Discrimination in health care industry: a research on public hospitals Kerim O ¨ zcan, Belkıs O ¨ zkara and Duygu Kızıldag ˘ Department of Management, Afyon Kocatepe University, Afyonkarahisar, Turkey Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this study is to investigate discrimination areas within public hospitals and discuss the potential reasons that will provide a contributive perspective on reducing discriminative behaviors. Design/methodology/approach – The research was conducted in public hospitals in Afyonkarahisar, a city in the central-west part of Turkey. Two distinct approaches were used to gather data, one of which was a questionnaire that was responded by 351 health care employees. And, the second method semi-structured interviews were conducted with five health care employees from each hospital. Findings – The research reveals that discriminative behaviors are not part of organizational life to a problematical extent in public hospitals. However, the dependence on governmental policies forces ideological/political engagements to play significant roles in public hospitals determination of discriminated groups. Professional solidarity, status-based stratification and embedded codes of patriarchal culture are other crucial dynamics, first two and last one causing, respectively, vocational and gender discrimination. Originality/value – This paper is an exploratory study focusing on discrimination among employees and from management to employees in the health care industry. Two distinct methods are used together to understand and analyze the areas and dynamics of discriminative behaviors. Keywords Discrimination, Health services, Turkey Paper type Research paper Introduction Though it has been one of the issues discussed for years, discrimination has been intensely taking place in the social agenda in recent years specifically with the effect of postmodern (Nicholson, 1990; Calas and Smircich, 1997) and critical perspectives (Grey and Willmott, 2005; Jenks, 2005). Postmodern issues such as fragmentation, diversification, sub-culture, and multi-culturalism; and critical perspectives referring the voice of silent and marginal crowds have accelerated the discussions on diversification in the workforce and its management. Furthermore, its relations to human rights make discrimination an archaic continuation of a judicial problematic (Block, 1992). Thus, this study is planned to glance at this controversial issue from the viewpoint of organizational behavior. We analyzed discrimination in public hospitals within Afyonkarahisar, a middle sized city of Turkey. Many studies discussing discrimination in the health care industry The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/2040-7149.htm The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor of the journal for their comments and suggestions. The authors would also like to thank Dicle Ulu and Sultan Tas ¸koparan for their support in collecting data and Jazmine Ransom for her support in editing the paper. EDI 30,1 22 Equality Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal Vol. 30 No. 1, 2011 pp. 22-40 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 2040-7149 DOI 10.1108/02610151111110054