Search results

The purpose of this article is to highlight inequalities created and sustained through gendered, raced, and classed organizational processes and practices using Joan Acker's work as a lens for perceiving the mechanisms that support such practices. It aims to use home health aide work as an example of how US labor laws and court decisions create and support disadvantages for workers who are largely economically‐disadvantaged and often women of color.

The article considers processes of inequality based on demographic characteristics and the resulting stereotyping, discrimination, and gender, race, and class inequalities.

The article finds that multiple intersecting processes of inequality exist in organizations, manifested in practices of stereotyping and discrimination for some job applicants and workers and advantageous positioning for certain others.

Future research should more specifically consider the effects of multiple processes of inequality on individuals' organizational experiences and the intersections of gender, race, and class (as well as other markers such as ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability) in organizational practices.

Managers and human resources practitioners should be aware of the effects of processes related to the intersectionality of gender, race, and class and work to eliminate resulting stereotyping and other discriminatory organizational practices linked to these processes in their organizations.

Identification of processes of inequality resulting in stereotyping and discrimination may help reduce them, thus increasing opportunities for work, wages, and benefits, and reducing poverty for members of the most devalued groups.

This research contributes to the literature on the intersecting nature of gender, race, and class‐based inequalities and on human resources decision making in organizations.

Within the past twenty years, the transition to adulthood has become a burgeoning area of research. The status attainment process, an early model for transition to adulthood research, has given way to research focusing on singular outcomes such as completing formal education, leaving home, obtaining employment, forming a union through marriage or cohabitation, and becoming a parent. As young adults continue to delay family formation, some argue that one’s first experience of heterosexual intercourse is also a symbol of adult status (Meier, 2001). Although most scholars agree that these outcomes along with chronological age symbolize being an adult, relatively few empirical studies examine them as inter-dependent transitions. A recent comparison of these indicators by gender, race, and social class is also needed.

This paper seeks to explore the difficult territory of intersectionality as it relates to inequality and disadvantage in the labour market of the arts and cultural sector. It aims to first examine the way Acker's concept of inequality regimes is located in the extant literature. Then, it aims to study the dynamics of intersectionality in the arts and cultural sector, which offers an ideal setting with interesting and counter‐intuitive outcomes of intersectionality.

The paper draws on a qualitative study which generated interviews with students, employers and higher education institutions which are involved in industrial placements (internships) in the arts and cultural sector in Britain.

In line with Acker, the paper also disputes a‐contextual and cumulative formulations of intersecting inequalities that rely on multiplying the unequal outcomes on the basis of traditional categories of disadvantage. Instead, it argues that multiplicity of identities and forms of disadvantage introduce complexity and contextual depth into the analysis of inequality if we are to understand interplay between different forms of disadvantage. In addition, the paper maintains that intersectionality produces surprising outcomes which vary across industrial contexts, in particular across different sectors of employment. It uses the case of work undergraduate and postgraduate placement practices in the arts and cultural sector, in order to demonstrate the unexpected nature of intersectionality in producing disadvantage.

The study draws on a selection of students, employers and higher education staff from London. A larger selection of institutions outside London could reveal differences between London and other cities and regions in Britain.

Intersectionality is an important concern for diversity and human resources management professionals. This paper provides an assessment of it in an unusual sectoral context.

There is need to develop an emic understanding of intersectionality in each sector.

In the literature, intersectionality is problematised at workplace and individual levels. This paper's view of intersectionality is original in the sense that it explores how intersectionality operates at a sectoral level. In doing so, it demonstrates that salience of a strand of inequality in terms of producing intersectional disadvantage depends on the context.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how equality and diversity are experienced in everyday work within Finnish work organizations and how equality policy and diversity management participate in maintaining the inequality regimes of the organizations.

The empirical findings are based on 31 interviews, which were collected in two private sector work organizations. Inequality regimes, the interlocked practices, and processes that result in continuing inequalities in all work organizations, are used as an analytic tool.

