Search results

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between social capital and collective action at the county level in the US while incorporating the moderating effects of community racial diversity and urbanity and to find the changing effects of social capital on philanthropic collective action for community education.

This paper employs a quantitative research design. The dependent variable measures philanthropic collective action for community education while the independent variable for social capital is measured as a community level index. Moderating variables include a community racial diversity index and urbanity. This analysis tests and interprets interaction effects using moderated multiple regression (MMR), with the baselines of MMR being grounded to multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. Analyses are carried out in the context of the USA during 2006 and 2010, with US counties employed as the unit of analysis.

The effects of social capital on philanthropic contributions decline in counties with low- and mid-levels of racial diversity. On the contrary, the effects of social capital increase in highly racially diverse counties. The three-way interaction model result suggests that racial diversity positively moderates social capital on philanthropic collective action for community education where the effect of social capital is strong and positive in highly racially diverse urban communities.

This research complicates the notion that social capital and racial diversity are negatively associated when exploring collective action and community education, and suggests effects of social capital varies with moderating effects on philanthropic collective action for community education.

This purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which accreditation of public affairs programs can be a tool to advance social equity, diversity, and inclusion. The paper is presented in the context of the widespread acceptance of the importance of addressing social inequalities in Latin America and the critical role that public policy and public administration can have on advancing these goals.

International and national accreditation standards are compared using content analysis for their reference to social equity and diversity in their standards regarding faculty, students, curriculum content and learning outcomes. The research applies content analysis of key documents and thematic coding.

International accrediting agencies that focused explicitly on programs in public affairs place a much greater emphasis on social equity and diversity than their national counterparts which accredit a full range of programs and institutions. National accrediting agencies assert the value of diversity, but their standards and reporting requirements suggest otherwise.

The research suggests that international accreditation standards have the potential to advance social equity goals more effectively than national standards and that there is great potential to enhance this component of national accreditation standards. Implications for policymakers, accreditation professionals and scholars are identified.

The research is original in its focus on the role of accreditation in promoting social equity and its comparison of national and international standards. Although limited to Latin America and public affairs programs, the research provides a basis for examining similar patterns with respect to other disciplines and professions, and in other regions of the world.

The purpose of this paper is to discern the legacies of social divisions, notably protracted social conflict on team members’ relations, collaborative interactions and ways of coping with such work-life reality.

This study constitutes a pilot phase of a research on nationally and ethnically diverse nurses’ teams operating in medical centers. It used qualitative methodology: a semi-structured individual interviews with 12 nurses.

The findings underscore the challenge of engaging diversity in mixed work teams operating in the shadow of protracted conflict. The results indicated inter-group biases, implicit discrimination and tensions due to the salience of social categorization and the faultline phenomenon. These tensions mount in crisis situations, such as violent incidents associated with the national conflict. The major coping pattern was directing the disagreements to a hidden sphere. The findings showed paucity of organizational level efforts to engage diversity and social divisions-related issues. In spite of the complexities associated with diverse workplaces, the nurses revealed high capability of maintaining cooperative interactions and effectively performing their healthcare tasks.

The current study represents a pilot phase of a larger research project. Subsequent stages will extend the sample size and use additional research instruments for data collection.

Human resources managers need to address the organizational issues related to diversity and social divisions, including policy and training activities.

Engaging “otherness” remains a considerable challenge in diverse work setting, especially when team work constitutes the main work pattern. It should be faced by work organizations and social institutions.

The study involves an innovative element as it attempts to elucidate the ramifications of diversity and inter-group tensions in “real-life” circumstances; namely, work setting in the context of a divided society. Most of the previous research examined such phenomena in the laboratory and/or on ad hoc groups.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic had an adverse impact on workforce diversity internationally. While in the Global North, many countries have sophisticated laws and organizational mechanisms and discourses to deal with such adverse impacts on workforce diversity, such structures of diversity management are either ceremonial or poorly developed in the Global South. The global pandemic disproportionately impacted Global North and Global South increases the existing gap due to vaccine rollout inequality and divergence in recoveries. The authors explore social innovation as a possible option for responding to the challenges induced by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study draws on interviews in 26 distinctive organizations operating in various industries in Turkey. The authors have adopted a qualitative design to explore how social innovation helps to respond to diversity concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors demonstrate that social innovation presents a viable option for a country with a poorly regulated context of diversity management. Social innovation could help overcome the challenge of the absence of supportive legislation, discourses and practices of diversity in poorly regulated contexts.

