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Research projects designed to examine social identity difference in organizations are driven by a passion to affect positive change that ultimately leads to a more just society rather than one which enables status quo power perpetuation and continues to marginalize certain people and inhibit them from achieving personal and career goals. This important change requires the support of all people and not just those who use a simplistically essentialist dyad because they feel a personal connection or because such avenues of inquiry are considered off limits when a researcher or a manager does not “match” members of specific minority groups. Polyvocality is necessary to exorcise -isms in the workplace and larger global communities, so this important work is everyone’s responsibility.

In Chapter 2, difference is operationalized and it is acknowledged that recognizing power differentials between ourselves as researcher and our respondents or participants as researched is a starting point in any important journey when exploring social identity difference. Researching across social identity difference is examined, the simplistically essentialist dyad or racial-matching paradigm is critiqued, and the partial perspective and lived experience orientations are advanced. Useful guidance and methodological techniques also are offered for self-reflexive moves when considering research paradigms, theoretical underpinnings, data collection procedures, data interpretation and analysis steps, and dissemination of findings – as well as discussion about ways that institutionalized power can intervene in potentially risky ways for researchers of social identity and difference.

This book represents an integration of numerous theory streams and approaches so that researchers of social identity difference will have at least one go-to source for engaging with potential analytical, ethical, and methodological challenges. Chapter 2 is divided into these central subthemes: what is social identity difference?, power issues among researchers and the researched, techniques for doing social identity difference research, and researching across social identity difference and the matching paradigm.

Now well into the 21st century, the world’s most powerful organizations’ highest executive levels and boards of directors still fail to represent a diverse collection of people shaped by unique social identity dimensions according to age, class, culture, ethnicity, faith/spirituality, gender, physical/psychological ability, sexual orientation, and more. Offered in this book is an investigation into why a homophily framework, or a similarity-attraction hypothesis, continues to perpetuate leadership by predominantly Caucasian/White males and reinforces barriers that keep qualified people possessing a multiplicity of social identity dimensions from achieving their full human potential.

To understand interactive processes through which discrimination is reproduced in the workplace, social identity theorists explore connections between ways that people create social identity and that organizations become socially constructed. Social identity theory explains how people seek to develop oneness with groups that help them to develop and/or to enhance positive self-esteem – and to better understand how people develop notions of high-status ingroups and low-status outgroups. Both of these frameworks are central to this book’s attention to difference in organizations. Difference is positioned as a positive advance in organizational dynamics; advocating respect and appreciation for multiple and intersecting social identities – not for profitability and other business case reasons – but because it is morally justified to eradicate inequitable and exclusionary practices in organizations. This book offers an introduction to doing difference research by introducing a number of theoretical underpinnings, addressing methodological challenges, and presenting a wide cross-section of numerous bodies of literature which have been attending to difference work. Chapter 1 is divided into subthemes of: applying social identity theory, emphasizing the “center” and the “margin,” managing organizational climate, and avoiding business case thinking and other flawed models by advocating for real diversity.

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.

Ridley Scott’s 1982 cinematic production of Blade Runner, based loosely on a 1968 story by Philip Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), is read within a general context of critical theory, the purpose being twofold: first, to highlight the film’s fit with, and within, several issues that have been important to critical theory and, second, to explore some questions, criticisms, and extensions of those issues – the dialectic of identity/difference most crucially – by speculations within and on the film’s text. The exploration is similar in approach to studies of specific films within the context of issues of social, cultural, and political theory conducted by the late Stanley Cavell. Interrogations of dimensions of scenarios and sequences of plotline, conceptual pursuit of some implications, and assessments of the realism at work in cinematic format are combined with mainly descriptive evaluations of character portrayals and dynamics as these relate to specified thematics of the identity/difference dialectic. The film puts in relief evolving meanings of prosthetics – which is to say changes in the practical as well as conceptual-semantic boundaries of “human being”: what counts as “same” versus “other”? “domestic” versus “foreign”? “integrity” versus “dissolution”? “safety” versus “danger”? And how do those polarities, understood within a unity-of-opposites dialectic, change, as human beings are confronted more and more stressfully by their own reproductions of “environment” – that is, the perspectival device of “what is ‘text’ and what is context’?” – and variations of that device by direct and indirect effects of human actions, as those actions have unfolded within recursive sequences of prior versions of perspectival device, a device repeatedly engaged, albeit primarily and mainly implicitly, as a “prosthetic that could not be a prosthetic.”

