Shedding light on the Italian way to diversity management : an empirical analysis

The increase in labour force diversity is one of the most important labour market characteristics of developed countries in the last decades. People’s diversity is not good or bad per se, its positivity or negativity relies on the way companies manage it: it is the conscious management of people’s diversity that can become a source of competitive advantage. Deeming that in Italy workforce diversity is by now a reality and recognising that there is an evident lack of information about diversity management practices in this country, the paper purpose is to show how diversity management is assessed and handled within a sample of Italian based companies. The paper, which uses a new-human relation framework, has important implications for the field of equality and diversity in organisational studies. In fact, it firstly systematises the concept of diversity management and, on the basis of this, it then sheds light on the Italian way to diversity management through an explorative and descriptive analysis on a sample of 93 Italian based companies.