Management & Business

MB336H

Diversity and Discrimination in the American Workplace:Is the Melting Pot Boiling Over?

Prof. Pushkala Prasad

America's broad commitment to multiculturalism and plurality is not without considerable challenge and tension. Nowhere is this more evident than within the workplace where employees and managers representing diverse sexual, ethnic, racial and age backgrounds come together and interact on a day-to-day basis. This course examines past and contemporary challenges facing workplace diversity by adopting historical, psychological, cultural and legal perspectives to understand multiculturalism at work. Conflicts between mainstream corporate and bureaucratic America and different social identity groups such as African Americans, women, Latinos and Latinas, gays and lesbians and older workers will be examined in this course. The course also examines formal institutional attempts at combating discrimination as well as informal institutional factors that keep discrimination alive.