Managing Multiculturalism and Diversity in Australian Organizations

Running Head: SOCIOLOGY 0
MANAGING
MULTICULTURALIS
M AND DIVERSITY
SystemJP

SOCIOLOGY 2
It was the start of Spring and Wang who was from China, recently got shifted to
Australia to avail the lucrative job offer in an Australian company, as coming to Australia, Wang
had various apprehensions about how the country would welcome him as a Chinese person, on
the day of his first joining, he was oriented with the staff there, the boss welcomed him warmly
but inside of him, Wang was missing the joy of attending the spring festival with his family who
have accompanied him to Australia as he felt himself as a minority in the country, on the day of
festival, his boss got shocked to see him coming and told him that it was the paid holiday for
nearly 40 percent of Australian employees who have Chinese origin or those employees who
have shifted to the country just like him. On knowing this he felt the burst of joy and found
himself lucky to get settled in the multi-cultural country where the interest of people from
different culture is taken care of. The situation described above points out multi-cultural history
of Australia where people from different cultures share the understanding of each other festivals,
traditional practices and languages. The following essay would be discussing that how
multiculturalism in Australia has created both opportunities and challenges in working with
diverse population in an effective manner.
According to author Arasaratnam, Australia is a multi-cultural country which consist of
people who are Australian natives, Britishers and immigrants from various countries. The
population of Australia which is 23.4 million is considered as one of the most linguistically and
culturally diverse populations in the world. Around 3 percent are Australian natives and 75
percent of the population have their origin other than Australia. The countries which contribute
majorly to the culturally diversified population of the country are England, New Zealand and
China and around 200 languages are spoken in Australian. In 1970, Australian multi-culturalism
policy replaced its assimilation policy which means the culturalism is defined not by a religion
but by recognition of all the cultures which reside in Australia (Arasaratnam, 2014).
According to the authors Syed & Kramar,the cultural diversity has been of great
advantage to Australian Organizations as it has inculcated discrimination free environment
making employees more receptive to other people cultures just like Wesfarmers which is
committed to ensuring diversity within its group through its great diversity policies, the diversity
creates the harmonious and healthy working environment where people are understanding
towards each other religious sentiments and emotions (Syed & Kramar, 2010). Another