Patrizia Zanoni

Guest Editorial: Unpacking Diversity, Grasping Inequality: Rethinking Difference Through Critical Perspectives

[Zanoni, Patrizia] Hasselt Univ, SEIN Ident Divers & Inequal Res, Fac Business Econ, B-3590 Diepenbeek, Belgium. [Zanoni, Patrizia; Janssens, Maddy] Katholieke Univ Leuven, Fac Business & Econ, Res Ctr Org Studies, B-3000 Louvain, Belgium. [Benschop, Yvonne] Radboud Univ Nijmegen, Inst Management Res, NL-6500 HK Nijmegen, Netherlands. [Nkomo, Stella] Univ Pretoria, Fac Econ & Management Sci, Dept Human Resource Management, ZA-0002 Pretoria, South Africa. patrizia.zanoni@uhasselt.be; maddy.janssens@econ.kuleuven.be; Y.Benschop@fm.ru.nl; stella.nkomo@up.ac.za

Deconstructing Difference: The Rhetoric of Human Resource Managers’ Diversity Discourses

This article analyses texts on diversity produced in 25 interviews with Flemish human resource (HR) managers from a critical discourse analysis and rhetorical perspective. Following critical discourse analysis, we analyse how HR managers define diversity, how their diversity discourses reflect existing managerial practices and underlying power relations, and how they reaffirm or challenge those managerial practices and power relations. Specifically, we examine how power enters HR managers’ local discourses of diversity through the very micro-dynamics of language by analysing the rhetorical schemes they use and the grand Discourses they draw from. This critical, text-focused approach to diversity discourses contributes to the development of a non-essentialist reconceptualization of diversity that acknowledges power.

Minority Employees Engaging with (Diversity) Management: An Analysis of Control, Agency, and Micro-Emancipation

This study analyses how minority employees engage with control in organizations. Differently from most critical studies of diversity management, which focus on how minority employees are discursively controlled, we approach (diversity) management as a constellation of both identity-regulating discourses and bureaucratic controls. We assume that minority employees are agents who actively resist and/or comply with the constellation of controls they are subject to. Based on qualitative data collected in a technical drawing company and a hospital, the specific constellation of controls in each organization is first reconstructed. Four interviews with minority employees are then analysed in depth, showing how their engagement with material and discursive controls creates both constraints and possibilities of micro-emancipation.

Many diversities for many services: Theorizing diversity (management) in service companies

Contrary to current definitions of diversity as a set of a priori sociodemographic characteristics, this study re-conceptualizes diversity as an organizational product. Through the analysis of qualitative data from four service organizations, we show that organization-specific understandings of diversity are based on the way employees’ sociodemographic differences affect the organization of work, either contributing to it or hampering it. Such understandings of diversity, in turn, shape organization-specific approaches to diversity management. From our empirical results, we further inductively derive two dimensions of service processes that appear to play a central role in shaping diversity (management) in service organizations: customers’ proximity versus invisibility and diversity-customized versus profession-customized service. We conclude the article on a more critical note, reflecting on how specific constellations of work/understanding of diversity/diversity management enable and/or constrain employees’ agency, including the possibility to challenge existing power relations.

Diversity in the lean automobile factory: doing class through gender, disability and age

This study advances a critical re-conceptualization of ‘diversity’ through class. Drawing on the case of CarCo, the Belgian branch of a North American automobile company, I show how the discursive constructions of various socio-demographic identities reflect underlying class relations between labour and capital and are, in turn, implicated in their reproduction. Reflecting the instrumental conceptualization of labour as the source of economic value in the capitalist mode of production, female, older and disabled workers were discursively constructed as unable or unwilling to perform as expected within the factory lean production system. These negative identities in turn legitimized the elimination of ‘different’ workers in the company restructuring and the outsourcing of the phases of the production process that could be carried out by them, materially reproducing class relations. The analysis unveils the ‘dark’ business case against diversity at CarCo, a company which was renowned as a ‘best’ case for diversity in Belgium. I argue that the re-conceptualization of diversity through class offers a powerful analytical tool to better understand how unequal power relations are played out in contemporary organizations.

The Power of Diversity Discourses at Work: On the Interlocking Nature of Diversities and Occupations

Drawing on Fairclough’s comprehensive social theory of discourse as text, social practice and discursive practice, the paper examines how discourses of diversity are implicated in the power dynamics in the Belgian branch of an international automobile company. Our analysis shows how diversity discourses are interlocked with occupations. On the one hand, speakers’ occupational practices are conditional for the emergence of multiple, occupation-distinct discourses of diversity. On the other, in their discursive practice, speakers not only construct diversity but at once deploy it as a symbolic currency to reaffirm their own occupational practices and related subject positions warranting voice in the workplace. Our study contributes to the extant critical diversity literature and the organizational scholarship on work by showing how the power dynamics of diversity cannot be adequately conceptualized without attending to occupational discursive and non-discursive practices.

Post-capitalistic politics in the making: The imaginary and praxis of alternative economies:

In June 2015, we launched the call for articles for this special issue in an attempt to catalyze the rising awareness, both within the critically oriented and the broader organization studies community, that we are today witnessing epochal changes, which are fundamentally redefining the social, economic, political, and environmental realities we live in in unforeseen and unimaginable ways. For many of us, the financial crisis of 2008 had crystallized the notion that capitalism in its very nature is in continuous crisis, as shown by four decades of persistent decline in economic growth rate and rise in overall indebtedness and economic inequality (Streeck, 2014, 2016). Yet the political debacle of party politics in the United Kingdom and the United States together with the rampant populism in various European countries have highlighted that this is not just another installment of a crisis-prone economic system. These ‘electoral mutinies’ suggest that what is under crisis is the governance system of neoliberalism itself (Fraser, 2017). The responses to this crisis have been proved severely wanting, leading to the weakening of all social and political institutions that offer a semblance of protection to the vulnerable (Wahl, 2017).