Kornau, Angela

Finding formal and stable employment in the local economy is a crucial step in the integration of refugees. In highly regulated high-income countries, multiple actors are involved in managing refugee employment and offer support to overcome its various barriers. Our research breaks new ground by focusing on the dynamics between these actors. We conducted 80 interviews with refugees, employers, governments, employer associations, refugee support organizations, and public employment services in three Western European countries. We conceive of the field as a refugee employment ecosystem in which complementarity is the key mechanism that aligns the various actors’ activities to achieve the goal of refugee employment. Complementarity means that actors not only fulfill their different roles but also step in, fill gaps, and add to others’ activities. Three microfoundations undergird this complementarity: individuals’ motives, responsiveness, and perseverance. By showing how refugee employment ecosystems are inhabited and sustained by individuals whose activities go beyond their assigned actor roles, we contribute to theory development in research on refugee employment and help to humanize theorizing about ecosystems at large. We also offer practical guidance on how to increase the resilience of refugee employment ecosystems.

Digitalisation permeates all aspects of organizational life, especially the ways we communicate with each other. Drawing on a case study of an alternative organisation—the German collective Premium, which is almost entirely digitally organised—we seek to explore contextual factors that facilitate or hinder the expression of electronic voice (e-voice). Based on 20 semi-structured interviews with different members of the collective, we identified various contextual facilitators and barriers to e-voice expression: Collective belief in the value of diverse voices, cautious online and complementary face-to-face communication facilitate e-voice, while less formalised structures, power and knowledge asymmetries, and information overload hinder it. These findings demonstrate that despite an alternative organisation's firm intention and self-reflective efforts to create an inclusive and participatory digital space, tensions arise. Further, our study contributes to employee voice theorising by outlining contextual factors that are specifically relevant to e-voice practices.

In this paper, we explore how institutional actors push or resist equality, diversity and inclusion in light of power relations in their respective country contexts. We conducted interviews with a range of institutional actors, including governmental organizations, employer representatives, unions, professional associations, and civil society organizations working on EDI issues in Germany and Turkey, two countries with very different socioeconomic and political settings. Our findings suggest that EDI fields are structured by country-specific power relations: they appear as competitively dispersed in Germany and politically polarized in Turkey, depending on the social position of the actors and the type of field fragmentation. These field characteristics, in turn, nurture different patterns of actors’ strategies such as framing and mobilizing aimed at maintaining or disrupting the institutionalized status quo of EDI. We propose that a critical, power-sensitive institutional work approach to EDI is a useful lens through which to examine extra-organizational country contexts in international HRM research and, in particular, context-sensitive studies of EDI. As a practical implication, EDI and HR managers will be sensitized to the relevance of building coalitions with external stakeholders if they are to advance EDI within their organizations.

This study investigates organizational diversity discourses in Turkey – a non-Western, politically relevant, yet underrepresented context. Using a Foucauldian perspective on power and discourse, we scrutinize how power relations in the Turkish context are (re)produced. Based on our analysis of company websites and semi-structured interviews with various actors (e.g., HR managers), we propose a conceptual framework of the discursive construction of diversity subjects at work along the dimensions of (1) visibility of organizational diversity discourses and (2) contestation of meaning within organizational diversity discourses. The combination of these dimensions yields four discursive dynamics as illustrated in our data (Advertising, Avoiding, Disrupting, Tabooing). This framework may inspire future context- and power-sensitive investigations on diversity discourses at the workplace.

In this chapter, we discuss the creative class theory developed by Richard Florida (2002, 2005, 2014) with a special emphasis on the Global Tolerance Index (GTI). The key proposition of his theory is that the so-called 3T’s - Technology, Talent and Tolerance - are key drivers for economic growth. Places that are more tolerant of people with diverse backgrounds have a competitive advantage as they will attract more talented people from ‘the creative class’ who in turn develop innovative ideas that enhance prosperity. We first outline the cornerstones of Florida’s theory, explain the composition of the Tolerance Index developed for the US-context as well as the GTI and discuss the global tolerance country ranking, which covers 139 nations. We then show how the index has been applied, discuss its strengths and weaknesses and finally outline some avenues for future research that embrace tolerance in the context of multi-disciplinary and multi-level D & I research.

The goal of this article is to provide a fine-grained analysis of international human resource management research that addresses the different perspectives applied in that research. We coded 203 peer-reviewed international human resource management articles published between 2011 and 2018 with content analytical methods guided by the compass of management research developed by Sieben, which is rooted in critical management research. We were particularly attentive to the various discursive orientations international human resource management scholars have adopted, including ideologically critical, poststructuralist, functionalist and interpretive perspectives. We further examined which methods, theoretical perspectives and topics were common within and across different perspectives. This analysis indicated that critical research intending to politicize and question existing structures and ways of organizing is still marginal. Along with the dominance of functionalist and interpretive studies, papers in our dataset commonly use a strategic human resource perspective, are predominantly interested in the human resource management–performance link and focus rather narrowly on multinational corporations and expatriates. Furthermore, while international human resource management scholars increasingly account for the contextual embeddedness of organizations through macro-level theories, they mainly apply institutional perspectives that view organizations as adapting to institutional constraints. We propose a more diverse and reflexive approach – inspired by ideologically critical and poststructuralist perspectives – that may help to overcome these blind spots. Such an approach might, for instance, look at types of organizations other than multinational corporations and individuals other than highly skilled expatriates and might explicitly bring multiple, external stakeholders into the picture. We conclude by suggesting that international human resource management research and practice would benefit from more research diversity which enables more holistic analyses of phenomena, more innovative research and resultant insights, and more space for meta-theoretical reflections.

This paper contributes to our knowledge on talent management (TM) by conceptually and empirically investigating the peculiarities of TM and gender inclusion in talent development in the German context, as well as by analyzing whether TM is an inclusive HRM practice with respect to gender. Thus, we add an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of TM by linking it to important findings of gender and HRM studies with a specific focus on inclusion. A conceptualization of inclusive TM is suggested, and as a result of a comprehensive literature review, we identify five TM elements (talent definition, underlying career orientation, the content of talent development programs, the TM approach, and the talent selection process) which – depending on their design and characteristics – have an impact on the degree of gender bias and the discriminatory risk of TM. Respective propositions are suggested, and based on a qualitative comparative case study analysis, this paper provides empirical evidence from the German media industry, which shows important differences between cases in the identified TM elements and indicators concerning the gender inclusion of TM practices.