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This report summarizes the issues raised in papers presented at the recent meeting of the Southern Management Association (SMA) in Clearwater Beach, Florida, USA. SMA is a regional affiliate of the Academy of Management and hosts a meeting annually somewhere in the southern USA. There were 200 papers presented and nine symposium presentations. SMA offers a track for diversity issues, which this year was combined with ethics and social issues. It is interesting to note that among the 18 papers that were diversity-related, only half were included in sessions within the diversity track. The remaining nine were scattered across tracks devoted to human resources, organizational behavior, careers, and other management issues. This dispersion of diversity research throughout the subdisciplines within management may be a sign of progress, in that it represents an increasing acceptance of diversity issues as "real" concerns within management. It may also be a problem, in that it may signal a lack of identity or the absence of clear theoretical grounding for diversity research. The one symposium that was diversity related focused on the aging professoriate.
This report was written based on attendance at as many sessions that included diversity related papers as feasible, but given the dispersion of the papers throughout the conference, it was impossible to attend all of them. Many of the papers were also included in the Proceedings, and I read each paper that was available. Thus, this report offers some insight into the state of diversity research in smaller schools, especially in the Southern region of the USA. The areas of diversity included in the conference presentations were age, ethnicity, and gender. There were no papers that looked at religion, sexual orientation, or physical disability, despite the generally increasing amount of empirical attention to these concerns in the diversity literature.
There were three papers that addressed age diversity within the workforce, all from a conceptual basis. Interactions among employees representing different generations were suggested to promote learning within the organization, given that employees from different generations learned to respect one another ([1] Bartley et al. , 2006). Concerns about the exodus of the "baby boomer" generation, and the resulting loss of explicit and tacit knowledge from organizations, was discussed by [7] Kavanagh et al. (2006). They...