Abstract
Diversity has become a buzzword in organizations–you will find it sprinkled liberally across vision and mission statements, annual reports, web pages, slide shows, and managers’ speeches. The need to ‘manage diversity’ is in fact one of those exhortations that slip out of a manager’s tongue as easily as those that call on organizations, ‘going forward’, to ‘think outside the box’, and ‘action’ all that ‘it takes’ to make it a ‘win-win situation’ for all ‘stakeholders’.
Is diversity then merely a part of the lexicon of management-speak? It would seem so, if you were to go by the way the term is bandied about without much clarity about what it stands for or about the issues of power and politics that surround it. The concept of ‘managing diversity’ is particularly controversial. Why is diversity something that needs to be ‘managed’ and if it is, who should ‘manage’ it?
Christina Shwabenland’s new book begins by acknowledging the tensions embedded in not only the concept of organizational diversity but also in the processes of managing diversity which are seen by some as building creativity and innovation and by others as a mechanism that allows powerful organizational members to control less powerful ones. But it is in the author’s exploration of a deeper tension ‘between similarity, that which we share with the other, and difference, that which is separate’ (p. 12) that we get a whole new perspective into the possibilities and challenges of diversity. She takes two distinct, yet inter-related approaches to understand and work with the notion of diversity–one metaphorical and the other dialectical.
These approaches take the ‘management’ of diversity from simple, mechanistic devices of forging conformity and operational efficiency to a more sophisticated and intellectual awareness of diversity that allows every individual to be more in tune with him/herself as well as other beings around and also with social, economic, cultural and political realities of the time. So why are metaphor and dialectic important? As Shwabenland says, they are both ‘ways of thinking that engage with notions of similarity and difference albeit in different ways’ (p. 14). The first part of the book deals with metaphor, how it works and how it can challenge stereotypes at individual, societal and organizational levels. The second part explores the dialectics of organizations and of organizing and that of similarities and differences and how a dialectical approach can lead to a more nuanced understanding of diversity.
The qualitative data that Schwabenland draws on for the book comprises a body of reflective reports written by students enrolled in a University module on Managing Diversity taught by the author, focus groups with students and excerpts of a couple of research projects authored or co-authored by her. The section on metaphor is overwhelmingly based on the reflections of students which are often deep but lack employee perspectives. Similarly, the exercises designed for the students to facilitate metaphorical thinking are full of insight but the pulse of the workplace can’t be felt strongly enough.
The book covers the literature on diversity in organizations quite extensively. In fact, the author does well to go beyond the traditional borders of organizational and management studies and draw on the works of, among others, philosophers such as Kwame Appiah, Zygmunt Bauman and Martha Nussbaum and postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty. Reaching out to scholars in diverse fields is particularly appropriate for a book on diversity.
Diversity is, of course, covered in its many different dimensions including gender, race, ethnicity, nationality and disability. But it would also have been good to have seen a deeper exploration of the communicative aspects of racism, sexism or other forms of institutionalized discrimination that frame the politics of managing diversity in organizations. The book does refer to the Habermasian notion of ‘communicative action’ but does not adequately take into account some of the feminist critiques of this notion which revolve around acknowledging the power differentials embedded in it. After all, the relationships between different groups of people in an organization are often manifested in the different ways in which they communicate with each other and those, in turn, reflect the existing dynamics of power in the organization.
Diversity is complex and so is writing about it. There is no way every thread of organizational diversity can be evaluated; even less so how each thread is entwined with other threads. There will, therefore, always be gaps in understanding the nature of diversity. Nevertheless, Schwabenland makes an effort to get to the core of the complexities of managing diversity. As she puts it: ‘Each dialectical dynamic, whether towards the centre or away, towards convergence or divergence, masks as much as it reveals. There are always messy bits, fragments, ideas, parts, people who don’t fit’ (p. 178).
While the book is well-written for the most, the style is a bit staccato at times. There are several paragraphs which begin with the name of a cited author and when there are number of paragraphs that follow this style in rapid succession, the reading experience can be slightly jarring. Overall, however, this is a valuable resource for students and organizational leaders alike who are keen to look at issues of diversity not merely from an instrumental and managerial perspective but through the human and artistic lenses of emotion, imagination and reflection.