5.1 CONCLUSIONES Y RECOMENDACIONES

This subject position of being morally motivated has been included under the category of relations between diversity practitioners’ because it emerged as an important idea in the accounts of DPs in describing their reasons for doing diversity work. It was used to construct legitimate and illegitimate reasons, setting out

boundaries of who counts as a DP. The term moral is used in this section to

characterise the way in which DPs talk about doing the right thing or doing good.

The subject position was used by both consultants and specialists, and the position achieved through defining oneself in contrast to monetary motivation. Being concerned with money was connoted negatively in statements by DPs, for example “what we're not is a money-chaser” asserted Joan-C. Similarly, Susanne-C said: Figure 2 Subject positions that construct relations among diversity practitioners

191 “There is an equality industry out there, and there are people who have made their job an equality job and it’s just like any other job, and there aren’t many principles around in terms of values and they just - they’ll take the money and they don’t really care what happens after they’ve done the job. […] I’m not interested.”

Susanne-C differentiates diversity work from being “any other job” by constructing a position in which DPs “care” about the work on a different level. If not directly associated with dubious ethics, making a lot of money was disassociated from moral behaviour, for example by Oliver-C “There are some people who I have seen are very successful financially who I would actually…question their ethics.” Oliver- C went on to describe those who are “in it for the money” as “charlatans”. It can be argued that this demonstrates an ongoing connection to the roots of diversity in social movements.

Making a living as a necessity of life – “paying the mortgage” (Charles-C), “needs must” (Thomas-C) - was distinguished from making money as motivation, used as a caveat to why DPs might take on certain projects. Rebecca-C distanced herself from money as a legitimate reason to work with a client:

192 “I decided that I would only work with organisations that I thought were professional and had integrity because I didn’t want to compromise my values. And so everyone I have worked with I've liked and respected whoever they are. And if I’ve thought that something was slightly dodgy or I didn't believe in it I said ‘no’. And I've walked away. And that’s really hard when you could be tempted by money.”

In statements articulating what does motivate them, several DPs said that they find the work interesting: “It's a fascinating life I live” (Thomas-C), “it’s an interesting time, I’ve got quite a challenging role. It’s a really interesting agenda.” (Helen-SP), that they enjoy it: “I love it” (Jamil-C), or have a passion for it: “anything that I do I think will have an element around this area I think it would be kind of would be quite difficult to not be something around this I'm really passionate about it” (Claire-SP). But several also explained that diversity work was a good thing to do, moral work. This was done in different ways: Two DPs wove together their enjoyment with doing good by promoting empathy in their clients:

“I love it, it’s what I want to do! […] I enjoy talking to people about

discrimination and I enjoy doing the training that I’m doing so people get to understand what it’s really like, through my own life experiences and other peoples’ life experiences or a different case studies. They actually get to understand the implications of how they may feel, how their actions may

193 affect someone else or how their colleagues’ actions may affect somebody else so it’s a good thing, I enjoy it.” (John-C)

“I enjoy what I do…I'm really enjoying what I do. For me the result is about making sure that people carry on and empathise or sympathise with these people” (Annette-C)

Empathy as a desired outcome of diversity work was an important idea that arose in the data and one that has not been extensively discussed in previous research on diversity. A more detailed discussion of this is presented in Chapter Five in the analysis of diversity training.

For others, diversity work offered an opportunity to fulfil a personal desire to change things for the better: “I want to change the world, yeah [laughs]” said James-C and “I want to change the world. <Yeah?> Only to a limited extent, I hasten to add [laughs], but yes, make it a better place” said Bill-C. Gerry-C said that

promoting equality and diversity-heterogeneity “matters to me” and for Catherine- C also “…her professional identities well connected her personal life. She's

interested in creating a safer environment dealing with prejudice and damage” (Notes from interview). For these DPs, diversity work offers a way to live in line with the ethics that they have set out for themselves – they are engaged in a practice of parhessia. In the tradition of parrhesia as a practice of the self, one becomes an ethical subject by creating synchronicity between the logos of life that one has set for

194 oneself and one’s actions (Foucault, 1999/1983a). It is worth noting that the use of the term ethical here differs from how the term ‘moral’ is used elsewhere in the text. References to ‘morality’ are made to characterise DPs’ own rationalities about their work as doing good or doing the right thing. Instead, ethics refers to ‘a practice or ethos, a mode of being’ (Dean, 2003: 181). In a Foucauldian sense, the ethical subject is one that puts their logos into practice.

