Casting the Other: The Production and Maintenance of Inequalities in Work Organizations (Studies Inmanagement, Organizations and Society, 5)

Casting the Other: Maintaining Gender Inequalities in the Workplace focuses on the production and maintenance of gender inequalities in organizations. By emphasizing 'difference' as something to be managed many organizations institute the 'problem of difference', and while orgainzations pay lip-service to ideas of equality, their day-to-day practices may be unchanged and unchallenged. Discrimination of various groups such as women, immigrants and older people continues and its dynamics remain unclear, largely because of the difficulties of studying it in the field. Additionally, various programs aimed at removing inequality, such as gender equality of managing diversity programs, may actually promote it by making differences visible and stabilizing them. Management, under these circumstances, comes to refer to the management of appearances which take the place of more radical acts to change the 'status quo'. "Casting the Other shows clearly the paradoxical way in which many well-intended programmes of organizational change actually work against what they seek to achieve by establishing the very practices which they hope to address. This book provides examples of the way in which power is used in the maintenance of inequality at different levels of the organization from the strategic to the local. This results in questions about how research could contribute to this process and offers a challenge to conventional approaches to diversity and its management."--Jacket Emphasizing 'difference' as something to be managed can cause organizations to institute the 'problem of difference', so that attempts to remove inequality may actually promote it by making differences visible and stable. This contribution to the debate on positive action - and its consequences for the management of organizational diversity - starts on a societal level. Edited By Barbara Czarniawska And Heather Höpfl. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [205]-223) And Index.