Chapter Objectives
After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
- Explain the background for diversity and gender studies as found in organizational and management research.
- Define diversity and diversity management.
- Define inclusion.
- Understand and explain intersectional theory and how it can be used in diversity studies.
- Articulate the main arguments for and against diversity management.
Chapter Outline
- Introduction
- Diversity in organizations
- Diversity management: an introduction
- Bridging the gap: establishing inclusive organizations
- Chapter review questions
- References
Introduction
In early European and North American organizational studies one can discern unspoken assumptions that organizations and workplaces are blind to the issues of workforce diversity and differences. For example, scholars have pointed out that organizations and organization studies are gender-blind (Acker, 1992) and colour-blind (Grimes, 2002) rather than gender-neutral and colour-neutral.
Blindness means not recognizing skin colour, gender and so on and their implications (e.g. expectations based on social gender roles, colour/ethnicity-based biases, etc.) in a given context.Neutrality refers to an ideal society in which gender and minority markers (such as skin colour, accent, clothes, etc.) are insignificant.
This gender and colour blindness occurred because the majority of employees were white men and primarily white male authors were writing for a white male readership (see Calás and Smircich, 1991, 2009; Grimes, 2002). However, since the time of these studies, women have increasingly joined the paid workforce, job mobility over national borders has increased, migrants and refugees are entering host country job markets at increasing numbers, and different sexual orientations are increasingly accepted in many societies. These demographic and societal changes have provoked awareness of the relevance of diversity and difference in organizations and have generated growth in diversity and gender research that contributes to the awareness and acceptance of issues of equality, diversity and difference in the workplace.
When using the terms diversity and difference in this book, we refer to diversity or difference in terms of social demography and social identity categories among the workforce. Diversity and difference should be understood rather broadly (see next section in this chapter), however, among the mostly used diversity categories are gender, age, ethnicity, and disability, to which we often refer throughout the book as well.
This book addresses issues of diversity and difference in organizations and offers concepts, theories and ways to understand and work with diversity. To begin with, this introductory chapter aims to set the stage in showing that diversity plays a role in organizations. We furthermore offer a discussion on how to conceptualize and define the term diversity. We argue that intersectional perspectives are valuable in understanding hierarchical differences and discrimination while also trying to avoid stereotyping and the reproduction of certain norms and power relations. We end the chapter by defining diversity management and inclusion.
Diversity in Organizations
Classical organization and management theories assume objectivity and universality by subconsciously assuming a specific social category is the norm in the organization. From a European and US perspective this norm is identified by organization scholars as consisting of white, middle-age, heterosexual, able-bodied, Christian men (e.g. Acker, 1992; Avery et al., 2004; Avery and McKay, 2006; Brooks and Edwards, 2009; Calás and Smircich, 1991, 2009; Grimes, 2002; Williams, 2006; Williams and Mavin, 2012).
Stop and Reflect
Think about an unspoken norm in your classroom or your work team. What are you tacitly assuming to hold true for all members of your group? (e.g. availability of students/colleagues/teachers; physical mobility of students/colleagues/teachers; certain language skills, etc.) How does the norm affect the group?
When organizations are analysed and understood from a diversity perspective they no longer appear as neutral and objective. Adopting diversity, difference and equality perspectives allows us to see organizations as, for example, gendered, coloured or ethnicized.
Since Max Weber’s early examination of bureaucracy (Weber, 1978) various theories of the organization have emerged, ranging from classical theories that view organizations as machines, via neo-classical theories on the social aspects of work, to postmodern perspectives that even question our belief in an objective reality (Hanappi-Egger, 2004; Mills et al., 2005). Step by step these theories have undermined the notion of the ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’ organization (Benschop and Doorewaard, 1998) while at the same time highlighting the social and political dimensions of organizations. Today we view organizations as socio-political systems; the role of workers and their identities, interests, preferences, wishes and motives have moved to the forefront of organization studies. Harassment and discrimination based on social categories will greatly disturb the social relations of employees, and thus negatively influence teamwork, promotion and competition (Zanoni et al., 2010).
Conceptualizing diversity and difference in organizations
Before the 1990s most investigations of diversity in management and organization focused mainly on the category of women, whereas other minority categories were more or less absent. In a review of leading management textbooks Mills and colleagues (2005) found that very few textbooks dealt with race or ethnicity.1 However, while gender remains an important diversity topic in organizations, scholars are now increasingly turning to the matter of diversity in a broader sense. The rather elastic concept of ‘diversity’ is often defined using six social categories of age, ethnicity, beliefs or religion, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity or expression. These categories refer to historically shaped groups who have been subjected to discrimination. The European Union (EU) has formulated an anti-discrimination guideline (see Chapter 2) using these six dimensions, and most companies addressing the topic of diversity apply the same categories when attempting to build inclusive organizations. Kandola and Fullerton (1998, p. 7) also support the use of these historically shaped social categories and add more diversity characteristics: ‘The basic concept of diversity accepts that the workforce consists of a diverse population of people. The diversity consists of visible and non-visible differences which include factors such as sex, age, background, race, disability, personality and work-style.’
Exercise
Look up the home pages of some European and US-based companies. Search for their diversity and inclusion statements and find out which diversity dimensions they use. Compare the various companies.
There are various types of diversity categories and ways to categorize minority and majority groups, but they concur in defining diversity as difference. An example of a rather broad definition of diversity is provided.
Diversity is ‘the collective amount of differences among members within a social unit with respect to a common attribute, X’ (Harrison and Klein, 2007, p. 1200; emphasis in the original).
This definition includes two important aspects. First, diversity is always related to a certain social unit and is thus a ‘compositional construct’. As a result, diversity is related to a unit (group, organization, society) but not to the individual members. In this sense, diversity is a relational concept measured against at least one or more particular attributes. This leads us to the second aspect: ‘A unit is not diverse per se. Rather, it is diverse with respect to one or more specific features of its members’ (Harrison and Klein, 2007, p. 1200).
Key Points
- Diversity is always related to a unit – a single person cannot be diverse.
- A unit is diverse with respect to one or more specific features – such as age, gender or educational background.
Conceptualizing diversity thus means to conceptualize attributes in which a social unit differs from another social unit. This implies specifying how one particular feature or attribute makes a group of people different from another group. So, if for example groups differ in terms of age, they are categorized according to the age differences...