Topic：Managing Diversity in Europe
Speaker： Sebastien Point, Professor, Université de Strasbourg
Time：July 6, 2022 (Wednesday) 16:15—18:15
Virtual Platform：Tencent ID：558-3314-9190
Organizers：School of Business Administration, Office of International Exchange and Cooperation, Research Office
Speaker’s Profile:
Since 2009, Sébastien Point is full professor at EM Strasbourg Business School, Université de Strasbourg (France) where he teaches International Human Resource Management and International Management. Since 2016, he is heading the research center “HuManiS” at EM Strasbourg Business School. He holds a PhD from Université de Lyon (France) since 2001. In the last decade, he has taught in many places worldwide, such as Bucharest University of Economic Studies (RO), Dominican University (Chicago, US), PennState University (US), University of Southampton (UK) and in Vietnam (VN). His research centers on organizational discourse and over the past years, he has been researching diversity, international career and CEO discourse in corporate annual reports. He has a great interest in Qualitative Data analysis Software and regularly runs seminars on NVivo for beginners and advanced researchers in many countries. He has published in many international journals such as European Management Review, Journal of Business Ethics, Organizational Research Methods.
Lecture Preview：
“Diversity and inclusion” has become a key term across Europe. Each company constructs the meaning of ‘diversity’ through its many dimensions, which cover a wide-ranging set of individual differences, not just gender and race but other visible and less visible differences that might lead to discrimination in the workplace. The goal of the speech is to provide examples about what global organizations say and do with regard to “what is done” in different countries, and how they try to differentiate themselves from competitors. In order to attract talent and appear as an employer of choice, European organizations multiply diversity and inclusion statements in their websites and their official documents. Therefore, this “diversity and inclusion branding” has become a real mainstream across Europe. Although isomorphism and institutional pressures might encourage companies to promote a converging diversity branding, some dimensions are universal and call for a global statement. In other words, diversity and inclusion branding can overcome the contradiction between the homogeneity required by employer branding and the heterogeneity required by diversity.
