The literature on policies, procedures, and practices of diversity management in organizations is currently fragmented and often contradictory in highlighting what is effective diversity management, and which organizational and societal factors facilitate or hinder its implementation. In order to provide a comprehensive and cohesive view of diversity management in organizations we develop a multilevel model informed by the social identity approach that explains, on the basis of a work motivation logic, the processes by, and the conditions under which employee dissimilarity within diverse work groups is related to innovation, effectiveness, and well-being. Building on this new model, we then identify those work group factors (e.g., climate for inclusion and supervisory leadership), organizational factors (e.g., diversity management policies and procedures, and top management's diversity beliefs) and societal factors (e.g., legislation, socio-economic situation, and culture) that are likely to contribute to the effective management of diversity in organizations. In our discussion of the theoretical implications of the proposed model we offer a set of propositions to serve as a guide for future research. We conclude with a discussion of possible limitations of the model and practical implications for managing diversity in organizations.

This paper explores gender politics and processes in the academy and investigates change from the perspectives of feminist academics. In particular it explores the experiences of women academics attempting to effect change to the gendered status quo of their own institutions. Focusing on micro-politics, the feminist movement is empirically explored in localised spaces of resistance and in the small, but significant, individual efforts at making changes within academic institutions. The analysis is based on interviews with female academics working in business and management schools and focuses on the challenges for change and how change attempts affect their personal and professional identities. The paper explores the range of change strategies participants use as they try to progress in their academic career while staying true to their feminist values and priorities through both resisting and/or incorporating dominant discourses of academic work. The analysis highlights such tensions and focuses on a contextualised, bottom up perspective on change which, counter to more totalizing theorisation, takes into account mundane and lived experiences at the level of the individual.

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When assembling self-managing work teams, the personalities of team members are often overlooked. One personality variable known to be critical for effective decision making in teams is cognitive style. This study sought to examine how differences and similarities in analytic/intuitive cognitive styles affected the behavior of team members on the task/emotionally expressive dimension identified by Bales. As hypothesized, intuitive individuals and homogeneous intuitive teams were found to initiate more social-emotional acts. Contrary to expectations, intuitive rather than analytic individuals and homogeneous intuitive rather than analytic teams engaged in more task-oriented behaviors. Teams also tended to select intuitive individuals as leaders. The possibility that different combinations of styles may be important for overall team effectiveness was subsequently discussed, and it was suggested that this may depend on whether the nature of the work environment is relatively well structured and mechanistic or relatively unstructured and organic.

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Brand scholarship traditionally resides within the marketing literature and focuses on organizations' external relationships with customers. However, increasing critical attention in organization studies has focused on the brand in order to understand its impact on the internal dynamics of employment relations in contemporary organizations. Drawing on an ethnography of frontline service work in an IT consultancy call centre, we explore the brand as an internal organizational resource sustaining the process of employee meaning-making activities. Documenting the 'work of the brand', we outline what the brand offers both employees and employers and, in doing so, we theorize the brand at work as a connecting mechanism between processes of identity formation/re-formation and regulation. While employees are encouraged to internalize particular brand meanings (in this case prestige, success and quality), we found that they often willingly buy into these intended brand meanings as a palliative to 'cope' with mundane work. In this way brand meanings are central to producing a self-disciplining form of employee subjectivity. Keywordsbrand, call centres, employee branding, ethnography, identity, organizational control 'All I want in life is a little bit of love to take the pain away.'Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space 'In ev'ry job that must be done, there is an element of fun.You find the fun and snap! The job's a game. And ev'ry task you undertake becomes a piece of cake. A lark! A spree! It's very clear to see that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.'

The Open University's repository of research publications and other research outputs The organisation of sexuality and the sexuality of organisation: A genealogical analysis of sexual 'inclusive exclusion' at work

Recent work has documented the need to engage with how men construct masculinities within postfeminist discourses in the workplace. Postfeminism has sparked debates concerning the changing ideals of masculinities, highlighting the tensions between traditional forms of patriarchy and ‘new’ ways of being a man (e.g., emotional, a ‘new father’, in crisis). Men have been depicted as being in search of a new identity, opposed to the ever‐growing confidence and empowerment of women. In mobilizing postfeminism as a discourse, this article illustrates how men working in an Italian pharmacological research centre (managed by men but dominated by women) assume subject positions that contradictorily fluctuate between tradition and fluid modernity, to reveal a masculinity which we identify with the ‘new industrial man’. The postfeminist masculinities exposed in the analysis mesh pro‐ and anti‐feminist ideas by appealing to un/heroic and romanticized subjectivities. The analysis also shows how un/heroic masculinities and men's appeal to biological differences to reinforce social ones and devalue the feminine obfuscate organizational gender inequalities. The article advances masculinity theory by offering a nuanced analysis of how masculinities and men are affected by paradoxical contemporary pressures for more egalitarian gender relations and a renewed emphasis on patriarchal traditions, which continue to support the gendering of the workplace.