Professional construction of diversity management in Korea

Abstract

IntroductionMany workplaces in Korea1 have put great emphasis on diversity. The Korean Workplace Panel Survey (KWPS) of 1,535 Korean workplaces surveyed in 2013 shows that 43% of the sampled workplaces have a set of policy statements for management. It is surprising that many workplaces in Korea have sought to manage diversity, because the in that country has been still male-dominant, ethnically homogeneous, and exclusive of the disabled.The expression workforce diversity refers to the differences among employees in a given workplace in terms of race, gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, language, physical abilities, disabilities, religion, cultural background, lifestyle, sexual orientation, tenure, and other variables that create socially meaningful distinctions among workers (Kossek and Lobel 1996). Diversity management refers to a variety of human resource (HR) strategies to recruit and retain employees with such diverse backgrounds (Magoshi and Chang 2009). Typical management practices include training, taskforces, affinity networks, and mentoring programs for particular minority groups within a workplace. These management practices and policies are usually designed to improve the inclusion of all employees into informal social networks and formal organizational programs (Jackson 1992; Kossek and Lobel 1996; Gilbert, Stead, Ivancevich 1999; DiTomaso, Post, and Parks-Yancy 2007).Since has recently attracted public attention in Korea, there is only a slight amount of literature on it. Only a few studies ask what the outcomes of management practices are (Lim 2010; Lee and Ko 2012; Lee et al. 2013; Min, Oh, and Park 2015). As many workplaces in the US have underscored and adopted various management practices to manage a diverse impartially and attract qualified employees with 'diverse' backgrounds (Kelly and Dobbin 1998; Dobbin, Kim, and Kalev 2012), studies regarding mainly rely on samples from the US. Building on the studies conducted in the US, I use the KWPS of 2011 and 2013 to examine factors related to whether or not workplaces in Korea have adopted a set of policy statements for management.In particular, this paper extends the literature on employment law and organizations into the Korean legal context. An important line of studies about employment law and organizations have mainly investigated the US cases, and these studies find how organizations introduce new employment practices in response to broad anti-discrimination law in Title VII of the Civil Right Act of 1964 in the US (Edelman 1990; Edelman 1992; Kelly and Dobbin 1999; Edelman, Uggen, and Erlanger 1999). These studies underscored that the legal uncertainty originating from the legal text in the common law system encouraged various social actors to participate in constructing practical meanings of the law and designing compliance programs.In contrast to the US case, the Korean legal system emulates the modern European civil law system, in particular the German system (Yang 1989). The main principle of that civil law tradition is to depend on written collections of the law so that there is no room for professionals to participate in constructing a practical meaning of laws (Glenn 2007). In other words, statutes are expected to be much less ambiguous than those in US laws. This suggests that HR and legal professionals may not be associated with the construction of the practical meaning of a law as has been the cases in the US (Baek and Kelly 2014).However, previous studies suggest that there may be openings for legal ambiguity even in a civil law system like Korea's. Indeed, professionals may affect the construction of the practical meaning of a law, as legal complexity has increased and the value of precedents and judicial discretion has been recognized in countries with a civil law tradition (Dainow 1966; Merryman 1981; Del Duca 2006). …