Incite then Control: Organizational Responses to Managers’ Appropriations of Diversity Practices (WITHDRAWN)

Abstract

The diversity management literature offers few accounts of organizations that manage to foster diversity, of how diversity policy and practices are enacted in practice, and of managers’ motivations to do so. To close these gaps, this paper reports a 4-year ethnography in a European bank which succeeded in reducing the glass ceiling by inciting managers to appropriate its gender diversity policy and practices. I examine the multiple types of appropriation (e.g., selective appropriation, extension, diversion, misappropriation) as well as managers’ underlying motivations for each of them. I then analyze the continuum of organizational responses to these appropriations, from undoing to appropriation of managers’ appropriations. This paper contributes to a) providing a better conceptualization of appropriation by extending previous typologies and highlighting the organizational repertoire of action to react to managers’ appropriations; b) shedding a new light on the so called ‘resistance to change’; and c) providing insights into the advantages and drawbacks of appropriation as a new model of practice implementation. It thus contributes to advancing and renewing both the diversity and change management literatures.