Diverse Identities in Organizations

Introduction

When the first edition of this handbook was written, diversity was a nascent topic in organization studies. Most attention had come from practitioners interested in how to ‘manage diversity’ in light of the forecasted changes in the demographic composition of the US workforce (Johnston and Packer 1987; Thomas 1989; Johnston 1991; Loden and Rosener 1991; Morrison 1992). At the time, scholarly attention to diversity was rather sparse (Jackson et al. 1992; Cox 1993; Watson et al. 1993). In the first edition of this handbook, Nkomo and Cox (1996) pointed out six ways in which the study of diversity could be advanced. The good news is that a substantial body of academic research on diversity has appeared since the first edition of this handbook. At the same time, the interest in diversity has spread beyond US borders to other areas of the world (e.g. D'Netto and Sohal 1999; Glastra 2000; Lorbiecki and Jack 2000; Nyambegera 2002). In Europe, the influx of immigrant workers coupled with falling birth rates of native populations have resulted in employers defining managing diversity as a significant challenge (Point and Singh 2003).

The bad news is that, while some of the issues identified by Nkomo and Cox (1996) have been addressed, there is still much to do about diversity, despite efforts to extend existing frameworks and the emergence of post-modern and critical theory perspectives on diversity. The increased volume of work has not brought agreement on the very meaning of diversity. All of this makes the task of reviewing the field cumbersome. As Ragins and Gonzalez (2003) note, any attempt to summarize the field places one on a slippery slope. However, it is somewhat clear that diversity refers to identities based on membership in social and demographic groups and how differences in identities affect social relations in organizations. We define diversity as a mixture of people with different group identities within the same social system. Thus, our treatment of diversity in this chapter is grounded in the notion of diverse group identities and their meaning within the context of organizations.

Faced with the challenge of writing about a construct that is presented as appearing out of nowhere, we begin by tracing the evolution and history of the concept within the broader frame of modernist approaches to organization and contemporary post-modernist projects (Clegg 1990; Martin 1992; Smircich and Calás 1999). This history sheds light on when and why the topic has become important as well as illuminating why diversity research has taken its particular direction. Next, we review the literature on diversity in organizations with particular attention to understanding what happens when groups with different identities come together in an organization. For each theory/body of work, we used the following five questions as a lens for our review: How is diversity defined? How is diversity measured? From whose standpoint is diversity defined? What is the level of analysis? What are the effects of diversity in organizations? We conclude with a number of dilemmas and problematic issues that remain despite the increased scholarly attention to diversity in organizations.

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