were published. One, extracted from a Harvard PhD filed six years earlier, dealt with the workings of the competitive process. Seeking not to supplant, but to supplement Marshall, this book by E. H. Chamberlin focused on an effort involving the use of a diagrammatic apparatus to highlight certain fundamental relationships between variables in the competitive process. It did not analyse real firms but nor did it attempt to pretend that such were irrelevant, and to concentrate on positions of competitive equilibrium only. It dealt with problems of arrival at equilibrium, false trading, and a whole variety of issues relevant to an actual competitive process. Supervised by Allyn Young, it drew on a wide range of references and showed evidence of the kind of thorough scholarly preparation which has always been characteristic of the best American PhDs.

Comprises an Internet dialogue between two academics, which explores the dynamics of men and women forming professional relationships. Raises issues which can be used for helping organizations to facilitate the appropriate development of inter‐gender working relationships.

Joan undertook the ground-breaking project originally reported in the 1958 pamphlet, Management and Technology, not at one of Britain's great universities, but at the unfashionable address of the South East Essex Technical College (then in the county of Essex but now part of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham). The Human Relations Research Unit had been set up at the college, which is now part of the University of East London, in 1953 with support from a number of agencies including funding ultimately derived from the Marshall Plan. Its express purpose was to enhance the performance of industry and commerce through the application of social science. Those readers familiar with the area will know that, at the time, it was economically and culturally dominated by the Ford assembly plant in nearby Dagenham, but it was also home to a diverse range of small- and medium-sized industrial workshops that were typical of the pre-war Greater London economy (Woodward, 1965; Massey & Meegan, 1982). It was into this diverse industrial milieu that Joan and her research team ventured (Fig. 1), completing their main study in 1958.

Gail Bader is Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. A cultural anthropologist, Bader’s research interests include educational anthropology, the cultural construction of work, computing and technology, and U.S. and Japanese culture.John M. Budd is Professor and Associate Director of the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri – Columbia. He is the author of numerous journal articles and books, including The Academic Library and Knowledge and Knowing in Library and Information Science.Bambi Burgard has served as Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs/Student Achievement at the Kansas City Art Institute since May 2002. Upon completion of her undergraduate education, she began doctoral study in counseling psychology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City where she earned her Ph.D. in 1999. She completed her predoctoral and postdoctoral internships at the University of Missouri-Kansas City counseling center.Harvey R. Gover is on the library faculty of Washington State University (WSU) Libraries and is the Assistant Campus Librarian for WSU Tri-Cities. Formerly, he was Public Services Librarian, Tarleton State University, a branch campus of Texas A&M. He was a principal author of the 2000 edition of ACRL Guidelines for Distance Learning Library Services.William Graves III is Associate Professor of Humanities at Bryant College in Smithfield, Rhode Island. A linguistic anthropologist, Graves is interested in the diverse roles that language and communication play in social and cultural change. He has conducted fieldwork on issues of social and cultural change among Native Americans, in diverse organizational settings in the U.S., in enterprises undergoing privatization in Russia and, most recently, among small-scale entrepreneurs in Belarus.José-Marie Griffiths served as the Chief Information Officer at the University of Michigan and Vice Chancellor for Information Infrastructure at the University of Tennessee. She was responsible for strategic IT planning; the development and implementation of academic and administrative computing, telecommunications and networking activities; and IT alliances with external organizations. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her contributions to information science, the development of the IT industry, and support for women in computing. She currently holds an endowed chair and professorship in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and is Director of the University’s Sara Fine Institute for Interpersonal Behavior and Technology.John B. Harer has been a school and academic librarian for over twenty-seven years. As an academic librarian, he has held various positions in access services, reference, and personnel administration. He is currently the Director of the Library at Catawba College in Salisbury, NC.Donna Meyer’s career has included management of computer labs, teaching computer skills, designing curricula that integrated information skills into core subject areas, creating web sites, and managing library collections. She currently works as Director of Library Resources at Northcentral University in Prescott, Arizona, providing quality online graduate research services.Rush Miller has been Hillman University Librarian and Director of the University Library system at the University of Pittsburgh for eight years. He serves as co-chair for the Association of Research Libraries e-Metrics Project. Miller is active in the profession and writes regularly on library management, international librarianship, diversity, digital library content and e-Metrics.James M. Nyce, a cultural anthropologist, is interested in how information technologies are used in and can change workplaces and organizations, particularly in medicine and higher education. A docent at Linköping University, Nyce’s research interests include the historical, social aspects of library and information science, the design and evaluation of information systems, and information use in science and medicine. Nyce is Associate Professor at the School of Library and Information Management, Emporia State University, Emporia, Kansas, and Visiting Associate Professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis.Charles Oppenheim is Professor of Information Science at Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK. His main professional interest is where the law interacts with information services. He is also interested in knowledge management, measuring the value and impact of information, citation studies, bibliometrics, national and company information policy, the electronic information and publishing industries, ethical issues, chemical information handling, patents information and policy issues related to digital libraries and the Internet.Roswitha Poll is chief librarian of the University and Regional Library Münster. From 1991 to 1993 chair of the German Association of Academic Librarians, since 1997 chair of the German Standards Committee for Information and Documentation. She chaired the IFLA group for the handbook on performance measurement in libraries and is now convener of the ISO working group for the International Standard of Library Statistics and member of the ISO group for performance measurement. She is working in national and international groups on collection preservation, quality management, statistics and cost analysis in libraries.Mary Jane Rootes is a Public Services librarian at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. She worked previously at the Pitts Library of Andrew College in Cuthbert, Georgia.Sherrie Schmidt is the Dean of University Libraries at Arizona State University. She began her tenure at ASU as Associate Dean of Library Services in 1990 and was named Dean in 1991. Prior to that, she worked at Texas A&M University, the University of Texas at Austin, the FAXON Company, the University of Texas at Dallas, AMIGOS, the University of Florida, and Ohio State University. Most of her professional activities relate to the use of technology in libraries.Joan Stenson is a Research Associate in the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK, where she is currently undertaking a doctorate.Richard Wilson is Professor of Business Administration and Financial Management at Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK. He has inter-disciplinary interests in the valuation of information assets. His publications reflect his research interests in management control, financial control, marketing control and strategic control.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.