“Reinventing the wheel over and over again”. Organizational learning, memory and forgetting in doing diversity work

Published date25 April 2020
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-10-2019-0249
Date25 April 2020
Pages379-393
AuthorMarieke van den Brink
Subject MatterHR & organizational behaviour,Employment law,Diversity,equality,inclusion
Reinventing the wheel over and
over again. Organizational
learning, memory and forgetting in
doing diversity work
Marieke van den Brink
Gender and Diversity Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Abstract
Purpose One of the urgent questions in the field of diversity is the knowledge about effective diversity
practices. This paper aims to advance our knowledge on organizational change toward diversity by combining
concepts from diversity studies and organizational learning.
Design/methodology/approach By employing a social practice approach to organizational learning, the
author will be able to go beyond individual learning experiences of diversity practices but see how members
negotiate the diversity knowledge and how they integrate their new knowledge in their day-to-day
organizational norms and practices. The analysis draws on data collected during a longitudinal case study in a
financial service organization in the Netherlands.
Findings This study showed how collective learning practicestook place but were insufficiently anchored in
a collective memory. Change agents have the task to build newmemory on diversity policies and gender
inequality as well as to use organizational memory to enable diversity policies and practices to be implemented.
The inability to create a community of practice impeded the change agenda.
Researchlimitations/implications Future research could expand our knowledge on collectivememory of
knowledge on diversity further and focus on the way employees make use of this memory while doing
diversity.
Practical implications The current literature often tendsto analyze the effectiveness of diversity practices
as linear processes, which is insufficient to capture the complexity of a change process characterized with
layers of negotiated and politicized forms of access to resources. The author would argue for more future work
on nonlinear and process-based perspectives on organizational change.
Originality/value The contribution is to the literature on diversity practices by showing how the lack of
collective memory to storeindividual learning in the organization has proven to be a major problem in the
management of diversity.
Keywords Diversity practices, Organizational learning, Organizational memory
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Despite numerous initiatives aiming to transform organizations into more equal, inclusive
and diverse work places, progress remains at best slow (Dobbin and Kalev, 2016;Evans,
2014). Diversity practices rarely translate into deep systemic change (Acker, 2006;Leenders
et al., 2019), as interventions often stay superficial (Ahmed, 2007;Eriksson-Zetterquist and
Styhre, 2008), geared toward fixing women/minorities (Ely and Meyerson, 2000;Zanoni et al.,
2010) and are implemented rather ad hoc (Benschop et al., 2015;van den Brink, 2018) or even
become counterproductive (Romani et al., 2019). In addition, planned diversity interventions
Organizational
learning,
memory and
forgetting
379
© Marieke van den Brink. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the
Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and
create derivative works of this article (for both commercial & non-commercial purposes), subject to full
attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://
creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode.
Funding: Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek. 451-11-024.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/2040-7149.htm
Received 1 October 2019
Revised 15 January 2020
Accepted 18 January 2020
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion:
An International Journal
Vol. 39 No. 4, 2020
pp. 379-393
Emerald Publishing Limited
2040-7149
DOI 10.1108/EDI-10-2019-0249

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