Opening and closing the door to diversity: A dialectical analysis of the social production of diversity

SummaryThis ethnographic study at a large manufacturing company analyses a complex organizational change, focusing on a program to establish a diversity initiative. The study approaches “diversity” as a dialectical production process unfolding over time in workplace dynamics, producing contradictions and praxes. This study shows how a social production process – opening and closing the door to diversity – shapes and prioritizes, and concurrently suppresses and marginalizes, ideas about and interests in diversity in organizations. Emphasizing this contradictory notion of “opening and closing”, the study reveals processes of domination over particular sectoral interests attempting to control the direction of diversity production. These processes suppressed conflicting interests and limited the possibility of conceiving alternative diversity praxes that may have had emancipatory potential.

► A dialectical production process unfolding over time in workplace dynamics. ► A dialectical analysis includes social construction, context, contradiction, praxis. ► Identifying “discursive closure” and domination by particular sectoral interests. ► Technological rationality makes “non-business” aspects of diversity unrealistic. ► How can we bring about real emancipatory/transforming organizational praxes?