Understanding and Managing Diversity: Readings, Cases, and Exercises, third edition

Citation

Benbow, L.B. (2006), "Understanding and Managing Diversity: Readings, Cases, and Exercises, third edition", Equal Opportunities International, Vol. 25 No. 6, pp. 476-478. https://doi.org/10.1108/02610150610713809

Much has been written about diversity in organizations over the past three decades. Yet our theoretical knowledge about diversity and its effects on individuals and organizations is still developing. Thus, it is quite a task to bring together a comprehensive, multiperspective, text, which challenges students and practitioners to understand that managing diversity involves individual and organizational development. Harvey and Allard take on this task. They bring together a fine variety of readings, cases, and exercises to help us understand, as the title of the text indicates, the complexities of managing diversity in organizations. Most commendable is the goal of the third edition “to make teaching diversity‐related courses easier for the instructor by providing a wide range of classroom material and instructor support material, and second, to make learning about diversity interesting, timely, and thought‐provoking to students” (p. ix). The text is organized into three logical sections working from the micro to macro levels of analysis.

This book begins, most appropriately, with an introduction to students that presents the basic terms used by authors throughout the text and a brief historical and theoretical context for exploring issues of workplace diversity. The introduction is followed by part 1, which focuses on individual perspectives on diversity. The section, consisting primarily of exercises and readings, is designed to provide a foundation for the study of differences and diversity management by helping students to understand how values, ethnocentricity, and stereotypes can alter their perception of different organizational actors including coworkers, customers, managers, and clients. The editors contend that this section will also help students learn that increased diversification of the workforce can be beneficial to group dynamics, but can also lead to conflicts that needs to be managed in a positive way. Students will also learn, the editors suggest, that managing diversity in the new workplace entails learning the importance of understanding the roles of culture, subcultures, and the importance of effective intercultural communication. To accomplish these objectives, the section opens with two exercises designed to provide students with an introduction to demographic changes in the workforce of the USA (Gorski no. 2) and Canada (Hunt no. 3). A variety of other student exercises are included to extend students’ ability to understand cultural differences and how impressions and stereotypes can arise from incomplete information (Allard no. 5); help students uncover stereotypes (Bowman no. 6) and other decisions that are based on one's social demographic variables (Allard nos. 7 and 8); identification of cross‐cultural contributions (Allard and Harvey no. 10); and finally an exercise to help students identify individual differences and effectively manage their experience with diversity and conflict (Parker and Klein no. 12). One analytical article (Sowell no. 9) offers a worldview of cultural diversity by focusing on how modern day exchanges of cultures have enriched each other and created all of the great civilizations of the world. A more theoretical perspective on intercultural communication (Bennett no. 13) is presented in the final article of the section. These articles end with discussion questions designed to stimulate and develop critical thinking among students.

The opening exercise in part 1, (Allard no. 1), is an ideal way of getting student to begin to examine their group memberships and the way in which these variable shape their values, beliefs, perceptions, and interaction others. This exercise is followed by two introductory exercises that provide students with questions related to diversity in the USA and Canada. As I read the exercises I found myself wondering how many of these questions my sociology students in America could answer correctly on the first day of class. Likewise, I wondered if non‐American students could do better. It seems somewhat problematic for the book to open with these exercises as opposed to more theoretical and analytical perspectives on diversity. Otherwise, the strength of part 1 is its weakness. In the introductory comments, students are provided with excellent learning objectives. Collectively, the section provides a fine overview to the key issues in the study of diversity and diversity management. Nevertheless, although the exercises are insightful, thought provoking, and even fun (which from a students’ perspective may be ideal for a diversity text) and the more theoretical articles interesting, they fall short of living up to the stated objectives. Perhaps, the most significant source of this dilemma stems from the author's inability to clearly distinguish between “individual perspectives” on diversity and “cultural perspectives” on diversity. Thus, discussion of values, beliefs, and perspectives are intertwined with more culturally related phenomenon such as understanding cultural contributions and language differences and neither issue is consistently connected to workplace phenomenon.

The readings, cases, and exercises in part 2 shift to group identity perspectives on diversity and provide a foundation of understanding for some of the complexities and issues of group identities. It begins, as part 1, with an overview and learning objectives of the section. The section presents a wide array of readings in various workplace settings which focus on the primary dimensions of individual differences such as race (Baldino no. 19), gender (Tannen no. 15, Harvey no. 16, Farough no. 17, Harvey no. 18), ethnicity (Allard no. 20, Aurelio and Novak no. 34), age (Holtzman, Kruger and Srock no. 21, Harvey and Sherer no. 23), sexual orientation (Hunt no. 24, Ross and Whitty no. 25) and physical/mental challenges (Allard nos. 26, 27, 28, and 29, Oliver and Bartholomew no. 29). The secondary dimensions of individual differences such as social class (Harvey no. 31) and religion (Rao no. 31, Harvey no. 33, Sherer no. 34) are also presented in this section. Overall, part 2 does more than the first to achieve its stated objectives. It does a fine job of helping students gain knowledge about different types of identity groups by including the personal accounts, perspectives, and workplace experiences of people from many different and multiple social identities. To this end, each of the substantive readings provides discussion questions that help students understand how social identities impact workplace interactions. These objectives are further developed by the inclusion of excellent instructor‐led group, individual, and role‐play exercises in this section.

The last section of the text, part 3, illustrates how complicated it is to make diversity initiatives workable within organizational contexts. Harvey and Allard suggest that this situation is further complicated in the US culture which has a short‐term orientation and is prone to measuring business success primarily in terms of achieving financial goals. Nevertheless, part 3, “Organizational perspectives on diversity” is the capstone of the text. The section opens with an exercise that provides students with a list of questions designed to challenges them to look at diversity initiatives at their college or workplace. The section continues with an explanation of three paradigms that can be used to categorize organizational responses to diversity (Thomas and Ely no. 37). The chapter also includes six true cases involving the challenges of diversity management. My reservation about this part of the book is that it does not include enough examples of diversity management in Canada; only one of the six cases involved a Canadian company (Mentzer no. 40). Otherwise, collectively, these article enable students to learn about the human, public relations, and legal costs that incur when organizations neglect to deal with diversity systematically. The section closes with an excellent capstone exercise. It is designed to give students the ability to critically assess the ways in which organization implement and manage diversity and to see how the theories and cases they have examined during the semester actually apply in the real world (Harvey no. 48).

Understanding and Managing Diversity is the culmination of a thorough job of presenting the importance of understanding diversity management. The accompanying instructor's manual, which I actually read enthusiastically because it included so many interesting experiential exercises, will make teaching diversity easy. Despite my reservations about the opening exercises and the overall content of the first section, the text is easy to follow and should provide students, even before they become organizational members, with a level of competency that will enable them to become effective organizational leaders and diversity managers.