The Work of Corporate Culture: Diversity Management

Avery Gordon Corporations have "discovered" culture over the last ten to fifteen years. I have recently begun research in order to ask what this discovery is about and why it is happening now. This research does not yet include an empirical study of actually existing corporate cultures in all their systematic singularities, but rather pursues study of what the idea of culture is doing for business. While such a fieldwork project would no doubt teach us a great deal about the relationship between ideas and everyday corporate life, the practice of producing ideas and reenvisioning the nature of the corporate enterprise is an extraordinarily rich endeavor in and of itself and a major site of activity for business intellectuals, including journalists, scholars, consultants, and human resources personnel. Here, I focus on corporate theory rather than on corporate practice, or on what we might call corporate cultural studies. In brief, I see corporate culture as a response to a serious structural crisis facing large U.S. corporations. It is, in my view, a mode of governance designed to provide a new habitus of sense-making for the citizens of the corporation. The management of racial and gender identities and conflicts, or what is otherwise known as diversity management, is a core component of the new corporate culture. Contemporary corporate culture does not demand assimilationism quite as we have known it, nor does it require undifferentiated social control. Corporate culture links a vision of racial and gender diversity to its existing relations of ruling to produce something that might be called multicultural corporatism. This vision of corporate multiculturalism has the potential to become an influential feature of the larger project, currently underway, of rewriting our nation's basic social contract.

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