Apologies for cross-postings: Revised deadline 15 February 2012
5th Equality, Diversity and Inclusion International Conference, 2012, Toulouse, France
23-25 July, 2012, Toulouse Business School
Stream 18 : DIVERSITY MANAGEMENT AND IDENTITY REGULATION
Stream Convenor :
Dr Olivia Kyriakidou, Assistant Professor in Organisational Behavior, Athens University of Economics and Business, Department of Business Administration, Patision 76, 10434 Athens, Greece, okyriakidou@aueb.gr
Twenty years after the emergence of diversity into the world of management, we need to have a concrete idea regarding the effects of diversity onto organizations' design, internal processes and outputs. Moreover, we need to critically explore the role diversity management initiatives play in modern post-Fordist organizations. In this sense, we aim to explore in this sub-theme whether diversity management represents a new, indirect mode of control, next to HRM and the management of organizational culture. Three main research questions guide the philosophy of our exploration:
a) Could diversity be seen as a major form of control that operates through the regulation of identity?
b) What narratives are produced within the realm of diversity management and to what extent do they provide specific constructions of the minority individuals?
c) How do the working subjects use such construction in order to define themselves?
We are concerned primarily with how the narrative and practice of diversity management accomplishes managerial control through the self-positioning of employees within managerially inspired discourses about work and organization with which they may become more or less identified and committed. Is the modern business of diversity management a form of managing employees' hopes, fears, and aspirations, rather than their behaviours directly? How is diversity management discourse enriched by the use of cultural media which produce positive and seductive meanings for minority individuals and lead to their subordination and control? We need to understand more in depth how diversity management may promote, more or less self-consciously, a particular form of organizational experience, for consumption by employees. In this sense, we need studies that focus directly upon the discursive and reflexive processes of identity constitutions and regulation within the realm of diversity management. We need to explore how mechanisms and practices of diversity management work inside the individuals' quest for self-definition, coherence and meaning.
However, the organizational regulation of identity is a precarious and contested process involving extensive identity work. Organisational members are not reducible to passive consumers of managerially designed and designated identities. In this sense, what type of identity work is evident in managerial efforts to introduce the discursive practices of 'diversity management'?
Concluding, our first aim in this sub-theme, is to advance an understanding of minority individuals' identity construction as a process in which the role of diversity management discourse in influencing the individual is balanced with other elements of the individuals' identities. Moreover, we aim to explore and specify the different means diversity management uses in order to pursue control through the regulation of identity. Finally, since organizational control is not necessarily effective in changing individuals' subjectivity and increasing their loyalty, we aim to specify acts of resistance and how they are lived by minority individuals. It is our intention to encourage the problematization of the established notion and conceptualization of diversity management and urge organizational and other theorists to render visible and question the taken-for-granted understandings that sustain and reproduce established boundaries in current diversity management initiatives.
Publication partnerships of EDI 2012 Toulouse conference
Associated to this conference are British Journal of Management, Cross-Cultural Management : an International Journal ; Equality, Diversity, Inclusion: an International Journal, European Journal of International Management and the European Journal of Industrial Relations. Pre selected best papers of the conference will be submitted to these journals who will process them according to their usual standards.
Relevant papers will be eligible to be included in the second edition of the International Handbook on Diversity Management at Work (to be published in 2013 with Edward Elgar), under the chief-editorship of Alain Klarsfeld. Stream organizers alongside participants to their stream may also want to write a summary comparative paper which might then qualify for this book project. See call http://www.viadeo.com/fr/event/006gnzvl84zvhv0/diversity-and-equality-international-research-project
Stream organizers are also advised that the book series Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Work (Book series by Emerald) headed by Professor Mustafa Özbilgin is associated to the conference and relevant stream proposals will be eligible for this book series subject to acceptance decision by professor Özbilgin who will attend the conference.
Indicative framework for the processing of papers by stream chairs
Papers' first versions: February 15, 2012. Papers will have to be subjected to two peer reviews organized by stream chairs.
Deadline for 1st review: March 1, 2012 (acceptance, acceptance with revisions following developmental feedback, rejection), 2012.
Deadline for revised paper: April 1, 2012
Final acceptance decision, best paper nominations and submission of best papers to the relevant associated journal (as agreed by submitter): May 1, 2012.
The review process of the best papers by partner journals remains under the total supervision of the respective journal chief-editors and independent from the conference dates.