Complex Diversity: The Three Levels of Analysis

Diversity in business isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, or simply a once-off campaign. Incorporating true diversity in the workplace requires a much deeper analysis of the multi-layered context responsible for inequality, bias, and discrimination.

Gain a deeper understanding of diversity with Ameeta Jaga, Convenor on the Leading Diversity and Inclusion at Work online short course from the University of Cape Town.

Transcript

Doing diversity work requires us to engage with a particular history, race, class, gender, and other intersectionalities to understand how social relations are produced in the dynamics of the labour market. 

Focusing on the interplay of these three levels when developing an approach to diversity management helps take into account the multi-layered context responsible for the inequalities and power differences that infiltrate the workplace.

For example, let’s look at race and gender. The macro-national level takes into account the significance of national structures, institutions such as laws, social organization, religious structures, gender, and race. This level determines which form of social identity becomes salient in both society and the workplace. 

The meso-organizational level considers the organizational processes, rituals, and routinized behaviours at work that established the rules of organizational-level gender and race relations. It includes approaches to diversity which mediate employment opportunities according to individual abilities and contextual circumstances.

At the micro-individual level we consider issues related to individual power, motivation, and agency to effect change, all of which are gendered and racialized phenomena.

These levels interact such that individual beliefs and attitudes are generally enmeshed in broader societal traditions and organizational norms to create unique arrangements of gendered organizations. For example, jobs that are then gender-stereotyped and women receiving lower salaries than men, in the same way that individual choices and orientations are not the key determinants of career success.

I draw on Ijeoma Oluo’s writing on race to think about how these levels interact in my own life. Yes, I studied and worked hard to be the first one in my family to get an undergraduate degree and then postgraduate degrees but achieving this is not only due to my own efforts. Some of the advantage I experienced because of having a degree can be ascribed to certain social groups. Like my privilege based on my physical ability, English as my first language, my sexual orientation, being a registered citizen of my country, and that I didn’t have to drop out of university to support my family. These are arbitrary social categorizations of advantage that helped me be successful. So thinking that anyone can do this if they just worked hard enough is flawed.

These advantages set you up with a status that is not fully earned and on a hierarchy that places others below you. When we believe that our success is truly of our own and not because of systemic structural inequalities, we then perpetuate the same advantage and disadvantage on others, maintaining unfair systems that have impacts on people’s lives. 

Too often diversity efforts are focused at one level, such as diversity training at the organizational level for business benefits. The inclusion of multiple levels of analysis allows for an examination of diversity and equal opportunity as a negotiated process, which is socially and historically embedded.