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Economics and Management Notes Employment Relations Notes

Diversity Notes

Updated Diversity Notes

Employment Relations Notes

Employment Relations

Approximately 32 pages

For each of the 7 topics I studied, I've included my finals revision notes (except High Performance Work Systems, which I did not revise but have included the essay notes for). The notes are very concise (3-4 pages), with each subheading indicating a line of argument that could be taken in an essay on the topic (based on the exam questions that have come up over the last 6 or 7 years - the notes could be used to answer any of these well), and then bulletpointing how the argument could be laid out...

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Employment Relations Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

Diversity

  • Difference between equal opportunities and diversity management policies: the former focuses on treating everyone in the same way, while the latter emphasizes that individual differences should be recognized and valued as a source of competitive advantage (Foster and Harris, 2005)

  • EO built around legislation (Equality Act 2010), diversity management individual to the firm.

  • One is a base for the other?

Discrimination

Gender:

  • Wajcman: less than 40% of the women of the flagship companies at Opportunity 2000 felt they had equal opportunities to men, 70% of men thought opps were equal.

  • Major problem is that women continue to have primary, if not exclusive, responsibility for children (Wilson) and these domestic labour responsibilities massively affect their ability to participate in the labour market (Hochschild).

  • Hakim: men and women still accept the modern sexual division of labour, and women actually have more choice than men in terms of their working life and its balance with homemaking.

  • However Dex et al: clear association between part time employment and women’s caring responsibilities, suggests that having a family significantly impacts on women’s working lives in a way that it does not for men.

  • Societal norms and the belief that women are associated with ‘family’ while men with ‘work’ means that ‘challenging women’ who seek to challenge gender hierarchy within firms (and have the potential to do so) are not viewed as leaders but as ‘deviants’, as ‘within male cultures they are ridiculed for their transforming capacities’.

  • Managerial competence is constituted around masculine images of a workaholic, aggressiveness and hard managerialism dislikable traits for a woman to adopt.

  • Gendering of processes such as visibility, involvement in networks and acceptability which are crucial to career success.

  • hinders women’s ability to progress up the career ladder, especially when women are assumed to be less committed than their male counterparts even when they have no domestic responsibilities (Halford et al). Problem with perception not fact. Earn 77% of what men earn.

Many other forms of discrimination and prejudice besides gender, such as disability, religion, race and sexual orientation.

  • Race: government sting operation found that an applicant whose CV suggested they were white had to send 9 applications before getting a positive response, whereas someone with the same work experience etc but an ethnic sounding name had to send 16.

History means that both EO and diversity management considered unimportant

  • The Conservative government opt out of the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, as well as abolishing wage councils and taking only minimalist and begrudging action to comply with European equality obligations early signal sent to employers that legislative compliance levers were weak and prejudice relatively unimportant. (Dickson)

  • Despite reversal of the opt-out with Labour’s election in 1997 and the introduction of the minimum wage, legislation in the UK remains largely voluntary rather than mandatory for employers limits the protection of employees.

  • Joint regulation? Trade unions may be useful as a social route, providing workers with a voice mechanism, and enabling disadvantaged groups to promote own interests in developing equality initiatives and giving them the means to take action against unfair treatment. Reassertion of arguments based on fairness.

    • Howevs in 2013 only 25.6% employees were represented by unions many unable to exercise individual rights due to financial barriers and the linguistic impenetrability of legislation.

    • Traditional, white, male-biased union bargaining priorities in the past have often served to perpetuate rather than challenge inequalities, so joint regulation not a great solution.

Privatised approach doesn’t really work for either

  • By leaving policies to individual firms to take voluntary action requires the ‘Business Case’ to be believed (arguments based on pragmatic business self-interest rather than social justice).

  • Foster and Harris: idea of the business approach is that catering to diversity gains recognition as an ‘employer of choice’, and therefore pick of the best applicants.

  • But there are problems which mean this is not very effective:

    • The B-C agenda is not about low pay, part time rights, the sexual division of labour, power differentials across gender or revaluing work at the bottom of the hierarchy – greater concern for the glass...

Buy the full version of these notes or essay plans and more in our Employment Relations Notes.