Introduction: Governing through Diversity

Abstract

It has become hard to avoid “diversity” today, especially in the global north. Organizations of all kinds feel compelled to have diversity plans and employ diversity practitioners. Increasing numbers of employees in many sectors are required to undergo diversity training. In public discourse, likewise, diversity is invoked regularly and in an increasing number of governmental arenas, from education through social work to the private sector (Puwar, 2004). In many countries, it has become, in fact, a “central policy injunction” (Swan & Fox, 2010, p. 570). In the EU, promotion of societal diversity and diversity mainstreaming are now among the key goals of the Union (Kraus & Sciortino, 2014; Vertovec, 2012). Academia has, in a similar fashion, become embroiled in this new “normative meta-narrative” (Isar, 2006, p. 1). In addition to the field of diversity management, which has existed within the orbit of workplace and management studies for quite some time, diversity studies has been emerging over the last decade as the interdisciplinary field covering much of what previously fell under migration and multiculturalism studies. An ever-increasing number of teaching and research positions, calls for papers and research institutes, prefixed with the very term “diversity”, attests to this transformation. Through all of this, diversity has assumed the status of a social good that no sensible person could disagree with.