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By tracing the origins of workforce diversity discourse to the domain of natural science and philosophy, and analyzing two other contemporary diversity discourses, biodiversity and the Human Genome Diversity Project, this paper reveals the essentialist assumptions upon which contemporary diversity discourse is based. It demonstrates how these essentialist assumptions structure the conceptualizations of workforce diversity presented in a sample of recently published organizational behavior textbooks. The organizational consequences of the adoption of this essentialized conceptualization of diversity are explored, and a suggestion for an alternative conceptualization of difference is offered.
Deborah R. Litvin (Thu,) studied this question.