DIVERSITY MANAGEMENT AS IDENTITY REGULATION IN THE POST-FORDIST PRODUCTIVE SPACE

In the last twenty years, diversity has made its way into the world of management as well as into the academia. While numbers of consultants are riding the diversity hype, teaching managers what diversity is and how to make it yield, scholars attempt to measure the effects of workforce diversity onto organizations ' internal processes and outputs. The emergence of diversity as an autonomous organizational research area has generally been explained in two ways. Most authors (Cox & Blake, 1991; Cross et al., 1994; Morrison, 1992; Thomas, 1991) see it as the effect ofa historical shift in the composition of the (North-American) labour force. From this perspective, diversity management represents an organizational strategy to adapt to changing Western labour markets characterized by feminization, ageing, migration, differential birth rates between the local and the migrant populations, etc. A smaller group of scholars (McDougall, 1996; Kandola & Fullerton, 1994; Kelly & Dobbin, 1998) has rather interpreted diversity management as a managerial re-appropriation of equal opportunity (EO) legislation. They argue that, in the discursive shift from EO to diversity management, managers have re-cast EO as a managerial tool an