Purpose – There has been very little development of the capacity of dialectical logic during the last hundred years or so, while the capacity of post-Cartesian analytical logics has expanded greatly in response to efforts to understand more and more complex theoretical and empirical problems, though still within the limits of analytical strictures such as externality of relations and the principle of the excluded middle. This chapter pursues relative lines of development in analytical and dialectical logic.

Design/methodology/approach – After presenting as background a congeries of personal experiences, reflections, and reviews, the chapter addresses some of the lessons relating to the neglect of dialectical logic (e.g., the notion of contradiction as error, and the idealization that is condition to it), in order to work toward some clarifications, developments, and challenges of dialectical logic (past, present, and future). Along the way providing comparisons with analytical logic, the emphasis will be on the contributions of several theorists, including Adorno, Marx, and Habermas.

Findings – Some illustrations of under- and undeveloped capacity are proposed with regard to dialectical-conceptual formations of identity/difference relations, unity of opposites, and quality/quantity relations, as well as contradiction as condition and as consequence of processes wherein various realities are produced. A number of challenges are outlined, with an invitation to scholars to pursue better development of the power of dialectical logic.

Research limitations/implications – An unduly defensive posture against perceived threats from both analytics and empirics (experiences of world) has surely been part of the obstacle to advancing dialectical logic, though one should not underestimate the resistances stemming from poor institutional-disciplinary support for the risk-taking activities required for innovation and development.

Originality/value – Dialectical logic is important to investigations of process dynamics in a number of ways, most especially insofar as contradiction is a major driver of processes, in particular processes that tend to follow trajectories that from the perspective of analytical logic are unexpected and/or illogical; for dialectical logic takes the event of contradiction as not merely indicative of error in the process of propositional reasoning but instead or also as an outcome of specifiable sequences of structurally conditioned behaviors, actions, and chains of effects at supra-individual levels of the production of realities.

Theories of ethnic conflict often assume that the cause of political violence is the same across actors and constant over time. I propose that causes differ, depending upon the identity, grievances, and strategy of the perpetrator as influenced by the cultural, economic, and political contexts in which they operate. Together with Granger causality tests, multivariate time‐series analyses of political deaths in Northern Ireland support a multi‐causal perspective. Reflecting identity differences, Loyalist violence but not Republican violence was likely to increase during months when high levels of protest coincided with annual commemorations. By deepening grievances related to ethnic stratification, rising unemployment contributed to Republican violence, but not to Loyalist violence. Repression of Nationalists increased Republican violence but decreased Loyalist violence, supporting a see‐saw conceptualization of political opportunities in divided societies. The findings highlight the need for sensitivity in both conflict research and management to differences between actors and across social contexts.

To explore the intersecting dynamics of gender, ethnicity, age, safety, power and sexuality in two cases of qualitative research

Reflexive analysis of community participatory action research.

Being an ‘insider’ is a nuanced and complex identity in social research leading to power flows that are not unidirectional. In addition, not only is gender not the only difference that makes a difference, but it is also important to consider the importance of difference within ‘sameness’.

In considering intersecting identities, difference and sameness this chapter adds to the assertion that research is never ‘hygienic’ and the role of self and research participants are vital considerations at all stages from design to dissemination.

The Scottish civil justice system is undergoing its most substantive transformation in over 150 years. This reformation will create new judicial bodies, alter the jurisdictional reach of courts, and drastically unsettle what has been, up to now, a highly stable institutional field. These changes have caused pronounced threats to the status of different groups of actors in the field. Our work examines the impact of these threats, and the varying responses among groups of professional actors. In so doing, we detail how intra-professional status differences and uncertainty hindered attempts to maintain threatened institutions.

Modern bureaucracies are under reconstruction, bureaucracy being no longer “modern”; they are becoming “post” bureaucratic. Defining the post‐bureaucratic organization as a hybrid form provides insight into the intrinsic difficulties involved in the refurbishment of large complex organizations. The purpose of this paper is to examine these difficulties empirically.

The paper describes the case of an Australian public sector agency, subject to “corporatization” – a metamorphosis from a strictly public sector outlook to one that was imputedly more commercial. It focuses on the transition from personnel management to strategic HRM in the HR function.

A series of difficulties affected these changes: difficulties in inventing a new identity; differences in perception of that identity; organizational philosophy towards strategic HRM; unsuitability of extent networks; and identity conflicts. Two factors emerge as the core explanation for the difficulties encountered: the “stickiness of identity” and the difficulties associated with network development.

The paper outlines the difficulties experienced in the putative “refurbishment” of a large public sector agency as it made its way to “corporatization”.