This book critically examines current workplace diversity management
practices and explores a nuanced framework for undertaking, supporting,
and implementing policies that equally favor all people. It presents
critical perspectives that not only elevate respect for differences but
also provide insights into the nature and dynamics of differences in
view of an inclusive and truly participative organizational environment.
The book first presents a brief overview of the connotations associated
with workplace diversity and its effective management. Next, it focuses
on the organizational appropriation of differences through the formation
and mediation of various diversity discourses. It demonstrates the
particular articulations of these discourses with inequality and
oppressive structures that perpetuate structural disadvantage due to
existing power disparity between dominant and unprivileged group
members. The book then goes on to underscore the need of constructing
relational and context-sensitive diversity management frameworks.
Overall, the book outlines that current business cases for diversity
focus solely on instrumental goals and tangible outcomes and, as a
result, fail to fully capture the complexity as well as the
particularity of the diversity phenomenon. The book underlines the
necessity for a more inclusive paradigm, implying a progressive
problem-shift in the dominant diversity research agenda from a
market-driven business-oriented diversity management to one highly
valuing, affirming, and respecting otherness.
