Transcending Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Work: A Self-Critical Engagement

The book reflects on ways of transcending Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) by establishing a dialogue between the professional experience of the authors and experts from academia and practitioners from financial services and executive search. The book emphasises the link and impact between what is taught and what is learned about EDI and how this reflects on later choices in career and workplace status. The book offers a critical and global perspective, emphasizing the multilocality and intersectionality dimension of diversity and unpicks key insights from different conceptualizations, like class, gender and postcolonialism and their relationship with the current paradigm of diversity and how people identify and communicate. With an extensive collection of testimonies and invitations for reflection, the book doesn’t limit the analysis to the influences of historical power relations in the workplace, but investigates at what stage multicultural power structures start developing a compulsory inclination to create ＂differences＂ and how this can influence hiring decision making and management in the workplace. In the book, academics and practitioners provide illumination and insights gleaned from their own personal experiences and perspectives. Whilst the research targeted financial services and executive search, the book’s findings will appeal globally to individuals of all age groups regardless of educational status, seniority or in which industry they are employed, particularly those who are aware of how each one expresses similarity and differences sometimes in not obvious ways.

Marguerite L Weber, MBA., CMgr MCMI., FREC, has worked in the U.K. and Australia with international recruitment mandates covering the Channel Islands; U.S.A; Europe; S.E. Asia; and the Middle East. In 2000, she co-founded Bevan Weber Associates (BWA), the first specialist alternative investment executive search firm run by women in the City of London, launching offices in Singapore. Her recruitment and executive search career has spanned over 30 years starting as operations support for the founders of the Michael Page Partnership. As well as Director of Operations for The Ton, an exclusive business introducing entrepreneurial investment ideas to private family offices around the world, Marguerite lectures part-time in Leadership and Organisation Studies at the University of West England’s Bristol Business School’s faculty of Business and Law. She has been project mentor for the Summer Enterprise Scholarships and sat on the judging panel of the ＂Dragon’s Den＂ style pitching for entrepreneurial students to secure funding from the University of West England and Santander Universities Accelerator fund.

Hugo Gaggiotti is Professor at the University of the West of England, UK. He has a PhD in Anthropology and a PhD in Management. He was a foreigner at birth and has remained displaced all his life. The focus of his writing is on the intersections between rhetoric, rituals, liminality and the symbolic construction of the meaning of work in mobile transnational workers. He conducted his fieldwork for many years in the borderlands industrial regions of Pindamonhangaba (Brazil), Ciudad Juarez (Mexico), Almaty (Kazakhstan), and currently in the US-Mexican borderlands of Baja California (British Council-Newton Fund Grant) and in UK (British Academy-Leverhulme).