Abstract

We tackle relations that diversity management practices keep up with processes of differentiation and organizational change. We envisage these practices according to two points of view: their immediate effects on diversity managers as well as on individuals and concerned groups; their insertion in an ongoing corporate policy which gives them a sense and “organizes” them. What are the characteristics of a management and an organization capable of favoring the inclusion of discriminated persons, but more still the “inclusiveness”? This last notion underlines the capacity of the organization to be transformed in order to favor continuously the integration of persons corresponding to more and more diversified profiles, and for which it will be more necessary to take into account their specificities, thus their singularity. The notion of inclusive organization evokes agents’ inclusion of previously discriminated categories but intended to merge in an organizational and competence models centered on a dominant social type. The notion of inclusiveness questions these models. Which are then the potentialities and the limits of diversity management practices to build these transformative capacities? To begin to answer that question we base our argument on an inquiry within a major French firm.