“Diversity management” (DM) has become one of the more successful management ideas of the past 25 years. It entered the lexicon in the late 1980s in the U.S. as a response to growing frustration with legislation-based affirmative action and equal employment opportunity initiatives. DM was taken up in Europe a decade later, beginning in the UK and Netherlands.
DM aims to encourage employees to be comfortable with diversity in the workplace and appreciate differences in race, gender, or sexual orientation. It focuses on demographic groups, organizational self-interest, and workplace training. “Diversity” has become an industry in itself, fed by management consultants, conferences, and publications.
Writing in the Scandinavian Journal of Management, Evangelina Holvino (Simmons School of Management, Boston) and Annette Kamp (Roskilde University, Denmark) take a hard-boiled look at diversity management in practice in the U.S. and Europe. They identify a number of DM “dilemmas”:
:: Does DM refer to individual or group-based differences? For some, diversity refers to all the similarities and differences among organizational members. For others, diversity refers to identities based on membership in social groups and their power relations in organizations.
:: Is DM all about reproducing the status quo or “catalysing change in inequalities and power relations”?
:: Should DM be based on a business case or on social justice? In North America in particular, DM is sold as an effective HR and marketing strategy, encouraging team effectiveness, increasing employee retention, and improving financial performance. But as the authors point out, assessing DM outcomes is a tricky affair. Few organizations seem interested in measuring the success of their diversity efforts, and independent findings have been inconclusive or contradictory.
“DM, like other ideas, has become blurred and blunted, distorted through inappropriate quantification, and taken over by academic researchers making it increasingly unsuited for practical purposes,” Holvino and Kamp write. “In the U.S.A., DM has provided an opportunity to discuss differences, identity, power, and equity in organizations like no other management idea has done before, but its ‘success’ as a managerial discourse has hindered its power as an idea that can make more of a positive difference in the world.”
“Diversity management: Are we moving in the right direction? Reflections from both sides of the North Atlantic,” by Evangelina Holvino and Annette Kamp; Scandinavian Journal of Management (2009, 25, 395—403)
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