Cults of diversities

Citation

Magala, S. (2008), "Cults of diversities", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 21 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2008.02321aaa.001

Cults of diversities

Organizations continue to flourish. The more they grow and proliferate, the more managing, communicating and coordinating activities are required. Professional managing of increasingly sophisticated and networked activities fuels theorizing and empirical research, toolkit making and tailor-made consulting. All this is good news to the academic research business, academic teaching bureaucracies and academic entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs busy with training, upgrading, advising, coaching and other new forms of consulting.

Among the more prominent recent developments a rise in the production rate of “diversity” label merits special attention. From minding differences to mining diversities we are urged to increase our sensitivity to differences in order to exploit our differences in problem solving and knowledge transfer. Sensitivity required to discern and distinguish is quite rigged. One is expected to cater to disabled and sexual minorities, but one is allowed not to notice class barriers. One should never forget gender trouble, but if wealth and power asymmetries are overlooked, nobody worries. If the old and the young ones are pushed around by the middle-aged, media get alarmed, but if entire traditions and continents are overlooked, we sigh and go about our business as usual. Gender, age, race, ethnicity, education, lifestyle and consumer taste supposedly pushed the former differentiators – status, wealth, religious tradition and class to the background. Gender and age, sex preference and consumer taste supposedly shape our professional middle class choices from Kiruna to Cape Town and from Halifax to Shanghai. Nations and civilizations can be put to sleep: national culture is not sexy any more and Hofstede's first institutional research and consulting baby, IRIC, closed down in Tilburg, The Netherlands, a few years ago. Civilizations are not sexy any more and Huntington's Kassandric prediction of the mother of all crusades fizzled out among regionalized geopolitics and gently ignored class struggles in classless societies.

Looking back at organizations in the first seven years of the twenty-first century we can say that the Holy Grail of employee commitment is pursued across all multiple and multilayer changes in organizational shapes, forms and activities. Janet Turner Parish, Susan Cadwallader and Paul Busch try to distinguish between organizational, affective, normative and continuance commitment and explain why the affective one exerts the most significant influence upon employee perceptions, thus impacting their behavior and loyalty more than other types of commitment.

Alexander Styhre's welcome variation on a theme of critical theory with a pinch of smile is based on a reading of Bachtin's literary theory and in particular on the latter's analysis of the writings of Rabelais. Too much of a serious analysis and too little fun had damaged critical management studies, claims Styhre, trapping it “within its own sphere of critical thinking” and making it fail “to address and understand significant components of everyday life”. Carnival, laughter, Deleuze – these are remedies moving us beyond Adorno (a gloomy man “who regarded people playing ukulele as significant evidence of a culture in decline”), which is where we should have moved long ago. Hm, it is true that for Adorno even jazz was a God's sign of eternal damnation, but on the other hand he had managed to notice class differences even if “Dialectic of Enlightenment” had been bowdlerized to facilitate swallowing down of the book's message by middle class intellectuals from gentrified professional classes.

Mari Kira and Jan Forslin come up with two case studies of unbalanced post-bureaucratic transitions in Swedish healthcare organizations, trying to trace and detect the “regenerative potential of work”: I wonder if they could find, include and nurse the “pinch of smile” both in their theoretical interpretations of doctors' nurses' and administrative staff's realities and in actual life “out there”. Angel Martinez-Sanchez, Manuela Perez-Perez, Maria Jose Vela-Jimenez and Pilar de-Luis-Carnicer also investigate the corporate HR practices and try to reconstruct the “organizational climate” in order to find out if “telework” adoption can be facilitated or hampered by differences in organizational climates caused by HR commitment-increasing practices and social benefits associated with “telework”. If the Saragossa researchers look for organizational climate differences, Baruch Shimoni examines a mix of cross-organizational and cross-national differences. He is namely interested in the hybridization styles of management cultures in Thailand, Mexico and Israel (not necessarily the most readily compared clusters). Some of his conclusions bring in a fresh breeze of reality caught red-handed:

... by producing their hybrid forms of management, these managers bring fresh management perspectives and approaches. The Thai managers mix corporations' characteristics which put active and assertive behavior, deep involvement and participation in first place with smooth interpersonal relation and social harmony. The Mexican managers mix corporations' characteristics such as self-management, team work and delegation and decentralization with respect for authority and loose orientation towards organizational process. The Israeli managers mix corporations' characteristics such as planning, predefined and predetermined work processes, punctuality and supervision with improvisation and self-reliance.

In light of these findings one is not surprised by Armenio Rego's and Miguel Pina e Cunha's “Workplace Spirituality and Organizational Commitment”. Their empirical study links workplace spirituality and organizational commitment implying that “by improving spirituality climates, managers can promote organizational commitment” and, thus improve “individual and organizational performance” this improvement:

... occurs because people react reciprocally towards an organization that satisfies their spiritual needs, allows them to experience a psychological safety, makes them feel that they are valued as human beings and that they deserve respectful treatment, and allows them to experience senses of purpose, self-determination, enjoyment and belonging.

Since, we are being perceived as full, complex, also spiritual beings, the title of the last paper in the present issue does not come as a surprise: in The Dark Tower Robert Barner writes on the use of visual metaphor in facilitating emotional expression during organizational change trying to show:

... how visual metaphors can be used to help work groups 'give voice' to their emotional reactions to organizational change events, and to help group members arrive at a common framework for interpreting and making sense of those events.

This closes the dark ivory tower of the first issue in 2008. Happy New Year, writers, readers, reviewers and friends! Enjoy your diversities or somebody else will mine it!

Slawomir Magala