The Assemblage and Dismantling of Access Barriers in Administrative Bureaucracies

Constructing the Problem of Diversity in the German Welfare State

Bibliographic Data

ID4245960
AuthorsMartin Petzke (0000-0003-2616-1200)
Year2024
Volume47
Issue1
Pages69-94
Publication date2024-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueQualitative Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0162-0436 • E-ISSN: 1573-7837
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s11133-023-09555-5
PMID38500842
OpenAlexW4390575467
LanguageEN
References cited44

The article extends the literature on the construction of "diversity management" by personnel managers in corporate America. Such research has highlighted that Human Resource (HR) specialists draw heavily on social-scientific thinking in implementing various remedies against discrimination. However, it has paid less attention to how such esoteric views of reality, comprising such "things" as "structural barriers" impeding occupational advancement and "diversity sensitivity," have been successfully established as a self-evident reality in the workplace. In order to more thoroughly investigate how the world of diversity management is established outside the circle of academic specialists, the article employs perspectives from science and technology studies on the ways in which sociotechnical assemblages, i.e., networks of human actors and material devices, enact scientific ontologies. It applies such perspectives to a German case of diversity management, a program of "intercultural opening" that seeks to make bureaucracies of the welfare state more accessible to immigrants. The article delineates the specific ontology behind this version of diversity management, rooted in sociological perspectives on social mobility, and explores the various techniques and instruments through which officers of intercultural opening establish this ontology as a visible reality in municipal administrations

Bureaucracy · Diversity (politics · Diversity management · Economics · German · Human resource management · Knowledge management · Management · Political science · Public relations · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Sociotechnical system · State (computer science · Welfare state · Gender Diversity and Inequality · Labor Movements and Unions · Law · Sociology and Education Studies

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