Archives par étiquette : RH/HR

How complex domination enables selection: Academic hiring conventions in a Pakistani university

Qamar Ali & Julia Brandl (2018)

European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 5:1-2, pp. 140-164

Abstract. The heterogeneity of criteria and of the faculty members involved in assessing candidates for academic positions raises the question how colleagues can find a common operational mode that enables them to select candidates. In this paper, we draw on convention theory (CT) to examine how powerful actors foster quietude and confidence in prevailing conventions which perpetuate their privileges. Findings from a study of a university in Pakistan show how actors use coordinative power to amend regulations, but also highlight how participating colleagues may resist this. The findings help to explicate the notion of complex domination and enrich CT scholars’ understanding of factors that can exacerbate inequalities in hiring.

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Understanding discrimination in hiring apprentices: how training companies use ethnicity to avoid organisational trouble

Christian Imdorf (2017)

Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 69(3), 405-423. 

Abstract. Children of immigrants from non-EU countries face particular problems to access apprenticeship training in German-speaking countries. In this context this article asks how recruiters in small and medium sized companies (SME) make sense of national and ethnic origin when hiring new apprentices. The author proposes Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory of justification in order to conceptualise ethnic discrimination in hiring. Accordingly, the social body of a company consists of multiple interweaved (industrial, domestic, market) ‘worlds’ of social coordination and justification. In order to avoid organisational trouble and to guarantee the further existence of the company, these worlds claim different principle of personnel assessment, some of them penalising applicants of specific ethnic origin. Empirically, the article refers to apprentice recruitment in Switzerland and Germany. It illustrates that employers in SME expect trouble in the domestic and in the market world of the company when hiring school leavers they perceive as foreigners. Hence, discriminatory categories such as ethnicity are used as symbolic and organisational resources for trouble avoidance in hiring apprentices.

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Handling paradoxical tensions through conventions. The case of performance appraisal

Arjan Kozica and Julia Brandl (2015)

In: German Journal of Research in Human Resource Management 29(1), pp. 49-68.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/239700221502900103

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ABSTRACT

“In this paper, we investigate how conventions enable organisational actors to cope with paradoxical tensions in performance appraisal systems. Building on a case study of a performance appraisal system reform in a public sector organisation, we analyse how this organisation enableds superiors to take into account both accountability and professional logic. When new appraisal rules required superiors to rank their employees according to their qualifications but also to show collegiate solidarity, superiors negotiated an organisation-wide understanding of the rules that enabled them to address both logics simultaneously. The study underlines the importance of collective understandings for individual responses to paradoxical tensions and reveals how performance appraisal systems can be operated according to different logics.”