There is an individualizing tendency of equality in Finnish work organizations, which is also the premise of diversity management. Accordingly, the organizations cannot address structural and historical discrimination based on gender, race, and class. Also, when diversity is intrinsic to the corporate image, the members of the organization downplay and legitimize inequalities in their organization.

The paper analyzes inequality regimes in a context that should be ideal for equality and diversity: Finland, where gender equality policies are relatively progressive, and organizations that strive for equality and diversity. This gives new insight on why inequalities are difficult to change.

Purpose – To assess the unrelenting argument made by conservative social theorists that low-income women of color have high rates of out-of-wedlock births because they are anti-marriage and have deviant family values.Methodology – Based on a four-year ethnographic study of homeless mothers in San Francisco, this research examines whether or not Latinas and African Americans do in fact denigrate marriage and unabashedly embrace unwed motherhood.Findings – The major contribution of this research is the recognition that low-income African American women and Latinas do value the institution of marriage and prefer to be married before they have children. Unfortunately, the exigencies of poverty force many of them to delay marriage indefinitely. A lack of financial resources, the importance of economic stability, gender mistrust, domestic violence, criminality, high expectations about marriage, and concerns about divorce are common reasons given for not getting married.Research limitations – Although San Francisco is a unique city, and I cannot generalize my findings to other locales, the experiences of homeless women in the Bay Area are analogous to what was happening throughout urban America at the end of the twentieth century.Originality – For homeless mothers in San Francisco, having children without being married is a consequence of poverty in which race, class, and gender oppression conspire to prevent them from realizing their familial aspirations, pushing them further into the margins of society. Using intersectionality theory, this research debunks the Culture of Poverty perspective and analyzes why homeless mothers choose to remain unmarried.

Purpose – The introductory chapter to this special issue highlights contemporary scholarship on networks, work, and inequality.Methodology – We review the last decade of research on this topic, identifying four key areas investigation: (1) networks and hiring, (2) networks and the labor process, (3) networks and outcomes at work, and (4) networks and institutional dynamics.Findings – Social networks play an important role in understanding the mechanisms by which and the conditions under which economic inequality is reproduced across gender, race, and social class distinctions. Throughout the review, we point to numerous opportunities for future research to enhance our understanding of these social processes.

Racialized class formation is a process in which both racial formation and class formation shape the experiences of African Americans in the stratification system. This occurs for blacks in differing social classes. However, this chapter focuses on African Americans in the professional middle class. The professional middle class as a whole has grown substantially under postindustrialism. Racialized class formation has been greatly shaped by the nature of state policy regarding citizenship rights and has varied in the transition from the pre-civil rights era to the post-civil rights era. This chapter utilizes historical, interview, and secondary data to analyze experiences of the “first generation” of black professionals to integrate employment in mainstream institutions after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The focus is on the processes of recruitment, hiring, and promotion, as well as relations with clientele among those black professionals and how their middle class employment experiences are racialized.

Social exclusion as a result of gender, race, and class inequality is perhaps one of the most pressing challenges associated with the development of a diverse information technology (IT) workforce. Women remain under represented in the IT workforce and college majors that prepare students for IT careers. Research on the under representation of women in IT typically assumes women to be homogeneous in nature, something that blinds the research to variation that exists among women. This paper aims to address these issues.

The paper challenges the assumption of heterogeneity by investigating how the intersection of gender, race, and class identities shape the experiences of Black female IT workers and learners in the USA.

The results of this meta‐analysis offer new ways of theorizing that provide nuanced understanding of social exclusion and varied emancipatory practices in reaction to shared group exposure to oppression.

This study on the under‐representation of women as IT workers and learners in the USA considers race and class as equally important factors for understanding variation among women. In addition, this paper provides rich insights into the experiences of Black women, a group that is largely absent from the research on gender and IT.