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Revision with unchanged content. Productive Diversity was adopted as a government policy in the early 1990s with the aim to increase Australian business access to, and success in, trading with increasingly diverse domestic and export markets through the productive capacity of Australia s multicultural labour market. Despite Australia s highly multicultural workforce, however, policy adoption has been patchy. This research asks why some companies have actively adopted diversity management strategies while others have not. This book examines the concept and theory of productive diversity in the Australian context and critically analyses the varied ways in which the term productive diversity has been employed. This research tests whether or not there are certain business characteristics that are related to the adoption of productive diversity and shows the varied ways in which the policy concept has been deployed by Australia s most profitable companies. This book will be of interest to human resource management professionals, those engaged in social policy and planning and researchers in the fields of cultural studies, organisational theory and business management.

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is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Community, Ethnicity and Policy Alternatives (ICEPA) at Victoria University.

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