Making sense of a multinational corporation’s Diversity Programs: understanding the importance of local
culture and gender images of the organization.
PhD PROPOSAL
Making sense of a multinational corporation’s Diversity Programs: understanding the
importance of local culture and gender images of the organization.
T IT L E
Making sense of a multinational corporation’s Diversity Programs: understanding the
importance of local culture and gender images of the organization.
ABSTRACT
Nowadays, North American and Western European corporations are implementing
diversity programs as a means to address workplace discrimination against women and
other minority groups. With the advent of globalization, many such firms started to
replicate diversity initiatives within their branches situated around the globe,
particularly Fortune 100 companies from the US. Multilateral organizations, such as the
World Bank, are also promoting gender equality initiatives in the private sector (PNUD,
2009). However, to replicate diversity programs without taking into account the national
culture and the culture of the organization becomes problematic. The purpose of this
proposed research is to acknowledge the importance that societal-organizational
interrelationship (Mills, 1988) has in addressing diversity in the workplace for two case
studies: one from Canada and the other from Argentina. Central to this study is the
organizational culture lens as a heuristic for addressing discriminatory practices within
organizations (Mills, 2002; Thurlow, Mills and Mills, 2005).
SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH IN THE ADVANCEMENT OF
KNOWLEDGE
Many of the literature in Management from a gender perspective has been written by
authors from European and North American continents. There remains a lack of
organizational texts addressing, explicitly, Hispanic women as their subject of interest
(Calás, 1992) in multinational corporations. Few studies explore implications that
diversity practices have within Latin American corporations, and the ones that do
address the issue emphasize the need for studying the cultural aspects of organizations
and national cultures (Hoftede, 1999; Mexfield, 2007, 2008).
I agree with Thurlow, Mills and Mills (2005) that the fundamental goals of feminist and
diversity research are to facilitate change and to provide opportunities for representation
of marginalized groups and individuals.
PERSONAL RELEVANCE
In 2009, I was hired as a trainer for Argentina’s first project to promote Gender Equality
in the private sector. The `Argentina Gender Equality Model` (MEGA in Spanish) was a
joint effort carried out by INADI (the National Institute against Discrimination,
Xenophobia and Racism), the World Bank and gender experts from the private sector
and government offices. I was responsible for training, from a gender perspective, mid1
December 2010
Making sense of a multinational corporation’s Diversity Programs: understanding the importance of local
culture and gender images of the organization.
level managers in eleven large companies (such as Coca Cola, Wal-Mart, Avon), in the
areas of communications, human resources, work-life balance, labor legislation. This
experience, plus past research in my Masters program in Organisational Studies, have
increased my awareness regarding the role played by multinational organisations and
their initiatives toward coping with diversity issues, gender issues and management.
Furthermore, in the above context, I found that as a researcher from a Latin American
country most of the literature on gender and organisations is written by scholars from
the United States and Western Europe. However, when I conducted interviews for my
Master’s thesis, I found that this was problematic because the reality presented by
Argentinean managers was quite particular in terms of managerial and cultural factors
so my research needed to be based on a theoretical framework more adapted to the
complexities of the Argentine environment. By the same token, remarkably, while I was
training mid-level managers for the above-mentioned project, I found that diversity
initiatives propelled by multilateral organisations have not been taking into account
cultural specificity.
In summary, my objective is to establish that gender analysis within organisations must
be addressed in correlation with their particular context and raise awareness of
additional factors requiring attention such as the institution of family, masculine and
feminine attributes in society and religion. In my view, current initiatives and programs
developed by multilateral organisations and U.S. multinationals, seem to impose a
universalistic approach on gender, ethnicity, and otherness which can be problematic for
organisations in other regions, such as Latin America, that are seriously involved in
managing diversity issues.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Workplace diversity is a highly problematic issue that has served to open up debate on
workplace discrimination while simultaneously constraining it by problematizing
everyone except the able-bodied white and heterosexual male (Thurlow, Mills and
Mills, 2005).
