The tension between the business case and social justice approaches forms a crucial point of debate in the diversity and equality field. However, their presentation as essentially oppositional is brought into question when the ‘business’ of the organization itself concerns social justice. This article draws on research in UK voluntary (non-profit) organizations to reveal the ambiguities and variations found in local constructions of equality and diversity. Managers and diversity specialists reconciled moral and business rationales through re-inscribing utilitarian arguments within an organizational commitment to social justice; however, significant dilemmas associated with doing diversity remained. The article argues for a shift in the research agenda away from competing ‘cases’ and towards investigating how the challenges that diversity presents can be worked through in day-to-day organizational practice.

Refugee women occupy a position at a neglected point of intersection of many categories of difference. This article draws on a study of pathways from voluntary work into paid employment for refugee women in the UK and reveals how they drew on these markers of difference to express and explain their experiences of exclusion or belonging. Their accounts are considered alongside those of organizational representatives, who drew on vocabularies of equality and diversity to construct refugee women as organizational outsiders or insiders. The article explores the interplay between the active agency of refugee women in negotiating the possibilities of belonging and the effect of discursive practices and structural processes that tend to perpetuate their outsider status. It concludes by briefly considering the relevance of these findings to current controversies concerning the impact of policies of managing diversity and multiculturalism on combating inequality and discrimination.

Older people are encouraged into self-employment as a means to extend their working lives; however both age and gender are thought to constrain the capacity of individuals to take on an enterprising identity. This paper explores the narrative identity work of women over 50 contemplating a move into self-employment. It reveals how they negotiated a provisional self-employed identity in relation to an aged identity, an enterprising identity and an identity as organizational outsider. It discusses the implications of contrasting forms of engagement with these identities for the subsequent enactment of participants' business plans. The paper briefly considers the implications of its findings for the following areas: enacting and realising provisional identities; the relationship of self-employment to enterprise; and a process-based conceptualisation of age.

Although many UK-based refugees have professional qualifications and experience, they experience high unemployment. This article draws on a study of organizations providing employment-related services to refugees. It explores the discourses and narratives of the providers and refugee users of these services in relation to contrasting constructions of refugee identity. Both the official discourse of refugee resettlement and providers' accounts emphasize the idea of 'empowerment', reflected also in refugee participants' presentation of themselves as active subjects. But, in an environment characterized as largely unfriendly to refugees, enacting such an identity is difficult. Empowerment has become increasingly associated with refugee participation, self-help and the involvement of refugee community organizations. However, the association of 'community' with a position on the margins may serve to reinforce refugees' outsider status. The question is raised, for both individual refugees and refugee organizations, of the possibility and desirability of choosing not to perpetuate a separate refugee identity. K E Y W O R D S discourse empowerment identity refugees refugee organizations 1 0 1 9 Human Relations [0018-7267(200208)55:8] Volume 55(8):

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.