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  • Discrimination at Work: The Psychological and Organizational Bases
  • Julie A. Kmec
Discrimination at Work: The Psychological and Organizational Bases Edited by Robert L. Dipboye and Adriene Colella Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005. 508 pages. $99.95 (cloth).

In one of the most comprehensive collections on workplace discrimination, the contributing authors make a strong case that workplace discrimination is alive and well, but workplaces are not beyond repair. As the title suggests, this collection of 18 chapters draws mainly from psychology to frame a discussion of workplace discrimination although some authors incorporate perspectives from management, economics and sociology into their discussions. In addition to synthesizing research on workplace discrimination, this volume also establishes a new framework for studying discrimination and new directions for future research.

The chapters are grouped into three sections with overlapping themes. The first section provides a comprehensive explanation of the individual, group, organization and extra-organizational causes of discrimination at work. While each chapter in this section covers one source of discrimination, the authors recognize that all levels contribute to and shape how people exhibit, experience and respond to discrimination. One chapter in this section, Chapter 3, critiques relational demography's ability to explain discrimination. The authors of this chapter suggest four ways relational demography can improve our understanding of discrimination. Their suggestions bridge the gap between psychology and demography in ways that easily translate into practice. Consistent with the section's focus, Chapter 4 discusses the role of group membership and demographic composition on workplace discrimination. This chapter offers tangible ways for organizations to avoid group-based discrimination: construct new identities for members or allow members' multiple identities to coexist. I anticipated greater specificity in the authors' solutions, but understand that space limitations and complexity of their solutions made that difficult. In this section's last chapter, the authors chart the environmental inputs, organizational throughputs and behaviors/processes, and multi-level outputs of discrimination. This framework will be extremely useful for scholars studying the organizational and environmental causes and consequences of discrimination. We learn from the chapters in this section that discrimination stems from a set of complex, inter-related processes and systems and that the elimination of discrimination requires equally complex solutions.

The second section considers discrimination on the basis of group membership. Chapter 6, which addresses organizational race composition, clearly demonstrates the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of workplace discrimination as well as a major limitation of all disciplines – the failure to study race beyond a black-white dichotomy. Less a criticism than a caveat, Chapter 7, on gender discrimination, concisely summarizes a substantial body of work, but does so at the expense of identifying the specific ways employers discriminate on the basis of sex. This section's remaining chapters discuss research on salient yet understudied dimensions of discrimination: sexual orientation, age, disability, personality and physical appearance. Together, these chapters demonstrate a crucial point about workplace discrimination – the underlying mechanisms linking different group memberships to disparate outcomes are varied. As a result, the theories that apply to one type of discrimination (e.g., race discrimination) do not necessarily apply to other forms of discrimination (e.g., age discrimination). For example, paternalism and pity on the part of a discriminator may set in motion disability discrimination. An [End Page 2367] entirely different mechanism, homophobia, may play a role in the discrimination that lesbians and gays face at work. That said, the chapters in this section offer researchers a theoretical framework for investigating multiple types of discrimination and point out just how little we know about discrimination outside of race and sex discrimination.

The volume's final section consists of six chapters that focus on the practice, policy and legal implications for the research summarized here. With the exception of Chapter 16 (a summary of the causes and consequences of employment discrimination outside of the United States) and Chapter 17 (a description of the process of studying Wyoming's sex wage gap), the chapters in this section offer researchers and practitioners advice on what to do about workplace discrimination. Readers should read Chapters 13 and 15 together. The former identifies human resource practices that can diversify organizations; the latter highlights the...

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