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Despite the centrality of managing diversity effectively in contemporary organizations, existing literature gives disparate and incomplete accounts of how managers actually manage diversity in practice. The prevailing managerial literature focuses on what diversity activities should be involved in managing diversity but does not identify how managers actually undertake these activities in practice. The growing interpretive/critical literature focuses on how people's understandings define managing diversity, but is silent on how managers translate their understandings into specific diversity activities in practice. We applied a practice perspective in conjunction with phenomenography as a methodological approach to investigate how managers actually manage diversity in practice in the empirical context of professional services firms. The results show that managers' practice of managing diversity is constituted by four understandings of managing diversity that distinguish and organize diversity activities into four different and progressively more comprehensive ways of managing diversity. This practice-theoretical account transcends the existing literature's partial accounts in significant ways by offering a new and considerably broader and more precise conceptualization of managers' practice of managing diversity, including which ways of managing diversity may be more effective than others.

Explores the concept “career ambitious” in the contexts of traditional corpocratic “male” and more recent “female” career development models. Traditional corpocratic career development models are premissed on the notion of linear hierarchical progression and, accordingly, encourage competition, this being the vehicle through which the individual reaches the much‐prized top rung of the career ladder. In this context, the career ambitious individual is fiercely competitive, viewing her or his career as a series of tournaments, and measuring her or his career success by objective measures such as salary, rank or promotion. In contrast, when adopting a more holistic women’s career development framework, in which the interplay between work, significant others, organizational factors and various life stages is acknowledged, the career ambitious individual is one who measures her or his success in both professional and personal arenas through subjective measures such as perceived degree of challenge, satisfaction or sense of growth or development.

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