Diversity management is a rethinking and reframing of equality management. It is increasingly seen as an indicator of corporate social responsibility (CSR), and has particular significance in Europe with its increasingly diverse populations, homogenous leaders and aging workforce. Corporate websites are often the first point of call for prospective recruits, partners and investors, and 'diversity statements' are often found in CSR, corporate profile and careers pages. This study investigates the web-based promotion of 'diversity' by 241 leading companies in eight European countries. The paper focuses particularly on the drivers, the strategic responses to the diversity challenge, and the stages of diversity management. Results indicate large differences in espoused diversity strategies and drivers for change across Europe, with UK companies promoting diversity management most vigorously. From the diversity statements of these top European companies, the authors identified the drivers for diversity management as better performance, enhancing corporate reputation and meeting stakeholder needs. It also identified six stages through which companies move from ignoring diversity altogether to promoting diversity for competitive advantage and multicultural organisational learning. Implications for strategic human resource management are discussed, and advice given to those responsible for managing strategic change in the area of diversity management and its online promotion. The worldwide web provides a new way of signalling excellence in the corporate response to the new challenge of diversity, but should be backed by real progress on this important issue.Many firms are now considering telework programs for their employees. Direct effects are easy to calculate: employees save commuting time and effort, while the firm incurs additional information and communication costs, but may save on office facility costs and gain higher productivity. But telework has great strategic importance beyond these effects, including contributing to a stronger human capital resource-base.This article explores these wider questions, asking if employee views are consistent with the strategic, resource-related impacts on the organization, by means of two surveys conducted with HRM managers and employees of large firms based in Brussels. The authors conclude that telework has multiple effects on the firm's resource-base, and both top-down managerial expectation and bottom-up employee needs perspectives will have to be considered before the practice is adopted. They also report significant differences in the experience of those who have adopted telework already, and the (by-and-large less positive)
This paper investigates how specific notions of gender and ethnicity are integrated into diversity discourses presented on 241 top European company websites. Large European companies increasingly disclose equality and diversity policies in statements on websites. Such statements may be used to promote an ethical image of the company in terms of how well it manages diversity and guards against discrimination. In this paper, we argue that diversity statement discourses are important as they play a key part in socially constructing how diversity should be regarded in the company by minority and majority groups, as well as indicating corporate values to external stakeholders (investors, government, community, press etc.). Sometimes, the notions of gender or ethnic diversity are positioned as a liability in need of protection, whilst in others, as a source of competitive advantage. We find evidence of use of discursive tools such as problematisation, rationalisation, fixation, reframing and naturalisation of the notions of gender and ethnic diversity, reinforced by use of symbols, such as statistics, photographs, membership badges and awards. Few statements directly associate gender and ethnic diversity with enhanced corporate performance. We found that diversity statements sometimes appear to reinforce existing business stereotypes of women and people from ethnic minorities, and in a few discourses, create new ones, particularly evident in photographs illustrating the diversity web pages. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006diversity, gender, ethnicity, discourse, corporate websites, Europe,
In the quest to attract talent, organizations must articulate the benefits of having a diverse workforce. By communicating the attractiveness of the workplace, a company increases its exposure to the environment as an employer of choice. In this paper, we conduct a comparative and thematic cross-cultural examination of corporate communication in form of diversity statements. We examine how organizations use diversity statements to attract talent, and discuss how the two strategic areas of diversity and employer branding can be linked in the concept of diversity branding. We examine the websites of 75 major companies in five different countries (France, Germany, Spain, the UK and the United States). Cross-cultural differences and similarities are discussed. We also conclude that the discourse of inclusion is gradually penetrating websites and that branding inclusion can be beneficial in the quest to be an employer of choice.
Le codage à visée théorique est un processus qui repose sur des opérations de catégorisation et d'interprétation des données qualitatives. Certaines pratiques de codage comme la comparaison constante, l'emploi des mémos ou encore la progression interprétative concourent à la théorisation. Ces méthodes sont présentées, discutées en regard de l'évaluation et illustrées à l'aide d'un exemple.Mots clés : Codage, codage à visée théorique, catégorisation, évaluation du codage.
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