Embedded Diversity: A Critical Ethnographic Study of the Structural Tensions of Organizing Diversity

This dissertation consists of a collection of four articles aimed at critically exploring how diversity and its management are organized in two Danish organizations. The articles are based on a critical ethnographic study of the links among diversity and its management, and the structural setting, including the greater historical-societal structures, the organizations’ structural setup and the spatial structures. Throughout the dissertation, I focus on how this structural setting enables and constrains the local organizing of diversity. This structural focus allows me to explore how structural conditions facilitate or restrain employee agency, and enables me to suggest locally relevant and progressive ways of organizing diversity. Consequently I ask the following main research question: How do the greater historical-societal setting, the organizational setup and spatial structures both enable and constrain organizing diversity in the two case organizations, and what are the implications for the management of diversity and employee agency?