This Conclusion offers a way of thinking about practicing diversity as a politics of organizational worldmaking effectuated by exploration, experimentation, and engagement. The explicit aim in proposing this alternative approach to diversity is to tackle the blockages discussed in Chapter 1 and go beyond the neutral, instrumental, individual, and cognitive nature of current diversity initiatives. In our view, these assumptions are the main reason that transformation efforts tend to reproduce what they aim to challenge. As scholars we have been offering diversity practitioners tools that do not work, even to the extent that it causes them what Sara Ahmed (2012, p 175) describes as the ‘physical and emotional labor of “banging your head against a brick wall” ‘.

To develop tools that do not reproduce what they aim to change, practice theory and queer theory were used as theoretical inspiration. These theoretical approaches are highly complementary, each contributing to our aim in different ways. Practice theory offers the necessary perspective to no longer think about social reality as fundamentally made up of individuals but rather of practices – a focus on the activities in a specific place and time, made durable by using material tools, discourses, and bodies. This ontological view almost automatically helps in moving beyond the individualized nature of diversity initiatives and instead focusing on how practices – through their purposiveness and space of intelligibility – have their effect on the kind of (in)hospitable space an organizational setting becomes. Altering practices instead of altering individuals. Queer theory offers the necessary politicalization to go beyond the neutral and instrumental nature of diversity management.