Two DPs described their personal interest in reducing inequality more explicitly:

“I sort of had an interest you know really from university, so early twenties, in sort of gender equality issues and race equality issues in particular I guess, and involvement in anti-apartheid and other sort of groups and I had a real interest in sort of the social justice issues” (Isabelle-C)

“I suppose I have just always been kind of interested in inequality in a sort of political type of way” (Amy-C)

Thomas-C connected doing good with fulfilling the teachings of his religion

(Judaism), but he also articulated diversity with a much wider desire to do good for the world:

195 “You know, you can't be involved with things that I'm involved in without it being political, well it is political, but it remains political with a small ‘p’ not party politics […] Equalities, diversity work is political it has to be. […] …with a small ‘p’ I'm a ‘political activist’, how about that? You've just turned me back into an activist, Deborah! […] …if you look at green

environmentalism, egalitarianism, protecting the poor and yeah, the underdog, which is what I do, you know. It's all part and parcel and all tied up together” (Thomas-C)

The quotes above have been organised to present an incremental widening in scope of the ‘good’ that diversity work does from fulfilling individual passions and improving individual interactions to being a part of a wider campaign for change: from fulfilling personal interest, to promoting empathy for others, to fulfilling desire to change the world for the better in some way, to a specific desire for social justice in achieving equality, and then finally Thomas-C makes the broadest association between diversity and social justice connecting diversity work not only with a campaign for equality, specifically an egalitarian form of equality, but also with another social movement: environmentalism. This shows how motivations can be articulated in very different ways by DPs. More specifically, they show that being morally motivated to do diversity work is not a unitary subject position. Where some participants made what could be seen as smaller claims to the good that diversity does in a variety of ways (promoting empathy, fulfilling a personal

196 interest or passion), others positioned their work as something much broader

(changing things, promoting equality, part of campaign for social justice).

The advantage of the former subject positions to DPs is that they can more easily meet the expectations that they have set out for themselves, or demonstrate that they do so to others. The latter positions make this much harder for DPs, but could be useful to people who might wish to see DPs pushing to produce change that not only favours organisation and their interests, but that improves social justice. The finding that DPs use a rationality that evokes morality and ‘doing good’ as part of their subject formation means that there is a window to challenge DPs to promote social justice more strongly in order to align with their own logos. This could challenge the use of the business case, which scholars have previously warned has potentially negative consequences for minoritised groups because of its contingency (Dickens, 1999, Noon, 2007).

A few of the consultants in this research talked at length in interviews, and also in informal conversations, about the voluntary work that they did. The interviews had been framed as seeking to find out about participants’ work in diversity, so it is pertinent that many DPs talked about unpaid activities that they were engaged in. These participants tended to talk about how their voluntary work was connected with, or part of, their paid work in diversity. They also explained that they enjoy it. For example, Jamil-C stated that he spends 20% of his time on voluntary work so

197 today is my voluntary day!” and that he “really enjoys it”. Annette-C talked about a website that she runs voluntarily: “it's something that I... that’s the other side of the coin from the business to business, it’s to do business to consumer, and I quite enjoy [laughs] that side of it to be quite honest.” Amy-C, Joan-C, Andy-C, and Thomas-C all also mentioned voluntary projects that they devoted time to. One DP also talked about how additional projects provided her with a sense of fulfilment that she did not get from her job:

“Where I see my passion is with things outside the organisation so I'll go and do third sector stuff with this consortium of charities or I'll instigate

something, you know, with freelance consultants. So all the exciting and passionate stuff I will get outside of my paid work […] Small organisations are not interested in window dressing they're just interested in getting on with the work and there's more of a collective sense of ‘we want to try and change society’ still and they're not interested in market share” (Nicola-SP)

The engagement of DPs in voluntary work reinforces the subject position of being morally motivated, in particular not being motivated by money. It is not possible to say from within the discursive analytical approach whether DPs themselves

perceive that voluntary work plays a role in shaping how they are perceived by others, that it is a practice of the self that is engaged in strategically, because the discourse analytic approach does not look at text in terms of deliberate or conscious action but instead regards it as an expression of discourse, as an artefact of meaning

198 that is the object of inquiry in itself. However, it is possible to say that voluntary work may give DPs a form of authenticity through an enhanced coherence in the logos that they have set for themselves and the way that they live. By talking about volunteering as part of diversity work, DPs engage in parrhesia, constructing voluntary work as part of diversity work. This idea seeks to render the DP an ethical subject, as one who is not financially motivated.

Rebecca-C suggests that this could be valued by clients: by showing that one is not financially motivated, in the “longer term, it wins you a lot of respect”. The question of whether or not the perception of the DP by others is affected by this is beyond the scope of the current work.

There is one more aspect of the subject position of being morally motivated that is important to bring to light because it shows how the slipperiness, or emptiness, of the signifier ‘diversity’ allows the business case to be articulated with moral motivation. By a handful of DPs, ‘doing good’ was at times articulated in terms of ‘maximising human potential’. These quotes illustrate the bricolage that DPs are engaged in: they show how the rationality of maximising potential was woven in amongst others that have already been outlined in this section:

“I've always had an interest in in this subject area or at least I have for an awful long time, you know, looking at how groups of people that have