Classical management theorists understand diversity policy through the lens of the law
of require variety which states that for one system to deal effectively with another it
must be of the same or greater complexity (Hatch and Cunliffe, 2006). By effective they
mean to make profit and become more competitive within the market and by complexity
they mean to add “different” kinds of people to the organization. However, when adding
different people such as women and other minorities, organizations expose a rather low
level of tolerance for deviations meaning that they naturally tend to homogenize their
culture (Alvesson and Billing, 1997: 107), particularly multinational corporations
(Paludi, 2010).
The literature on management has developed extensive research on managing diversity
programs at companies (Alcazar et al. 2006; Bond and Pyle, 1998; Leonard and Levine,
2006; Richard, 2000; Sbdar, 2009; Thomas and Ely, 1996). However, these studies have
major limitations. First, they are conducted in order to validate why companies should
implement their diversity initiatives and still neglect in the analysis the approach of
difference and otherness. Second, the studies treat diversity as a problem to be solved,
which consequently simplified the analysis of the matter. Finally, diversity management
studies are mainly conducted by the homo economicus logic, which understand
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Making sense of a multinational corporation’s Diversity Programs: understanding the importance of local
culture and gender images of the organization.
managing as a mean to maximize profit leaving aside the approach of workplace
equality.
In fact, the problem of diversity is even more complex particularly at this moment in
history that globalization brings people together from diverse cultures, ethnicities,
genders, and races within organizations. A political theorist, Sartori (2001) argues that
an open and good society is plural as opposed to multicultural. The first is related to
tolerance and the recognition of diversity as a value in itself. On the contrary
multiculturalism involves breaking up the multi-ethnicity and not integrating
differences. The multiculturalism approach appears to be more frequent in diversity
programs than the pluralistic one. Within organizational studies Prasad and Prasad
(2002) analyzed how globalization altered the concepts of difference and otherness,
focusing on the situation of women. They provided an interesting approach of training
programmes across many North American and Western European organizations, which
instead of making organizations members more appreciative of cultural differences,
somewhat ironically they reproduce stereotypes (different ethnic minorities and women
managers are constituted as exotic, inadequate or underdeveloped others who need
help). In this context, Mills research studies (1995; 2002) illustrated how organizational
images reproduction can restrict diversity and in consequence exclude women and
minorities from some roles of power within organizations.
As mention before, globalization has become problematic, in particular to Latin
American countries which are outside the construction of the hegemonic discourse.
These countries are trying to reach some balance between their idiosyncrasy and the
leading discourse from powerful countries. Like Calás (1992) warned many years ago,
Hispanic women like other diverse populations are becoming homogenized within
dominant organizational discourses. However, within the organizational perspective
there is a completely absence of research works addressing this particular situation.
OBJECTIVES AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The main objective of this research is to analyze the diversity in the workplace within
the lens of organizational culture and gender, with a special focus on societalorganizational interrelationship (Mills, 1988). Two research questions are guiding the
study:
1. What cultural aspects do multinationals branches have to manage when
applying diversity programs which are enforced by headquarters?
2. Does organizational image contribute, in any way, to a systematic
discrimination and negative stereotyping of women and other minority groups?
METHODS
Organizations are complex and when addressing organizational culture and
discrimination practices (cf. ´systematic discrimination´ Abella, 1984) complexity
growth. I consider the appropriate strategy for conducting this study will be a feminist
qualitative research (Thurlow, Mills and Mills, 2005). More importantly, the value of
the approach is gaining insight into how discrimination develops. Taking into account
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Making sense of a multinational corporation’s Diversity Programs: understanding the importance of local
culture and gender images of the organization.
the research questions I will analyze two case studies (Stake, 1999) of multinationals
branches: one Argentinean and one Canadian. As Yin has argued (Eisenhardt and
Graebner, 2007) case studies are rich, empirical descriptions of particular instances of a
phenomenon that are typically based on a variety of data sources.
Data collection will include:
1.
Narrative interviews with relevant informants from the organizations
selected as case studies.
2.
Additional data from organization´s institutional material.
3.
Participant observation.
All the transcripts from the interviews with will be transcribed in full and discursively
analysed and codified (Czarniawska, 1997, 1998; Grant et al., 2004) using the software
ATLASti.
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