Discrimination

Introduction

The study of discrimination in organizational behavior has a long history (Dipboye and Halverson, 2004). Before tracing this history, it is important to locate the concept of discrimination in relationship to its corollary concepts: stereotyping and prejudice. In Gordon Allport's (1954) classic book, The Nature of Prejudice, he argued that an acceptable definition of prejudice had to include two essential elements. First, there must be an attitude of favor or disfavor; second, there had to be an over generalized, erroneous belief. The latter generally encompasses the concept of stereotypes, a term coined by Lippman (1922) and borrowed from printing lexicon to indicate its reference to a fixed, unchanging mental process. Discrimination captures the behavior element of Allport's classic conceptualization, and is typically defined as ...