Shadows and light: diversity management as phantasmagoria

Within the field of critical diversity studies increasing reference is made to the need for more critically informed research into the practice and implementation of diversity management. This article draws on an action research project that involved diversity practitioners from within the UK voluntary sector. In their accounts of resistance, reluctance and a lack of effective organizational engagement, participants shared a perception of diversity management as something difficult to concretize and envisage; and as something that organizational members associated with fear and anxiety; and with an inability to act. We draw on the metaphor of the phantasmagoria as a means to investigate this representation. We conclude with some tentative suggestions for alternative ways of doing diversity.