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Chapter 3
Addressing Minority Discrimination
in a Master’s Education Program
for Construction Management
Martine Buser and Dimosthenis Kifokeris
Abstract Increasing minorities’ participation in high-tier and managerial positions
in the construction sector can compensate for the shortage of skilled workers faced
by the industry even in Sweden. However, relevant initiatives seem to not have
achieved substantial results yet. This is also evident in construction management
education, which then creates implications for the industry. In this paper, we attest
to shortcomings in tackling the aforementioned issues, as well as present possible
solutions. Theoretically, we adopt diversity management and critical diversity the-
ory and then conduct a literature review followed by an empirical focus on a mas-
ter’s education program for construction management in a Swedish university. Our
fndings show that while methods and policies may exist, they are generally imple-
mented ineffciently. Even more alarmingly, there can be a “diversity washing”
through relevant low-budgeted programs, which may serve more as an extraction
for underperforming managers rather than serious initiatives. As such, university-
proposed solutions may fail, as the organizational structure does not support them,
and the responsibility of implementation lies primarily with the teachers. We there-
fore propose broader initiatives with a strong refection in praxis – such as following
up on students’ behavior in the classroom and examining not only the way foreign-
ers can be integrated but also the way the majority is blindly maintaining and repro-
ducing its privilege. Those could allow construction management education to
contribute toward a diverse and equitable development of the Swedish construction
sector. In that vein, this paper aims to contribute to SDGs 4, 5, 8, and 10.
Keywords Minorities · Diversity · Construction industry · Construction
management education · Sweden
M. Buser (*) · D. Kifokeris
Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology,
Gothenburg, Sweden
e-mail: buser@chalmers.se; dimkif@chalmers.se
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
G. Lindahl, S. C. Gottlieb (eds.), SDGs in Construction Economics and Organization,
Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25498-7_3