The book. It is a recent function, which emerged in the organization charts of large companies at the end of the 1980s in the United States, at the beginning of the 2000s in France. The position of diversity manager has experienced rapid institutionalization within companies in both countries, “pressed by law and morality to fight against discrimination”. But at the same time, this mission, which had great ambitions (enhancing differences, attracting talent, conquering new markets, etc.) quickly showed its weaknesses and its operational limits.
Sociologist Laure Bereni decided to conduct a long-term survey of these diversity managers. She met a hundred of them in the 2010s, in the business regions of New York and Paris. His work, Virtue Management (Les Presses de Sciences Po), sets out to reveal the contradictions of their function, and the complexity of their “balancing work”.
Their main mission is very delicate: “Working the boundary between the business world and society. » It is “to allow the [organisations] to escape the image of purely economic identities closed in on themselves and impose that of a business world embedded in society and concerned with the common good”. A spot “exhilarating and awkward”, notes the author, in a context where the company’s relationship with the outside world appears particularly ambivalent. The companies present their diversity program as being voluntary, proactive initiatives. In reality, they are “strongly determined by law and public action”.
A “permanent quest for legitimacy”
At the same time, organisations, if they wish “coopting social issues”are making great efforts to erase all traces of the politicization of diversity. “Diversity managers are constantly explaining diversity to colleagues who confuse it with what it is not: a policy of promoting minorities, the affirmation of controversial political values, a matter of legal compliance or another ethical issue. »
Beyond, M.me Bereni examines the resources allocated to diversity managers. Obviously, they are too weak. Even if they would like it, the latter “do not have the weapons to tackle the discriminations and inequalities of all kinds that structure organizations”. The results are therefore far from the ambitions.
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