Categories of difference, whether they are based on gender, race, age, sexuality or other traits, are not neutral and detached from individuals: they matter for a person’s identity. We write this book starting from the concept of identity, as we believe that diversity management ultimately is about the management of people’s identities. However, despite being crucial for diversity and its management, identity theory is too rarely mobilized to help us to understand and discuss diversity management. Foregrounding the links between identity, diversity and diversity management is, therefore, an original angle compared to the bulk of the existing diversity management literature. We also believe that the topics of diversity and identity are ones that reach far beyond the professional sphere and our work lives. These are concepts and issues with profound intellectual and emotional reach that are relevant to all and find an echo in everyone’s experiences and reflections. Despite the fact that women, people of colour, the elderly and sexual minorities are often the target of diversity management initiatives, everyone has a gender, everyone has an age and everyone has a sexuality; some are just more noticed and subject to being managed than others are, and some belong to the dominating norm and are thus less visible and not subject to being managed. Reflecting on identity, therefore, makes us ask: who am I? But also: who am I not? And who do I want to be? Thus, we hope that the contents of this book will resonate with the readers beyond their professional or scholarly interest in the topic.
Tentative Definitions and Reflections
The terms ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’ could at first glance be seen as opposites, either as two facets of a coin or as two extremes on a continuum. Diversity suggests a multitude of possibilities and configurations of traits and attributes, none of which entirely overlap. Diversity is popularly a synonym of difference; it is associated with the constructs of separation, variety and disparity (Harrison and Klein 2007). In its etymology, the term has shifted from considerably negative connotations to more positive ones. ‘Diversity’ comes from the Latin diversus or diversitas, meaning both ‘various’ and ‘contrariety’. In both English and French, this duality of meaning carried on, as ‘diversity’ used to refer to a “fact of difference between two or more things or kinds” but also characterizing what is “being contrary to what is agreeable or right” (Etymonline 2018a). Before diversity became associated with a concern for inclusion and equality in society, it had since the late eighteenth century been a virtue associated with the rise of democracy as a political organization model. Identity, in turn, is synonymous with similarity, sameness and even oneness. The Latin roots of identity as identitas or idem point to a similar understanding. In addition, in its mathematical definition, identity is about equivalence rather than indistinguishability: A and B are identical if the equivalence is true despite changes in the values of the variables. Stronger theoretical and practical attention paid to the relational dimension of identity, of its situatedness, came about in the twentieth century, and the term ‘identity politics’ appeared only in the 1980s (Etymonline 2018b). There thus appears to have been a gradual shift from identity to ‘ipseity’, which means individual identity or selfhood.
Human beings are not mathematical objects, and exact meanings shift with time and place. A tension exists between the ideas of being identical to and being diverse from others: between the idea of being a ‘self’ different from all others and identifying with a group of others. Beyond definitions, how is it that we experience diversity and identity? In a recent retrospective of the internationally renowned artist Marina Abramović at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), one of the authors of this book took part in a performance that museum-goers were invited to re-enact. The instructions and tasks were quite simple: sit opposite another person, look them deep in the eyes, keep this connection as long as desired and then leave. She was seated opposite another person who, at least phenotypically, resembled her in a way that would be acknowledged by the casual onlooker: it was a person of similar gender, age, height and skin tone. Staring into her eyes, the first thought she had was about the complete alterity that was facing her: even the similarities could be broken down into a myriad of dissimilarities. The more time passed, the more that person seemed estranged, yet, concurrently, the shared experience and the shared gaze created a momentary unity, harmony and alignment—maybe a shared identity. This personal example is just one modest illustration of how diversity and identity are experienced simultaneously and instantaneously and how this experience is relational and contextual. Moreover, this performance, this experience, insisted on silence and immobility. Furthermore, we multiply the possibilities of encounters and divergences when we remove these constraints and go beyond the ‘physical envelope’.
So, how can we further characterize the relationship between diversity and identity? How can we work in this tension between diversity and identity—between the ‘others’ and ourselves? How does this translate in the workplace and into practices related to diversity and inclusion? Scholars and practitioners are without a doubt entitled to have diverging takes on these questions and diverging views on how to answer them. What we want to put on the front stage with this book is that definitions of diversity and identity are intrinsically linked and that these premises have consequences on how diversity management is studied, theorized and implemented in the workplace. In particular, we argue that the definitions and conceptualizations of identity are too often invisible or implicit in scholarly and practitioner efforts to develop the field of diversity in organizations and diversity management. Moreover, we see the relative absence of the acknowledgement of identity (theory) underpinnings to diversity-related debates as preventing a more fruitful dialogue across these vast arrays of perspectives, as well as between researchers and practitioners.
