Responding to the call to theorize praxis in relation to philosophy and white diversity research, I draw on philosophers of race, and in particular collective white ignorance, and generous encounters to argue for listening as a form of progressive white praxis. While praxis has been theorized in feminist theory in relation to knowledge, standpoint and bodies, literature neglects how whiteness structures the production of knowledge and praxis. I argue that an understanding of white praxis should entail an examination of white epistemology, white ignorance and encounters with the stranger. At the same time, heeding critical race theorists’ cautions about critical whiteness studies and white feminism, I propose ways in which listening could begin to work as a form of white praxis responding to racism in research on diversity and organizations.

Arguing that commodities used in diversity management are relatively under-researched, this article examines a popular diversity image—a photograph of diversity as a mosaic—in order to explore what it can tell us about how racial difference is represented visually. In its close reading of the composition of the picture, the article argues that this diversity image acknowledges difference while at the same time it actually homogenizes it. The mosaic inscribes difference within a sameness grid and commodifies it. In so doing, it attempts to disable any political antagonism from minoritized groups, and placate the imagined white viewer, operating as a strategy of containment. The article contributes to critical diversity studies by drawing attention to visual techniques as technologies of ‘race making’ and visual images as important sites of power struggle.

The challenge of diversity is much more than a change in terminology from categories like gender, ethnicity, age and class to the more encompassing and concealing term ‘diversity’. In contrast to gender and other categories of identity, which are often represented as sources of social inequality in organisations, ‘diversity’ does not so powerfully appeal to our sense of social justice. (Benschop, 2001, p. 1166)

The article addresses diversity work as a specific form of management work that involves complex micro-political strategies of resistance. Diversity work stems from an activist agenda that has been adopted by mainstream management practice, especially new public sector management. But in being adopted, it has been critiqued for also being co-opted, and as a result de-radicalized. The article seeks to examine this critique. First, we examine the politics of diversity, discussing critiques of diversity work from political theory and referencing femocrats, an earlier movement affecting women in management. Secondly, we recognize that the ambivalence of diversity work can be understood in terms of co-optation and resistance. Here our central contribution is to understand these two processes in a much more nuanced way, drawing on our own and other organizational studies of diversity work in practice. We locate this more nuanced analysis of diversity work in the emergent context of new public sector management. We draw attention to three micro-practices that help to exhibit a complex understanding of co-optation and resistance: (a) discursive resources, (b) embodied resources and (c) management technologies as resources. Finally, we conclude by outlining the article's contribution: extending Meyerson and Scully's notion of the tempered radical in four key ways. We do this by emphasizing the importance of the specificities of occupational resources of resistance, arguing that resources of resistance move beyond the discursive, emphasizing the gendered, classed and racialized variegated nature of insider/outsider dynamics and finally, stressing that co-optation and resistance are temporal, dynamic, intermingled processes in diversity work.

In this article I review what kinds of emotions might be felt by women who are teaching managers. I counterpoise arguments that women's bodies are over-determined as motherly or lacking in masculinity, and therefore lack embodied authority, so leading to feelings of inadequacy, fear, and anxiety with the view that there are spaces, modes and moments when women can exceed, or interrupt these interpolations to produce most pleasurable relations. As a way into the debates, I examine ideas drawn from women's studies on the emotions associated with pleasure-pleasure specifically based on women's embodied erotics. Arguing that pleasure is not necessarily political resistance, or indeed, unproblematic, I argue that these ideas on pleasure and erotics can be applied to our understanding of women teaching in the management classroom. I conclude that an acknowledgement of some of these pleasures may provide us with a better platform for conceptualizing teaching than simply notions of nurturance, learner-centredness or disembodied rationality.Discussion of the emotions of women teachers in the management classroom is largely absent from the recent return to the emotions in organization studies. In this article I start to address this relative gap by examining the emotions that are imagined to be the lot of women when teaching management. In particular, I ask what it feels like to teach men managers in a woman's body, given the dominance of men and masculinities in management, and on management courses. In short, I come from the position that the teacher is embodied and emotional and teaches others who are too.The article does not assume that emotions and bodies are equivalent, or that all emotions are embodied or that all bodies are 'real'. I take as my point of departure the view that emotion and the body are contested concepts and, in line with many recent feminist theorists, I see emotions and bodies as sociocultural practices, rather than as psychological or solely physiological individual 'possessions' (Ahmed, 2004; Lutz and Abu-Lughod, 1990). In essence, the body can be a site of for the production and materialization of emotions, and vice versa (Ahmed, 2004).