Exploring the Boundaries between Diversity Discourses and Practices, Identity Regulation and Workforce Control

Abstract:     
The main goal of the paper is to interpret the concepts of national and linguistic identity/diversity in the perspective of ideological control, by analysing both the managerial discourses and the work practices. We have studied how identity and diversity discourses reflect existing managerial practices and underlying power relations, and how they reproduce those managerial practices and power relations. For this purpose, a case study of a large Italian-French company will be presented: it is one of the world's leading aerospace company and the largest manufacturer of regional aircraft. The analysis is based on a qualitative investigation conducted in terms of grounded theory. We further show how such managerial language and practices tends to act on individual and collective identity, having an impact on organizational action in terms of ideological control. The dominating group (French management) tries to affect the sense of group identity/diversity in order to establish models of action for the organizational actors in a logic of maintaining the status quo. Under this respect, the discourse and praxis of diversity management are functional to reinforcing a binary vision of the type “in-group versus out-group” which reinforces the stereotypes and consolidates the “sense of the other” with respect to a category of “normality.”

Number of Pages in PDF File: 18

Keywords: diversity managament, organizational identity, critical

working papers series