Routledge Companion to Organizational Diversity Research Methods

Diversity in organizations is now an established topic of interest for practitioners and academics alike. A growing number of publications, including several handbooks, constitute a sizeable body of work that is documenting and analyzing diversity in organizations, drawing on disciplines such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, management, and economics.

This book addresses the complementary question of how diversity in organizations is, and can be, researched. As such, rather than claiming to provide an exhaustive overview of all the methods that have been employed to research diversity, the aim is to provide readers with insights into the potential research designs for such studies in contemporary organizations. This includes but is not limited to methods; providing critiques or novel perspectives on long-used methods, questioning the role of the researcher in the field, theorizing the researcher and their methods as activism, and finally problematizing research standpoints and their ontological, epistemological, and affective dimensions. With this the editors intend to reflect scholars' shifting emphases on identification of diversity and related practices (including concerns for intersectionality), the critique of such categorizations and practices, and the more recent emphasis on intervention.

To fulfill these ambitions, leading as well as up-and-coming scholars in the field contribute their reflections on these issues and illustrate their theoretical and methodological points with empirical insights from projects they are currently engaged in. A wide array of methods across the qualitative and quantitative spectrum are included, providing a holistic view on researching diversity in organizations by considering all aspects of research design, including the central but too often sidelined role of the researcher in it. Each contribution will unpack an actual empirical investigation in order to address and illustrate the diversity of research approaches to diversity in and around organizations, making this handbook of great value to academics, students, researchers, practitioners, and professionals with an interest in research methods in management, organizational studies, as well as diversity studies.