Romani, Laurence
Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets
Director of the Center for Responsible Leadership and CIVICA Academic Lead for SSE, my work focuses on organizations' contribution to inclusive societies, for example, with their recruitment programs. For the last few years, I have paid special attention to how the representation of persons with a migration background is done in recruitment processes. Topics that have become salient are 'merits', especially how merits are seen and evaluated in a recruitment, and I am investigating this with the projects MERITA as well as 'Solving the integration challenge of high-skilled migrants'.
Theoretical frameworks that I have found helpful for studying how merits are evaluated are for example, Lamont's theory of recognition (and de-stigmatisation) or Boltanski and Thévenot's Economies of Worth. I consider contributions from critical management, critical and pragmatic sociology, feminist and postcolonial organization studies to further diversity management research.
Research Areas:
Critical management studies
Migration studies
Multiple-paradigm studies
Current Project:
Solving the integration challenge of highly skilled migrants
MERITA: Shifting views on inclusion in Europe
The employable migrant: construction of employability by organizational actors
Selected recent Publications:
Morillas, M and Romani, L. (2023). Ideology, doxa and critical reflexive learning: The possibilities and limits of thinking that ‘diversity is good’, Management Learning, 54(4): 511-530.
Böhm, S., et al. (2022) Ethics at the Centre of Global and Local Challenges: Thoughts on the Future of Business Ethics, Journal of Business Ethics, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05239-2
Risberg, A. and Romani, L. (2022). Underemploying highly skilled migrants: An organizational logic protecting corporate ‘normality’. human relations, 75:4, pp. 655-680.
Romani, L; Zanoni, P and Holck, L. (2021) Radicalizing diversity (research): Time to resume talking about class, Gender, Work & Organization, online
Holgersson, C. and Romani, L. (2020) Tokenism revisited: when organizational culture challenges masculine norms, the experience of token is transformed, European Management Review.
Szkudlarek, B.; Romani, L.; Osland, J. and Caprar, D. (2020) The Sage Handbook of Contemporary Cross-Cultural Management. London: Sage.
Romani, L. Holck, L. and Risberg, A. (2019) Benevolent discrimination: explaining how Human Resources professionals can be blind to the harm of diversity initiatives. Organization. Online first & Open Access. See link in 'My documents'
Primecz, H., Mahadevan, J., Romani, L. (2016), Why is Cross-Cultural Management blind to power relations? Investigating ethnicity, language, gender and religion, International Journal of Cross-Cultural Management, 16(2), 127-136.
