Abstract

There has been a development over the past twenty years of focused organizational strategies to address increased levels of workplace diversity in order to improve opportunities for diverse ‘others’. This focus has seen the development of the ‘business case’ for managing diversity and the claim that diversity has a long list of potential benefits for organisational performance and profitability. However little questioning has been developed around what this means for organisational functioning and the experience of those labelled ‘diverse’. This paper questions these processes by raising certain paradoxes within the diversity management literature. Its argument is that without addressing underlying assumptions of power within an organisational context, which pervades the literature itself, diversity management runs the risk of undermining, rather than increasing, opportunities for the diverse.