In the Eveleigh Railway Workshops Train Cleaning Depot (ACDEP) case, intra-community ties, inward-looking cultural norms and exclusive linguistic codes prevailed for most of the migrant employees who belonged to the largest and/or most cohesive cultural groupings. Management may well have sought to enhance the individual human capital of all its migrant employees and the organisation’s social capital by introducing English language classes and cultural sensitivity training. However, the threat of punishment and exclusion for failing to conform to the collective norms that operated within their own specific ethnic groupings provided greater incentive than the pursuit of individual self-interest. Only those migrant employees from cultural groups that were not well-represented at ACDEP were sufficiently free from the constraints of ‘strong bonds of reciprocity and care’ to pursue their personal self-interests by investing in education provided by the English classes.
By participating in such management programs they not only responded to management initiated norms of cultural sensitivity and ‘mutual respect’, but also gained access to power and resources that had not been available to them previously either horizontally or vertically. In short, they crossed the vertical bridge that cut across cultural groups, occupations and hierarchies. From our perspective, these factors not only throw light on the barriers that can impede the success of the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) initiatives but also help to explain why the problems identified at that time continue to plague the NSW railways. Read the whole presentation (PPT) by Dimitria Groutsis.