Diversity and its management as a dialectical process: Encountering Sweden and the U.S

Assimilation, Integration or Inclusion? A Dialectical Perspective on the Organizational Socialization of Migrants

Given the increasing importance of migrations around the world, and the challenges that migrants face in entering the labor market, the process of socialization of migrants into organizations deserves more attention from management scholars. Indeed, societal discourses promoting equality and diversity often appear to be in contradiction with the unequal power relations migrants experience on entering the workforce. Drawing on a dialectic perspective and a qualitative meta-synthesis methodology, we show how the practices engaged in by organizations to socialize migrant employees are deeply embedded in and influenced by macro-social contexts that may place migrants at a disadvantage, giving rise to emerging tensions. We examine a range of contingencies that can mitigate the inequalities that migrants experience, and we reveal a variety of dynamic dialectical pathways surrounding migrant socialization practices through which they may be reproduced or transformed depending on the mutual relationships between situated conditions, emerging tensions and human praxes.

Benevolent discrimination: Explaining how human resources professionals can be blind to the harm of diversity initiatives

This article contributes to critical diversity management studies by exploring how human resources professionals do not see that the diversity measures they initiate can contribute to the reproduction of inequalities. We argue that framing such practices as benevolent obscures the fact that they are discriminatory acts. Drawing on the concept of benevolent discrimination, we conceptualise it along three dimensions: (1) a well-intended effort to address discrimination within (2) a social relationship that constructs the others as inferior and in need of help, which is granted with (3) the expectation that they will accommodate into the existing hierarchical order. Benevolent discrimination is a subtle and structural form of discrimination that is difficult to see for those performing it, because it frames their action as positive, in solidarity with the (inferior) other who is helped, and within a hierarchical order that is taken for granted. We develop the concept of benevolent discrimination building on an in-depth qualitative case study of a Swedish organisation that is believed to be exemplary in its engagement in diversity management initiatives. The organisation is however swayed by an inequality regime based on the intersection of class and ethnicity. We argue that it is precisely because human resources professionals frame their actions as acts of benevolence that they cannot see how they take part in organisational discrimination.

Traces of equality policy and diversity management in Finnish work organizations

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how equality and diversity are experienced in everyday work within Finnish work organizations and how equality policy and diversity management participate in maintaining the inequality regimes of the organizations.

Design/methodology/approach

The empirical findings are based on 31 interviews, which were collected in two private sector work organizations. Inequality regimes, the interlocked practices, and processes that result in continuing inequalities in all work organizations, are used as an analytic tool.

Findings

There is an individualizing tendency of equality in Finnish work organizations, which is also the premise of diversity management. Accordingly, the organizations cannot address structural and historical discrimination based on gender, race, and class. Also, when diversity is intrinsic to the corporate image, the members of the organization downplay and legitimize inequalities in their organization.

Originality/value

The paper analyzes inequality regimes in a context that should be ideal for equality and diversity: Finland, where gender equality policies are relatively progressive, and organizations that strive for equality and diversity. This gives new insight on why inequalities are difficult to change.

Managing protean diversity

Recently, global workforce diversity and its management have received criticism for not paying attention to the contextual influence stemming from socially constructed dialectics of power and politics. These contextual dynamics, however, tend to be viewed as external to the organization. In this article, we follow the call for critically investigating the contexts influencing diversity management by analyzing the development of a global human resource management project initiated to promote a culturally diverse workforce. We find that despite good intentions, as well as support from the top management, the project dissolves through micropolitics and power dynamics. We contribute to the critical literature on workforce diversity by identifying how organizational contextual dynamics influence the way the concept of workforce diversity is constructed and understood at work. Based on these findings, we develop the concept of protean diversity to better understand how to manage the ever-changing and unstable nature of contemporary workforce diversity.

Understanding approaches to managing diversity in the workplace

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to enhance understanding of why and how companies implement diversity management in practice, and of factors that may explain their approach.

Design/methodology/approach

– This study takes inspiration from existing typologies depicting organisation-wide perspectives on diversity management, and articulates them in more detail by applying practice-driven indicators and highlighting possible contingent factors at play. The resulting framework is used to investigate diversity management in Italy. Data from a survey conducted among 90 companies and two focus groups with experts and managers are presented.

Findings

– The most common approach among Italian companies focuses on addressing social expectations, seemingly shaped by isomorphic pressures and the need to secure legitimacy in their environment. Results also point to an understanding and practice of diversity management in Italy that also incorporate compliance and opportunity-oriented aspects, in an interplay between coercion and voluntarism that reflects local perspective and priorities.

Originality/value

– This study makes an effort to address the paucity of studies linking approaches to managing diversity with managerial interventions and contextual factors. The research model connecting approaches with practice-driven aspects and explanatory factors shows descriptive and predictive potential, although it should be contextualised to the specific setting under investigation. This study also fills a research gap in Italy, where existing research primarily involves case studies and qualitative approaches and focuses on gender issues. Implications for research and practice drawn from this study can be useful to scholars and practitioners in other countries.

