Why is achieving change towards more equal and socially just organizations so difficult? This book's proposal for reimagining the practicing of diversity in organizational settings is initiated by examining the primary obstacles to diversity initiatives. We need to understand why it is that many change efforts regarding diversity are difficult to implement or fail to meet expectations. Despite the persistent emphasis on diversity in organizational life, there is widespread disappointment regarding the limited impact of diversity initiatives. Some employees still leave organizations because they feel out of place, while other employees are annoyed by, sometimes even hostile to, the initiatives taken. Implementing diversity initiatives is challenging, but what makes it particularly difficult?

Addressing this question, the chapter follows the idea of many critical scholars that an ‘organization’1 is no neutral container or an objective system of rules, policies, and structures to which differences can just be added and then stirred to achieve equal and socially just organizational settings. Rather, organizing processes that aim to achieve organizational goals produce and reproduce inequalities. Joan Acker's (2006) seminal paper, ‘Inequality regimes: gender, class, and race in organizations’, advanced this argument by discussing in detail how five organizing processes create and recreate class, gender, and race inequality. General requirements of work such as total expected working hours, bureaucratic techniques that order positions and people, recruitment and hiring through social networks, wage setting practices that reward high-performing workers, and informal interactions while ‘doing the work’ systematically favour a certain type of ideal employee – often the unencumbered White man – resulting in continuing, persistent patterns of complex inequalities at work.