Marjolein Dennissen

130 The Herculean task of diversity networks jobs. As collective bottom-up initiatives organized by employees of historically marginalized groups, diversity networks have the potential to provide these groups with a voice about their experiences of exclusion, inequality, and discrimination in their organization, as well as influence the managerial agenda on these issues. However, despite their passion and commitment, as volunteers, these members often lack the political knowledge of persistent (re)production of organizational inequalities. Contributing to a complex phenomenon as organizational equality necessitates not only perseverance and effort but also some understanding about the role of power and strategic expertise to deal with these power relations. As such, outsourcing diversity management to diversity networks becomes a risky endeavor, because these networks might not be properly equipped to execute such a complex and power-laden task. In addition, the responsibility of diversity and organizational equality is placed on historically marginalized social groups themselves. Diversity networks that embody diversity can be under pressure not to address organizational inequality (Ahmed, 2009) and tend to adopt the rhetoric of sexy, feel-good diversity during meetings with organizational management. This dissertation showed that if network members are not aware of the role of power, privilege, intersectionality, or other inequality-related processes, they could contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of inequality rather than changing it. This holds true for not only network members but also (HR) managers or diversity officers. In recent research, Romani, Holck and Risberg (2018) showed that, despite their good intentions, HR professionals in a Swedish pharmaceutical company who were in charge of the implementation of diversity management practices contributed to the reproduction of discrimination when they had no further knowledge about power processes and societal, taken-for-granted norms that marginalize particular social groups. In the light of the political nature of diversity management, it is essential that practitioners gain an understanding of organizational processes of power and privilege. A (re)design and implementation of diversitymanagement practices that build on reflective and critical perspectives are needed. This necessitates collaboration between diversity scholars and practitioners (Van den Brink & Benschop, 2018). A close examination and awareness of multiple levels of organizational equality, acknowledging intersectionality and simultaneous processes of disadvantage andprivilege, helps to better assess howdiversitymanagement practices impact inequalities in organizations. In the next section, I further explicate the implications of my study for practice. The Herculean task of diversity networks “…you also have to change your environment. And there are these crusades… Look, you cannot do it alone. And with a diversity network… and that is maybe the strongest feature of a network, you cannot do it alone. You also need your environment. And people who are not a member of the network, you need them too.” (chair ethnic minority network Finance)