The Need for Anti‐Discrimination Policies in the Labour Market

Abstract

It will be argued here that the need for anti‐discrimination policies in the labour market — while patently obvious to the present audience — can also be reinforced via an analytical approach, which we have elsewhere described as a “socio‐economic systems” approach. Briefly, such an approach leads to the conclusion that in most areas of social economics (including discrimination) we should be concerned with the study of the structure and processes of the dynamic field of societal relations within a complex and interdependent environment of many systems (social, economic, legal, political, historical, psychological, technological and natural). Consequently, we need to study these environmental systems, the elements of the structure, the process of adaptation of these structural elements to their environment, the accommodation and conflict generated by these processes, the societal relations stemming from these reactions and the feedback mechanisms whereby the open and dynamic system constantly adjusts (Figure 1).