Michàlle Mor Barak

Michàlle Mor Barak is in the vanguard of a new breed of management experts focusing on global workforce diversity. In her award-winning book, Managing Diversity: Toward a Globally Inclusive Workplace (2006), she proposes an original model for creating an “inclusive workplace” – one that helps businesses integrate with society via expanding circles of inclusion at the organizational, community, state/national and international levels.

Mor Barak’s research demonstrates that diversity management and inclusion, when adopted as key business strategies, represent more than just doing the right and moral thing. They also constitute good business. Diversity management is essential if corporations are to adapt to an increasingly diverse workforce, and it gives them a competitive advantage in recruitment, retention, customer relations, marketing and developing a positive corporate image. All of this, in turn, translates into profits.

An internationally renowned scholar, Mor Barak has led conferences on diversity at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy as well as at the Borchard Foundation’s Chateau de la Bretesche in France.

She also provides leadership for the USC School of Social Work’s Work & Life concentration as well as for the university’s joint MBA/MSW dual-degree program. “We are creating a new breed of boundary-crossing professionals with joint social work and business education,” she says, “who can initiate programs to help workers, families and communities while improving the corporate bottom line.”

• Michàlle Mor Barak's faculty home page
• USC Center for the Inclusive Workplace
• To read an article about Mor Barak’s George R. Terry Book Award from the Academy of Management, click here