Time: 1:00 - 2:00pm Venue: FB4.04/08, Fourth Floor, Bancroft Building, Mile End Campus, E1 4NS
Dr. Mustafa Bilgehan Ozturk, Senior Lecturer in Management, Middlesex University Business School
Openly gay managers in the US corporate context: continuing struggles for organisational inclusion and career advancement
Sexual orientation equality and diversity is increasingly viewed as a key principle of justice and fairness in the workplace. There is now a nascent but powerful recognition that sexual minority inclusion should be pursued as a significant business aim in order to successfully address a wide range of organisational concerns, such as employee rights, wellbeing, productivity and turnover, as well as organisational responsibilities towards employees. Therefore, the topic of this talk represents not only a timely and relevant research enquiry, but also an absorbing area of interest for a wide range of academics with various research interests involving business and management.
Extant equality and diversity research often considers sexual minorities an invisible stigma group, identifying antecedents and consequences of disclosure and predicates of organisational acceptance. Recent positive shifts in societal opinion and the growing number of “gay-friendly” organisations in the US require a recalibration of research efforts to represent the career concerns of sexual minority employees who are increasingly out at work. Through in-depth interviews with 20 gay male managers in US corporations, this research utilises the concept of tempered radicalism to investigate the interplay of agentic power and structural openings and constraints in struggles for workplace inclusion and career advancement.