EXAMINE THE BUSINESS CASE FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF

Examine the business case for the management of diversity and discuss whether equality and diversity can ever really be achieved in practice

Examine the business case for the management of diversity and discuss whether equality and diversity can ever really be achieved in practice

Diversity management discourse has become part of organisation studies (Becker and Seidel, 2006; and organisational practice (Engel and Hofmann, 2004; European Commission, 2005; Fuchs and Hanappi-Egger, 2004; Trinkfass and Enders, 2006; Wolff, 2006). US-based multinational companies have been working with diversity management since the 1990s and more recently small- and medium-sized European-based enterprises have begun considering diversity management as a value adding measure (European Commission, 2005).

Diversity management discoursehas spread quickly in the European Union (EU) to reduce discriminatory structures and processes (fairness and anti-discrimination perspective), to improve a marketing image and orientation (access and legitimacy perspective), and to facilitate organisational learning about diversity (organisational learning perspective) (Dass and Parker, 1999) in order to enhance organisational performance (Chatman and Flynn, 2001; Earley and Mosakowski, 2000; Ely, 2004; Harrison et al., 1998; Jehn and Bezrukova, 2004; Richard et al., 2004; Sanchez and Brock, 1996; Watson et al., 1993). The diversity management discourse originating in the USA has also influenced EU legislation with EU anti-discrimination directives now covering gender, age, ethnicity, religion, disability and sexual orientation, the “big 6” of diversity management (Hardmeier and Vinz, 2007, pp. 28-9).

Evidence from the European Commission (2005) on business practices in the EU, however, shows that companies including Adecco, British Telecom, Deutsche Bank, Ford, IBM, and Shell take a piecemeal approach to diversity management. The practice is to approach the various dimensions of diversity one piece at a time which results in sequential engagement and implementation of diversity dimensions such a starting with gender or age and then adding on or subsuming other dimensions such as ethnicity or religion or belief under the umbrella of diversity called for the “harnessing of differences” in their definition of diversity management:

The basic concept of managing diversity accepts that the workforce consist of a diverse population of people. The diversity consists of visible and non-visible differences which will include factors such as sex, age, background, race, disability, personality and workstyle. It is founded on the premise that harnessing these differences will create a productive environment in which everybody feels valued, where their talents are being fully utilised and in which organisational goals are met.

This fundamental conception of diversity with its multiple dimensions, however, leads us to the question: what conceptions of identity underpin the diversity management discourse and do these conceptions reproduce heteronormativity? Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to contrast and confront diversity management discourse with queer perspectives in order to direct attention to diversity management discourse's reliance on processes that reproduce binary and heteronormative notions of identity in organisations. Queering is especially well-suited for unpacking the diversity management discourse and its implicit assumptions about identity because it strives to deconstruct the functions of binary categories in ...