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Abstract

Due to the fact that immigration in Denmark is a more recent phenomenon, diversity management has had a much shorter history in politics as well as in business, and has not yet been institutionalized to the same degree as in for example North America, from where the concept originates. When crossing the Atlantic, the concept of diversity management merged with Danish universal welfare logics that offer a particular view on equality as sameness together with solidarity through corporate social responsibility. Drawing on 94 employee narratives about difference in a Danish workplace renowned for its diversity work, this article argues that a translation of the original American concept has taken place that turns diversity management into an ambiguous corporate activity when practised through Danish welfare logics. Paradoxically, corporate practices of social responsibility aimed at fostering equal opportunities obstruct successful labour-market integration, as differences are assimilated and marginalized rather than valued and respected. Economic redistribution is thus at the cost of recognition of difference contained in the business case of diversity. In this article we explore how difference can be reintroduced into the Danish welfare logics to balance the simultaneous need for redistribution and recognition of difference, which goes through aligning diversity management with critical scholarship by means of a norm-critical approach.

5. Concluding discussion: reintroducing difference differently through a norm-critical approach

A growing number of critical diversity studies have by now successfully and importantly exposed how underlying (mainly gendered and raced) discourses of business case diversity initiatives construct minorities in condescending ways, which paradoxically obstruct the effect of these initiatives (e.g. Ahonen, Tienari, Meriläinen, & Pullen, 2014; Zanoni and Janssens, 2004). However, despite having had an important impact on the diversity debate, these studies are first of all predominantly decontextualized and abstract, and secondly they pursue a goal of social justice through deconstructing the managerial conceptions of difference imbued within the mainstream business case for diversity (Ahonen et al., 2014; Ghorashi & Sabelis, 2013; Jack & Lorbiecki, 2007; Jonsen et al., 2013; Klarsfeld et al., 2012; Mamman, Kamoche & Bakuwa, 2012; Tatli, 2011). We have therefore lately witnessed a call for more contextualized as well as more practical critical studies (Boogaard & Roggeband, 2010; Holck, 2016a; Özbilgin & Tatli, 2011; Janssens & Zanoni, 2014; Ostendorp & Steyart, 2009; Schwabenland & Tomlinson, 2015; Siebers, 2009). This article has responded to this call and contributes to the debate in two distinct ways: First of all, the article has demonstrated how the particular historical development of the Danish welfare model and its logics of equality as sameness and solidarity as social responsibility can help to explain the continued low standing of minorities in Danish organizations. In this way, our analysis highlights how the welfare logics of equality as sameness and solidarity as social responsibility paradoxically obstruct successful integration of minorities in the workforce because minorities – through these logics – are constructed as deviant, as deficient, and as less valuable labour. Our analysis thus illustrates how diversity management initiatives can only be meaningfully “disassembled” by a historical-contemporary ideological contextualization. This allows us to understand the relevant fallacies and to translate them into meaningful changes. Contextualizing diversity management in a Danish setting brings about an understanding of how the current translation of diversity management in a Danish organization like Fastfood becomes an ambiguous, contradictory programme, by drawing on a complex combination of a sameness preference implied by the welfare logic of equality as sameness and inclusive labour-market schemes of solidarity through corporate social responsibility. As we have shown, these logics don’t cultivate respect and appreciation, but, rather, cultivate assimilation and further marginalization of difference. The logic of equality as sameness actively excludes minorities and views them as stereotypical others set apart from the Danish “family”. Simultaneously, solidarity as social responsibility serves to devaluate and neglect minority skills and competences brought to organizations. This leads to a situation where difference is problematized, as you can only be “equal” by assimilating into Danish “majority standards”, and solidarity is only offered based on a perception of minorities being “inferior”. As such, minority employees are left in an inclusion dilemma, as they are supposed to suppress their “difference” in cultural values and labour-market experience to become accepted, but they are bound to fail, as they never become “the same” (a “white Dane”). In the current situation, therefore, the translation of diversity management into a Danish context has led to a situation where redistributive practices seem to be at the cost of recognition. Regardless of the intentions, the Danish practice of diversity management fused with social responsibility does not redress the structural injustices of a majority-biased labour market. Instead, it only extends the division between the contributing majority and the receiving minority, thereby supporting patterns of misrecognition (Fraser, 1998). As a result, solidarity is sectarian, and valuing differences serves as a means of further misrecognition. Consequently, diversity management initiatives in a Danish setting most often do not even disturb the logic of equality as sameness. Rather, diversity management is disturbed and distorted by the underlying welfare logics, by fixing Danes and immigrants into a hierarchical relationship of superiority and inferiority that obstructs most diversity efforts to ensure equal opportunities in the workplace.