The field study revealed several distinct forms of social innovation for diversity management, which emerged as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors demonstrate that in the absence of supportive diversity management structures and frameworks, social innovation in diversity management at the organizational level could provide a viable response to the emergent needs in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This book offers theoretical frameworks and results of hundreds of empirical studies designed to investigate aspects of social identity dimensions of difference. Part I provides a foundation for examining social identity by defining it in terms of systems of power and hegemony, offering discussion of relationships between researchers and their participants (or, employees), and focusing on an ever-expanding literature which addresses the many ways that social identity dimensions overlap and intersect for individuals. Part II offers in-depth looks at specific social identity dimensions of culture, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, social class, physical and psychological ability, and faith/spirituality. As the final installment, Chapter 12 summarizes the book’s major themes. The message speaks to human resources and diversity managers in organizations as well as researchers; encouraging them to actively disassemble homogeneity at the top of organizations and to support enabling of all humans to reach their full human potential across organizations and in all social realms. Promoting and enabling social identity difference throughout organizations is no easy task due to multiple challenges. Indeed, incremental gains and small wins mean moving forward; the right direction.

The benefits of board diversity are often categorized into five distinct business rationales: talent rationale, market rationale, litigation rationale, employee relations rationale and governance rationale. However, if resource dependency theory’s focus on the director’s ability to secure important resources for the firm is considered, social capital as a viable additional rationale for board diversity can also be considered. The purpose of this paper is to argue that diverse members of the board are likely to have social capital that differs from non-diverse members of the board. Consequently, that diverse social capital can bridge the board to new resources for advice and counsel, legitimacy, channels for communication and access to important external elements, thus making a strong argument to be included as a rationale for board diversity.

It is intended to provide a conceptual discussion on whether enhancing the board’s social capital is perhaps a viable and overlooked rationale for board diversity.

Consistent with the other five rationales for board diversity, this analysis suggests that social capital should be considered as a sixth rationale for board diversity. Social capital serves a role in governance and rises to the standard of other rationales for board diversity.

Boards may not recognize that social capital is a strategic resource and sufficiently diverse groups such as women and minorities may be more likely to contribute non-overlapping social capital networks, which may translate into greater external influence and thus additional resources for the firm. This paper may help to influence the viewpoints of directors on who is valuable as a board member.

Existing board diversity rationales do not include social capital as a primary rationale for board diversity. It may be possible that social capital becomes a legitimate sixth rationale for board diversity.

The objective of this paper is to leverage a two-sided view of social capital to develop a model of board gender diversity and firm performance using social capital data from Northeast Regional Center of Rural Development.

The authors examine a large sample of 2,322 US publicly listed firms over the period 1996 to 2009. The final sample consists of 14,634 firm-year observations.

The authors find that when a firm's social network is not supportive of gender diversity, corporate boards have lower levels of female representation. The strength of a social network's social ties exacerbates the relationship between social capital and board gender diversity. The authors also report a negative relationship between female board membership and firm performance in social networks that are not pro-diversity. Robustness tests reveal that the authors’ social capital view of board diversity also applies to board ethnic diversity.

This study focuses primarily on blue chip firms due to data constraints. It will be interesting for future researchers to investigate a broader spectrum of firms from a broader perspective of diversity beyond the study’s gender and ethnicity findings. Furthermore, this study assesses the US context, and future research could investigate firm sociability in other national contexts.