Grounded intersectionality

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to build on contemporary intersectional literature to develop a grounded methodological framework for the study of social differences.

Design/methodology/approach

– A systematic literature review serves as the foundation for a discussion of the challenges associated with intersectional research. The findings assist in positioning the proposed methodological framework within recent intersectional debates.

Findings

– The review shows a rise in intersectional publications since the birth of the “intersectionality” term in 1989. Moreover, the paper points to four tensions within the field: a tension between looking at or beyond oppression; a tension between structural-oriented and process-oriented perspectives; an apparent incommensurability among the macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis; and a lack of coherent methodology.

Research limitations/implications

– On the basis of the highlighted tensions in contemporary research as well as the limitations of that research, the present presents a methodological framework and a discussion of the implications of that framework for the wider diversity literature.

Practical implications

– The paper suggests an empirically grounded approach to studying differences. This provides an opportunity, for scholars and practitioners, to reassess possible a priori given assumptions, and open up to new explorations beyond conventional identity theorization.

Social implications

– The paper suggests a need for an empirically grounded approach to studying social differences, which would not only create an opportunity to reassess common assumptions but also open up for explorations beyond conventional identity theorizations.

Originality/value

– The framework departs from traditional (critical) diversity scholarship, as it is process oriented but still emphasizes stable concepts. Moreover, it does not give primacy to oppression. Finally, it adopts a critical stance on the nature of the macro, meso, and micro levels as dominant analytical perspectives. As a result, this paper focusses on the importance of intersectionality as a conceptual tool for exploring social differences.

(Mis)managing diversity: exploring the dangers of diversity management orthodoxy

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to challenge the dominance of the mainstream discourse and practice of diversity management (DM) by identifying and problematizing three distinct but related issues that it encompasses: first, its tendency to displace all alternative approaches; second, its general neglect of the social-historical context and third, its almost exclusive focus on the business case rationale for supporting diversity.

Design/methodology/approach

– Employing ethnographic research methods, the empirical material was collected in an international manufacturing corporation based in Sweden. It consists of three different, but interconnected approaches: archival research, interviews and observations.

Findings

– The paper shows that in neglecting power, identity, intersectionality and the changing socio-historical context of diversity, a well-meaning corporate diversity programme tended to obscure ethnic and age-related disadvantages at work.

Research limitations/implications

– The limitations of this research relate largely to its dependence on a single case study and the limited focus on diversity as it affected able-bodied, white male immigrant workers. A broader study of the multiplicity of types of discrimination and ways in which diversity is managed in a range of countries and organizations could facilitate a more in-depth exploration of these issues and arguments.

Originality/value

– Although not entirely new, the three arguments that have been drawn upon to discuss, analyse and illustrate DM through our data have rarely been brought together in one theoretical and empirical study.

Managerial Gender Diversity and Firm Performance

This study examines the relationship between managerial gender diversity (MGD) and firm performance. It outlines how extremely low and extremely high levels of MGD can trigger group processes that can impede the attainment of the performance benefits associated with moderate levels of MGD. Findings from longitudinal panel data from financial service firms in Portugal suggest that the effects of MGD on firm performance are best captured by a non-linear function with two breaking points. This study introduces a framework that combines different theoretical perspectives focused on tokenism, subgroup formation, divergent thinking, and other group processes linked to positive and negative gender-diversity consequences. Corresponding overall firm-performance outcomes are contingent upon the level of MGD.

Regularities of diversity discourse: Address, categorization, and invitation

Managerial discourses on diversity invoke goals of inclusion and emancipation of suppressed individuals and groups as well as objectives of creating benefits for organizations and society. Partially due to this two-fold emphasis, diversity discourses may, however, be as restricting as they are liberating to the subjects of which they speak. In this article we suggest that utterances pertaining to diversity discourse should be understood as constitutive rhetoric marked by three discursive regularities: address, categorization, and invitation. These regularities underlie and restrain the multiple discursive practices of the developing field of diversity management, and as researchers and practitioners alike continue to explore and enhance this field it is important to understand – and seek to broaden – its conditions of possibility. Emphasizing the theoretical argument about discursive regularities and their articulation, we provide an illustrative example of the how different discursive practices may reproduce common limitations by exploring contributions to Danish diversity discourse.

Regularities of diversity discourse: Address, categorization, and invitation

Managerial discourses on diversity invoke goals of inclusion and emancipation of suppressed individuals and groups as well as objectives of creating benefits for organizations and society. Partially due to this two-fold emphasis, diversity discourses may, however, be as restricting as they are liberating to the subjects of which they speak. In this article we suggest that utterances pertaining to diversity discourse should be understood as constitutive rhetoric marked by three discursive regularities: address, categorization, and invitation. These regularities underlie and restrain the multiple discursive practices of the developing field of diversity management, and as researchers and practitioners alike continue to explore and enhance this field it is important to understand – and seek to broaden – its conditions of possibility. Emphasizing the theoretical argument about discursive regularities and their articulation, we provide an illustrative example of the how different discursive practices may reproduce common limitations by exploring contributions to Danish diversity discourse.