Taking identity and its different conceptualizations as a starting point is, however, not a straightforward task, and decisions had to be made as to how to address variation without reaching a counterproductive level of complexity. Identity is a broad and multidisciplinary topic and as such has been studied from varied perspectives, which have themselves been classified and labelled differently across time and disciplines. A broad partition, beyond its limitations, is a relevant way to make sense of a substantial body of literature. In organization studies, Kenny et al. (2011) have, for example, used a division of six theoretical perspectives: social identity theory (SIT), psychoanalysis, Foucauldian perspective, symbolic interactionism, narrative and micro-interactionist perspective. In a review of the literature on multiple identities, Ramarajan (2014) outlines five key perspectives: social psychological, sociological, developmental/psychodynamic, critical and intersectional. Concerning the ambiguity between the emphasis on identity and ipseity, Ramarajan notes the following:
A particular definitional issue that arises when analyzing the literature is that the terms ‘self’ (or ‘self-concept’) and ‘identity’ are used in at least three distinct ways. Scholars have sometimes used the terms self and identity interchangeably. They have also used the term self as a broad construct to denote the entire set of identities a person may have and the term identities to denote more specific targets, such as role or social group-based identities. Implied in this formulation is a hierarchical relationship between the self and various sub-components of the self, the identities. Scholars have also sometimes proposed the opposite, that a person has one core identity but it is composed of various selves. (Ramarajan 2014, p. 594)
When choosing our partition of the identity literature, we focused on perspectives that encompass both self and identity. For the analytical purpose of discussing the theoretical links between the identity and diversity research, we organize our reflection around the three following perspectives on identity: social identity and related theories; critical perspectives on identity; and post-structural perspectives on identity. In this book, we choose to discuss and interpret existing scholarly work and practices around diversity in the workplace along these ‘fault lines’. Besides, some key division points are recurrent in the identity literature, mainly around the issue of “the extent to which identities are chosen or ascribed, stable or dynamic, coherent or fragmented” (Brown 2015, p. 23). Moreover, Brown emphasizes the notions of choice, stability, coherence, positivity and authenticity as central debates in identity research (2015, p. 21). We pay attention to such discussions across the chapters.
There are obvious limitations to our choices. First, they indeed limit our capacity to develop a finer-grained discussion of the identity literature. As we aim to provide a compelling yet succinct overview of what connects diversity and identity in the workplace, we refer the reader to more specialized accounts of identity scholarship in management and organization studies and beyond. This also means that we categorize existing work about diversity and diversity management into a predefined set of ‘identity perspective boxes’ that are not always a perfect fit and, more importantly, that reflect our subjective reading of scholarly work. Moreover, importantly, we could have gone the reverse way and started with existing classifications of the diversity literature to see if and how they match specific identity perspectives. As we aim to bring more focus on the concept of identity than is currently the case in diversity scholarship and practice, we have not chosen to do so. Moreover, while in some cases the identity-related theoretical inspirations of diversity scholarship are quite obvious, others draw on a synthesis of approaches, or such interrelations are left to the reader’s appraisal. This is by no means surprising or specific to this stream of research, and a lack of explicitness is witnessed in identity scholarship itself (Kenny et al. 2011). Yet, we certainly hope that the authors we cite will not themselves feel pigeonholed and assigned a specific identity in a book where we try to deconstruct and reconstruct such lines of thought.
Outline of Aims and Contents
We lack a clear view of the overlap or discrepancy of the perspectives between researchers and between researchers and practitioners in the field. This is why this book targets students, scholars and practitioners interested in matters of diversity, its management and how employee identity is the object of such management. The purpose here is to review the different perspectives on identity and read the diversity literature through these lenses. The purpose of the review is not to judge the perspectives on identity and assign any normative value to their translation into diversity but to stress the importance of understanding the theoretical links between the different identity perspectives and the diversity literature. We propose to look at the diversity literature through the lens of identity and show the advantages and limitations of each approach. We do not aim to advocate for one of the existing perspectives or for a new one. However, we do not stop at the theoretical classification but are concerned with how our article can foster research that is aware of the conceptual divisions and draw on the benefits of their differences. What we would like to emphasize with this approach is that even though no perspective is intrinsically ‘better’ than the others, there are dilemmas, situations, problematics, issues and political circumstances—theoretical as well as practical—that may call for the pre-eminence of one perspective over another. We do this in two ways: (1) we show how each perspective is distinct but also overlaps others and (2) we show how each perspective offers different possibilities and has different consequences for diversity management. Here is an overview of the chapters that constitute the remainder of the book.
In Chap. 2, we expand on the relevance of considering identity and diversity in conjunction and explicitly link diversity and identity in diversity scholarship and diversity management. Before moving on to the chapters delving more into the three perspectives on identity we focus on in this book, we discuss how identities are somehow invisible in the most popular paradigms for diversity ma...