Page 30 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

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An Introduction

Robert L. Dipboye
University of Central Florida

Adrienne Colella
Texas A M University

When we first considered editing this volume on workplace discrimina­
tion, we had reservations because employment discrimination has been
written about extensively in the social sciences. We wondered about what
new thinking could be added—how could this volume move the frontier of
employment discrimination research forward? How could this book distin­
guish itself from the myriad of other books on the topic? After some initial
research, we concluded that such a volume was indeed needed to bring
together a substantial, but disparate body of literature and to offer authors
who have written extensively on the topic a forum for suggesting the next
steps in workplace discrimination research. It is to these ends, integrating
a great body of literature based on different theory and methodology and
moving research in this area forward, that we hope this volume expands
the frontier of workplace discrimination research.
This book is concerned with prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination
in the workplace. We refer to prejudice as the attitudinal and especially the
affective biases that exist with regard to members of groups other than
those to which one belongs. Stereotyping is used to refer to the cognitive
biases against outgroup members and includes not only attributions of
traits to members of these groups but also beliefs about these individuals.

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