forthcoming. Knights, D. and Richards, W. 2003, ‘Sex discrimination in UK academe’,
76 Equality, diversity and inclusion at work
The practice of managing diversity and dealing with cultural dif erences between employees tends to emanate in organisations large enough to
have them in human resource HR management departments or man- agers responsible for those organisational functions. Unfortunately HR
departments are often driven by notions of ‘best practice’, determining appropriate actions for delineated situations. Aspiring to be best and to
engage in excellent practice is laudable, but suggesting that diversity can be best managed through a predetermined and documented system will
not provide creative and diverse practices. Rather, such an approach will result in a limited and limiting hegemonic discourse for managing work-
place diversity. What is needed is a plethora of practice and diverse diver- sity management. As a result we require theory, or at least a conceptual
frame, that is able to take account of local nuance and conditions while providing a process for analysing the tensions and benei ts arising from
work relations between diversity groups.
Being located in New Zealand at the ‘edge of the universe’ Manhire, 1991 cited in Jones and Stablein, 2006: 146 has a direct impact on what
are the salient diversity issues. The nature of the issues around inequity are dif erent from those in other localities such as the UK, the US or
even nearby Australia. Issues around inequality and equal opportunity economic as much as political are cast within a neo-colonial frame of
bicultural relations between the indigenous people, Maori, and Pakeha, the descendents of colonisers who arrived relatively recently in historical
times around 1850. It is the disjunction between the dominant diversity discourses and the results of local academic debate Humphries and
Grice, 1995; Jones and Stablein, 2006 plus more policy and practitioner- orientated discussions of diversity Leung, 2006; EEO Trust, 2008 that
has created the well-spring of discontent from which the theoretical direc- tion discussions of this chapter arose.
In what follows I position ‘workplace diversity’ as spanning macro and micro levels of analyses. A position that is not eitheror, an area
that includes both social justice and economic rationales. I highlight two key delineators for this emerging i eld of workplace diversity: power and
context. I then suggest an integrating theory invoking Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory of practice as a potential way forward to theorise and further
research in workplace diversity.
POWER AS PIVOTAL
Workplace diversity has at its core ‘membership in social and demo- graphic groups and how dif erences in identities af ect social relations