Fostering diversity work as a process of lifelong learning: A partnership case study with an immigrant services organisation.

Abstract

Diversity work is an area of growing interest for organisations in both the private and public sectors. In a nutshell, the term refers to the work conducted within an organisation that promotes inclusive and equitable engagement with people and communities across social differences such as gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and religion. Related research has generated relatively more knowledge about the challenges and problems of diversity initiatives than about effective practices that genuinely foster social equity and inclusion. This article contributes to the latter with a partnership case study involving the United Chinese Community Enrichment Services Society (S.U.C.C.E.S.S.), a large non-profit immigrant services organisation headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. Specifically, the study presented here focuses on the organisational practices that are constitutive of frontline workers’ engagement with diversity work and learning. It shows that (1) building a diverse and inclusive organisation, (2) supporting continuous learning opportunities at work, and (3) providing diversity training, both directive and generative, form the organisation’s diversity “curriculum”. This study also demonstrates that the strength of this workplace curriculum is that it has the potential to challenge the boundary between instrumentalism (harnessing diversity work to business success) and equity activism (prioritising diversity work in its own right), and that it creates space for collective reflection in the presence of others. Conceptually drawing on the practice turn in social sciences, particularly Steven Billet and Jennifer Newton’s learning practice, and what David Boud terms “the reflective turn”, this article positions diversity work as a reflective and iterative process of lifelong learning for both organisations and individual workers.