Thomas Calvard | University of Edinburgh (original) (raw)

Papers by Thomas Calvard

The Internet of People, Things and Services, 2018

Research Handbook of Diversity and Careers

The Psychology of Ethnicity in Organisations, 2017

Decades of investigations into diversity in the workplace have created mixed answers about what k... more Decades of investigations into diversity in the workplace have created mixed answers about what kinds of effects it has on employees and teams, and whether or not it can be managed effectively to generate positive outcomes for organizations. In contrast to mainstream work from management and psychology, critical views on workplace diversity have emerged that seek to grasp more fully the messy social and political realities of workplace diversity as they operate in context. Critical Perspectives on Diversity in Organizations therefore seeks to review, integrate, and build upon emerging critical perspectives on workplace diversity to help give a fuller understanding of how employee differences affect workplace interactions, relationships, employment, inequality, culture, and society. Critical perspectives help to fill in and openly recognize many of the more far-reaching issues that pure management and psychology approaches can leave out-issues of power, inequality, politics, history, culture, and lived experiences. If organizations do not try to take these issues into account and critically reflect on them, then diversity management is likely to remain a relatively blunt instrument or worse, a hollow piece of rhetoric. This book will be of interest to international graduate students and researchers working on topics associated with equality, diversity, and inclusion in organizations, as well as various organizational practitioners and activists engaged with these issues.

This paper explores the relationships between employees‟ psychological contract perceptions, pers... more This paper explores the relationships between employees‟ psychological contract perceptions, perspective-taking between employees and employers, and employees‟ responses to declining job satisfaction (e.g., absenteeism). Fifteen employees of a promotion agency participated in semi-structured telephone interviews, and their comments were explored qualitatively using template analysis. Employees‟ work behaviour was related to their perceptions of employers‟ psychological contract violation and the perspective-taking attempted by both parties. Implications for employment relationships and contingent workers are discussed.

Interest in resilience is on the rise. In Operations Management, much attention has focused on su... more Interest in resilience is on the rise. In Operations Management, much attention has focused on supply chain resilience, to the exclusion of in-company resilience. Implicit in this is an assumption that resilience mainly concerns resistance to, and recovery from, major disruptions. We challenge this assumption in two ways. First, we argue that resilience is relevant to operations within as well as between organizations. Second, we use a simulation of a manufacturing process to demonstrate empirically that resilience is associated with other aspects of manufacturing performance such as productivity, quality and agility.

Organization Science, 2017

Organizations, particularly those for whom safety and reliability are crucial, develop routines t... more Organizations, particularly those for whom safety and reliability are crucial, develop routines to protect them from failure. But even highly reliable organizations are not immune to disaster and prolonged periods of safe operation are punctuated by occasional catastrophes. Scholars of safety science label this the “paradox of almost totally safe systems,” noting that systems that are very safe under normal conditions may be vulnerable under unusual ones. In this paper, we explain, develop, and apply the concept of “organizational limits” to this puzzle through an analysis of the loss of Air France 447. We show that an initial, relatively minor limit violation set in train a cascade of human and technological limit violations, with catastrophic consequences. Focusing on cockpit automation, we argue that the same measures that make a system safe and predictable may introduce restrictions on cognition, which over time, inhibit or erode the disturbance-handling capability of the actors...

The current study investigated the levels of performance and well-being amongst 154 employees wit... more The current study investigated the levels of performance and well-being amongst 154 employees within a Caribbean coastguard organisation, including qualified and unqualified employees that were hired as a result of nepotism, as well as non-nepotistic employees. A mixture of indirect self-report questions and personnel file information were used as criteria to differentiate nepotistic status. In line with expectations, nepots

Sociology of Health and Illness, Sep 5, 2022

This article focuses on the workplace as a significant site of convergence between the discipline... more This article focuses on the workplace as a significant site of convergence between the disciplines of medical sociology and disability studies. As disability remains on the margins of sociological exploration and theorising relating to health and work, disabled workers remain on the margins of the workforce, subject to disproportionate rates of unemployment, under employment and workplace mistreatment. The article focuses on the experiences of people with 'leaky bodies', focussing specifically on employees who experience troubling menstruation and/or have gynaecological health conditions. It brings together data from three studies conducted between 2017 and 2020; interviews with disabled academics (n = 75), university staff with gynaecological health conditions (n = 23), and key stakeholders in universities (n = 36) (including university executives, line managers and human resources staff). These studies had separate, but linked foci, on the inaccessibility of workplaces, managing gynaecological health conditions at work and supporting disabled people at work

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021

The menstrual cycle remains neglected in explorations of public health, and entirely remiss in oc... more The menstrual cycle remains neglected in explorations of public health, and entirely remiss in occupational health literature, despite being a problematic source of gendered inequalities at work. This paper proposes the new concept of blood work to explain the relationship between menstruation (and associated gynaecological health conditions) and employment for women and trans/non-binary people. We build on and extend health and organisational literature on managing bodies at work by arguing that those who experience menstruation face additional work or labour in the management of their own bodies through the menstrual cycle. We discuss how this additional labour replicates problematic elements that are identifiable in public health initiatives, in that it is individualised, requiring individual women and trans/non-binary people to navigate unsupportive workplaces. We present findings from an analysis of qualitative survey data that were completed by 627 participants working in high...

Work, Employment and Society

Disabled people continue to face a variety of significant barriers to full participation and incl... more Disabled people continue to face a variety of significant barriers to full participation and inclusion in work and employment. However, their experiences remain only sparsely discussed in relation to human resource management (HRM) practices and employment contexts. The current study contributes to this gap in understanding by drawing together relevant work connecting HRM practices, diversity management and disability studies to examine the experiences of a sample of 75 disabled academics in the UK. Through the social relational model of disability, HRM practices socially construct disability in the workplace. Interview and email data from disabled academics in the UK are drawn upon to illustrate how organisational practices and policies, while intended to ‘accommodate’ disabled people, inadvertently construct and shape disability for people with impairments or chronic health conditions.

Management Learning, 2015

In this conceptual article, the relations between sensemaking, learning, and big data in organiza... more In this conceptual article, the relations between sensemaking, learning, and big data in organizations are explored. The availability and usage of big data by organizations is an issue of emerging importance, raising new and old themes for diverse commentators and researchers to investigate. Drawing on sensemaking, learning, and complexity perspectives, this article highlights four key challenges to be addressed if organizations are to engage the phenomenon of big data effectively and reflexively: responding to the dynamic complexity of big data in terms of “simplexity,” analyzing big data using interdisciplinary processes, responsible reflection on ideologies of learning and knowledge production when handling big data, and mutually aligning sensemaking with big data topics to map domains of application. This article concludes with additional implications arising from considering sensemaking in conjunction with big data analytics as a critical way of understanding unique aspects of ...

Journal of Business Ethics

Journal of Management Inquiry

Perspective-taking, or engaging with the viewpoints of others, has been linked to a range of posi... more Perspective-taking, or engaging with the viewpoints of others, has been linked to a range of positive and negative interpersonal outcomes. However, it has only been researched infrequently in organizations, and questions remain about how it might be developed as a multidimensional cooperative process and problem-solving capability more widely. To better understand this, this article presents findings from a 2-year change intervention with 10 US hospitals. Interview data from three time points (393 interviews, 197 staff members) reveal dimensions and levels of understanding underpinning the development of organizational perspective-taking. Actors’ accounts suggested several major interrelated dimensions of perspective-taking operating at local and system levels, through affective concern, cognitive understanding, and motivational efforts to improve the sharing and interpretation of diverse perspectives. The study has implications for how organizations can better foster perspective-ta...