Managers' practice of managing diversity revealed: A practice-theoretical account

Abstract

Despite the centrality of managing diversity effectively in contemporary organizations, existing literaturegives disparate and incomplete accounts of how managers actually manage diversity in practice. The prevail-ing managerial literature focuses on what diversity activities should be involved in managing diversity butdoes not identify how managers actually undertake these activities in practice. The growinginterpretive/critical literature focuses on how people's understandings de fine managing diversity, but is silenton how managers translate their understandings into specific diversity activities in practice. We applied apractice perspective in conjunction with phenomenography as a methodological approach to investigatehow managers actually manage diversity in practice in the empirical context of professional services firms.The results show that managers' practice of managing diversity is constituted by four understandings of man-aging diversity that distinguish and organize diversity activities into four different and progressively morecomprehensive ways of managing diversity. This practice-theoretical account transcends the existing litera-ture's partial accounts in significant ways by offering a new and considerably broader and more precise con-ceptualization of managers' practice of managing diversity, including which ways of managing diversity maybe more effective than others.