This study contributes new insights to the discourse on gender diversity on corporate boards which stand to inform both policy and practice. The results of the study can inform the position of an industry association on board gender diversity, with guidance on how messaging across networks can be more effective should it account for the hidden bias that the authors uncover in the current study. From a manager's perspective, this study can help those managers and boards trying to enhance board gender diversity by providing a more complete understanding of the factors that can limit progress.

This study contributes a social capital view of board gender diversity to the growing literature of corporate governance, board diversity and local environmental influences on corporate policies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the perspectives of academic staff on issues of diversity and social schisms: capturing their perceptions of the complex relations at an academic campus positioned in an intricate sociopolitical context. It also explored how the faculty’s construal of diversity and social divisions inform their educational practices.

The study employed a qualitative approach using grounded theory methodology. Data collection was based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 20 diverse faculty members from different departments in a Northern Israeli college. The interviews were transcribed and processed into main themes and categories.

The findings revealed two main themes: “Diversity awareness” depicting recognition and sensitivity to the complex social context in the college, strategies of directly engaging with it, downplaying or overlooking the intricacies, and “Practices” describing the practical translations of the educational credos into teaching practice. Both themes reflected a myriad of faculty voices.

The study illuminated the challenges posed by social schisms, inequalities, and diversity for the faculty who need to grapple with the intricacies on a daily basis. More open dialogue and debates by the protagonists are needed to increase awareness of diversity and experimenting with different ways of addressing the intricacies.

Empirical evidence of the organizational actors’ predicaments, their diverse patterns of coping with intricacies, and the factors underlying their choices contribute to the body of knowledge on managing diversity in vivo by real women and men with different backgrounds and experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between ethnic diversity, social exclusion and institutional quality of Pakistan. Pakistan is enlisted among those countries that are suffering from bad institutional quality, which may be due to the less economic growth along with multifarious ethnic problems, higher misery and social exclusion. This study is an attempt of how ethnic diversity and social exclusion are encompassed to affect the institutional quality.

This study covers time series data from 1970 to 2015 and uses autoregressive distributed lags modeling approach to explore the underlying nexus among variables.

The finding of this study reveals that ethnic diversity and social exclusion are the enormous obstacles and deteriorate the institutional quality of Pakistan. In case of Pakistan, ethnic diversity is playing a fundamental role in the deterioration of institutional quality. Ethnic diversity has adverse effect on institutional quality which leads to hamper the economic prosperity; therefore, it has to be managed in efficient way by establishing a dense social network needed for growth promotion. This study also shows that socially excluded people are more involved in breaking the institutional rules (formal and informal) because they are not treated equal in society in all of aspects.

This study suggests that governments should play a vital role in creating secure and peaceful society through strong institutional quality and shaping the economic life of a country in a variety of ways such as to promote society toward more cohesiveness.

This study fills a significant gap in the literature as there is limited research on ethnic diversity and social exclusion in relation with institutional quality of Pakistan.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how those involved in executive pay determination in large publicly quoted UK businesses see the role of diversity within remuneration committees (Remcos) as enabling the input of different perspectives, which can enhance their decision-making and potentially improve pay outcomes.

Qualitative, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 18 high-profile major-enterprise decision-makers and their advisers, i.e. non-executive directors (NEDs) serving Remcos, institutional investors, executive pay consultants and internal human resources (HR) reward specialists, together with data from three focus groups with 10 further reward management practitioners.

Remco members recognise the benefits of social category/demographic diversity but say the likelihood of increasing this is low, given talent pipeline issues. The widening of value diversity is considered problematic for Remcos’ functioning. Informational diversity is used as a proxy for social category/demographic diversity to improve Remcos’ decision-making on executive pay. While the inclusion of members from wider social networks is recognised as potentially bringing a different informational perspective, the social character of Remcos, reflecting their elite nature and experience of wealth, appears ingrained.

Our original contribution is to extend the application of upper echelons theory in the context of Remco decision-making to explain why members do not welcome widening informational diversity by appointing people from different social networks who lack value similarity. Instead, by drawing views from employees, HR acts as a proxy for social network informational diversity. The elite, upper-echelons nature of Remco appointments remains unchanged and team functioning is not disrupted.