Influence of Raters’ Attributes on Biases Toward Immigrants

Although immigrants offer many benefits for organizations and our society, they continue to experience unfair discrimination, prejudice, and hostility in the employment process. One contributing factor towards the negative perceptions toward immigrants are the raters’ attributes (i.e., decision makers in the workplace). These attributes include their demographic background (e.g., age, gender), differences between raters’ and immigrants’ cultural values, raters’ personality, and raters’ previous contact with immigrants. In order to understand raters’ biases toward immigrants, we used the social cognition framework (Miller & Brewer, 1984) to explain the reasons for these biases, and offered hypotheses to guide future research on the issue

Age and the Digital Divide

The digital divide is putting older workers at a disadvantage in gaining access and maintaining job opportunities. Despite this concern, little research has examined the extent that the digital divide (i.e., the gap between those who have access and can use the Internet and those who do not) (Hoffman & Novak, 1998) affects employment-related outcomes. Therefore, the primary purposes of this paper are to assess the extent that there are age differences in the digital divide, and examine the influence of these differences on employment opportunities. We present a model to guide research, offer hypotheses, and consider implications for future research and practice