This article focuses on the discursive construction of the nursing profession in the context of an industrial action. Drawing on studies that claim that the diffusion of new public management reforms restructure healthcare professions and on feminist studies arguing that gender is crucial to understanding the concepts and processes of this restructuring, the article examines a media debate surrounding a recent labour dispute in the Finnish healthcare sector. The analysis illustrates how the nursing profession was discursively constructed through a negotiation of individual and societal rights and responsibilities, and how the debate was framed by competing and contested discourses of professionalization, caring, labour markets and new public management. As a consequence, the debate both sustained and reproduced the traditional gendered meanings related to the nursing profession, as well as provided a context for unsettling, at least for a moment, the normative gender order of Finnish society.

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In recent years diversity and its management have become popular topics of discussion in all kinds of organizations. Diversity management practices have spread around the globe focusing on the organizing and management of inclusion and exclusion of different genders, sexualities, ethnicities, ages, classes and (dis)abilities and many other identity categories. This chapter provides a general introduction to the volume, which seeks to explore what diversity is and what it has to do with organizations. The editors present description of each chapter and reflections based on the texts.

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