Marjolein Dennissen

135 Discussion Reflections on limitations and future research avenues In this section, I offer some final reflections on the research process and my own role as a researcher. I conclude with some promising avenues for future research. In this dissertation, I set out to build a more comprehensive understanding of how diversity networks are actually functioning as a diversity management instrument. Thus, rather than explain the effectiveness of diversity networks, the aim of this study was to provide an in- depth exploration of different diversity networks and to better understand how these networks can contribute to equality in organizations. Because critical diversity perspectives on diversity networks are particularly rare, the central research question of this dissertation has previously not been adequately addressed. Therefore, I conducted a multiple case study that not only supported a broad exploration of diversity networks but also allowed for a fine-grained analysis of these networks within their real-life, organizational context (cf. Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007; Yin, 2009). Although a case study may limit generalizability in the statistical sense, it does allow emergent theorization by recognizing patterns among cases (Bleijenbergh, 2013; Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007). Rather than broad generalizations, my research yielded in-depth theoretical insights about how diversity networks address power, inequality, intersectionality, and privilege. As such, the cases were used to shed new light on diversity networks and make important theoretical contributions to the literature on diversity management. To study diversity networks and their contribution to organizational equality, I have adopted a critical diversity perspective. As a critical diversity scholar, I take a particular position and epistemological stance, which has implications for the way I see the world. In line with the larger stream of critical management studies, critical diversity studies “offer a range of alternatives to mainstream [diversity] management theory with a view to radically transforming management practice” (Adler, Forbes, & Willmott, 2007, p. 119). Critical scholars share a “deep skepticism regarding the moral defensibility and the social and ecological sustainability of the prevailing forms of management and organization” (Adler et al., 2007, p. 119). Thus, their aim is to show how problematic organizational norms and practices serve to sustain and perpetuate organizational phenomena, such as organizational inequality (Adler et al., 2007). However, being skeptical about organizational diversity management and diversity networks and showing how organizational inequality is sustained by organizational practices seems easier than actually identifying how practices can contribute to equality instead. So, ironically, despite the intentions of critical scholars to change the status quo, a critical view also hampers a contribution to change due to a tendency to see howorganizational practices “merely, though accidentally, reproduce the very inequalities they were trying to contest” (Scully & Segal, 2002, p. 161). This tendency has been called “metaphysical pathos” (Gouldner, 1995 as cited in Scully & Segal, 2002, p. 161). Taking a critical diversity perspective to study diversity networks, I experienced this tendency toward metaphysical pathos myself. Inspired by the work of Audre Lorde, I pondered about her idea that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the