About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

18 Emp. Resp. & Rts. J. 1 (2006)

handle is hein.journals/emprrj18 and id is 1 raw text is: Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2006 (© 2006)
DOI: 10.1007/s10672-005-9000-9
Introduction to Special Issue
Editor's Introduction - Special Issue on Sexual
Orientation/Identity Issues in the Workplace
Published online: 23 April 2006
What a difference a decade makes!! I just finished perusing the program for the
Academy of Management Annual Meeting for 1996. There was virtually nothing on the
program that dealt with sexual orientation/identity issues in the workplace. At that point
not only were sexual orientation issues not on the radar screen of most Academy members
and/or seen as important to study, but management academicians who did choose to do
research in this area were generally assuming significant risks. One colleague of mine, who
had just completed his PhD at that time and wanted to do research in this area, was strongly
discouraged from doing so by his dissertation committee chair and other mentors. He was
told that such research was not mainstream or valued and that doing such research early
in his career, without the protection of tenure, was unquestionably career suicide.
At that time, those interested in doing research on sexual orientation/identity issues
were largely confined to the Women In Management (WIM) interest group. Slowly,
within this group a strong support network was formed. Each year a greater number of
individuals tested the waters by submitting and presenting their work on sexual orientation
at the Academy. Shortly thereafter WIM changed its name to Gender and Diversity in
Organizations (GDO) and became a full-fledged division. Not only were the numbers
of submission increasing but the quality of research being undertaken related to sexual
orientation/identity began to be noticed. Three years ago the unthinkable happened; a
paper whose research was focused on gay bathhouses won a Best Paper Award at the
Academy of Management Conference. The even bigger shock was that it was awarded in the
Organization and Management Theory Division. The authors, Bryant Hudson and Gerardo
Okhuysen, dual-handedly pushed the frontiers of sexual orientation research forward with
their creative, high-quality and very risky research. In a recent conversation, I told Bryant
that this work and its recognition are going to be regarded as a critical turning point in the
demarginilization of sexual orientation/identity research within the academic management
circles.
By 2005, the program of the Academy of Management Annual Meeting contained a
very wide range of sessions devoted to sexual orientation/identity issues; either grouped
together on their own or fully integrated within the other more traditional research domains.
Upon seeing the program and also hearing that Group and Organization Management, on
whose Editorial Board I have served for a number of years, was planning on doing a special
issue on sexual orientation/identity issues in the workplace, I prepared a call for papers to
1

0892-7545/06/0300-0001/0 © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

profiles profiles most