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Even more than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination toward a number of groups in employment settings in the United States, workplace discrimination remains a persistent problem in organizations. This chapter provides a comprehensive review and analysis of contemporary theory and evidence on the nature, causes, and consequences of discrimination before synthesizing potential methods for its reduction. We note the strengths and weaknesses of this scholarship and highlight meaningful future directions. In so doing, we hope to both inform and inspire organizational and scholarly efforts to understand and eliminate workplace discrimination.

Drawing from interviews with individuals on parole, this chapter explores experiences of and responses to penal misrecognition. It documents that participants feel fundamentally misrecognised by the parole agency and penal state. They believe that the penal state views them as dangerous, defective and incapable of virtuous self-governance. Yet this is not how they perceive themselves. This leads to a delicate balancing act where participants refuse certain aspects of the penal state while accommodating others. On the one hand, individuals refuse parole’s misrecognition of them and reject the state’s authority to define who they are. On the other hand, they largely acquiesce to parole’s authority to supervise and regulate conduct. Turning to the concept of refusal highlights that individuals do not just attempt to resist penal power; rather, they flatly reject the state’s epistemic constructions. They do this by turning away from parole and by turning towards other forms of sociality beyond the penal state. This creates material and affective distance from parole and opens up space for self-recognition and for receiving positive recognition from others. In this way, individuals seek to minimise, move away from and/or bypass a penal intervention that is ostensibly designed to assist and support them.

The overall goal of science is to build a valid and reliable body of knowledge about the functioning of the world and how applying that knowledge can change it. As personnel and human resources management researchers, we aim to contribute to the respective bodies of knowledge to provide both employers and employees with a workable foundation to help with those problems they are confronted with. However, what research on research has consistently demonstrated is that the scientific endeavor possesses existential issues including a substantial lack of (a) solid theory, (b) replicability, (c) reproducibility, (d) proper and generalizable samples, (e) sufficient quality control (i.e., peer review), (f) robust and trustworthy statistical results, (g) availability of research, and (h) sufficient practical implications. In this chapter, we first sing a song of sorrow regarding the current state of the social sciences in general and personnel and human resources management specifically. Then, we investigate potential grievances that might have led to it (i.e., questionable research practices, misplaced incentives), only to end with a verse of hope by outlining an avenue for betterment (i.e., open science and policy changes at multiple levels).

The chapter presents a novel account of a key concept in John Dewey’s reconstructionist theory specifically related to the nucleus underlying his idea of democracy: intersubjective communication, what Dewey called the ‘democratic criterion’. Many theorists relate democracy to a form of rule. Consequently, discussions of democracy tend to be limited to functionalist theories. Dewey’s idea of democracy establishes an important distinction from conventional theories by developing its radical, critical, evolutionary, and intersubjective potential. I argue that Dewey anticipated Jürgen Habermas’s Paradigm of Communication in his reconstructionist social theory with potential to de-reify institutions and to empower human beings democratically.