Diversity management at Biodyne

The data for this article comes from an interaction that I participated in with three employees of a MNC that I call Biodyne,Footnote ¹ who were working at the company's regional headquarters in Singapore. It was recorded as part of a broader research project that investigated the cross-cultural positioning of Koreans working at MNCs in Singapore. The interaction took place in January 2010, during lunchtime at a crowded food court next to the participants' office. The three participants were Donna, a Chinese Singaporean, Ranjit, an Indian national, and Shin, a Korean national, who were all mid-level managers working in the same department. I had already known Shin for a while as he was an acquaintance of mine and also a key participant in my larger project, but I met Donna and Ranjit for the first time that day. The interaction took place somewhat accidentally—I had arranged to interview Donna over lunch, but when we went to the food court we ran into Ranjit and Shin, so we ended up sitting together and the interview became something of an informal focus group. This led to a serendipitous opportunity to observe how the participants talked about their work among themselves. Even though I controlled the general flow of the interaction by asking questions, the talk itself was quite lively, with the participants actively discussing and joking among themselves about their life and work at Biodyne.

Biodyne is a MNC that operates throughout the world, with its headquarters in Basel, Switzerland. It is a market leader in its own industry, and has over 25,000 employees in ninety countries around the world. Such global reach of the company means that diversity is an unavoidable issue for Biodyne. In particular, the Asia-Pacific regional office in Singapore was a highly diverse place where interaction across cultural boundaries routinely took place. Unlike country offices, which mostly took care of local sales and production and were staffed predominantly by employees hired locally, each regional office supervised and managed the country offices in its respective region, and for that reason culled its employees from various countries within the region. The greater diversity of the Asia-Pacific region meant that its office was particularly more diverse than other regional offices; the Singapore office had over 150 people from nearly thirty different nationalities, including both people from within the region and Westerners from the headquarters in Basel. These characteristics made the Singapore office a truly multicultural workplace. Communication within the office, though predominantly in English, frequently took place between colleagues with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds; employees also routinely communicated with country offices located in culturally and linguistically distinct places within the region, ranging from Australia and China to Thailand and India.

Ironically, though, there was relatively little emphasis on diversity management in terms of overt corporate policy. Even though Biodyne had a Chief Diversity Officer (CDO) position as many companies that view diversity as a critical leadership factor often do (Llopis Reference Llopis2011), there was little specific training related to diversity. While Biodyne offered various training programs to its employees, including ones regarding communication in the workplace, they were usually outsourced programs provided by vendors, thus not specifically tailored to the contingencies of Biodyne, and usually focusing on generic soft skills such as presentation skills. Employees were annually educated on the company's code of conduct, the last item of which was about diversity (how the company aims to cultivate a culture where each employee can contribute to the fullest of her or his potential, how it actively recruits people from different cultures and backgrounds, etc.), but the employees that I spoke to told me that the training focused mostly on reiterating technical issues of legal responsibility (such as avoiding discrimination and harassment). This lack of overt managerial interventions regarding the company's cultural and linguistic diversity is perhaps unsurprising, given that organizations tend not to be interested in the varying linguistic and cultural resources that workers bring with them unless there is significant social and ethical pressure (Wee Reference Wee2012). The area in which diversity management at Biodyne was most visible as overt corporate action was that of recruitment, in its active hiring of employees from across the region; but what attracted the attention of the top management more was other “trendy” issues such as sustainability and the environment, which had a more direct impact on the company's business. This led some employees to remark that the company was merely paying lip service to the idea of diversity.

There was also an unavoidable sense in which diversity was foregrounded as an important and valued characteristic of Biodyne, however. The sheer diversity of Biodyne's workforce was strongly emphasized on the corporate level; for instance, publicly available corporate documents such as annual reports repeatedly highlighted the diversity of the company's employees. Evidently, such corporate-level discourse had a significant impact on how the employees conceptualized their workplace, and this was reflected in much awareness and explicit talk about this diversity. For instance, the employees of the Singapore office that I spoke with regularly told me how diverse the office was, often in a proud and excited tone. One salient example of this was their claim that no matter where in the world they went, if they ran into some kind of trouble they could always call back the office to get help, because most likely there will be someone from that country or someone who can speak the local language. Such stories were clearly told as amazing illustrations of the power and potential of the regional office's diversity.

This apparent discrepancy—between the relative lack of practical corporate-level interventions regarding diversity and discourses about diversity that were widely circulated within the office—in fact, is what makes Biodyne an interesting site for investigating diversity management as technology of neoliberal control; it allows us to focus on how, through the mediation of metadiscursive regimes, diversity management may still work to dispose employees as particular kind of subjects, even in the absence of direct acts of discipline. The prevalent highlighting of diversity at the office did not mean that diversity posed no problem. In fact, there was much tension surrounding the issue of diversity. Obviously, not all forms of cultural and linguistic difference were valued equally, and despite the great value placed on diversity, there was in fact strong pressure towards convergence in linguistic and communicative practice. For some employees, then, the discourse of diversity management was a false promise, as they realized that their linguistic and cultural background works as a handicap, rather than as capital valued by the corporation. As I show below, it is through the work of metadiscursive regimes in everyday discourse that such contradictions of diversity management came to be rationalized and neutralized, leading employees to accept and internalize the values attributed to certain ways of speaking and interacting instead of others.

The dilemma of Korean employees

The contradiction of diversity management was a particularly salient issue for the Korean employees. Including Shin, there were nine Korean nationals working at the regional office, the largest contingent of Asians by nationality after the Chinese and the Indians. These Koreans represented the new, elite modes of Korean transnationalism with greater mobility (Park & Lo Reference Park and Lo2012). Since the 1990s, Koreans have been moving abroad to work at MNCs overseas, aided by South Korea's globalization and the wider recognition that Korean corporations received in the international business scene. Those who came to be employed in MNCs overseas were typically mid-level managers who were relatively successful in their career; usually they would already have been working at the Korean branches of foreign multinationals, recognized for their job performance and English language competence and for their potential to competently adapt to the multilingual and multicultural global workplace. In this sense, they deviate from the stereotypical image of Korean workers as monolingual and monocultural that derives from Korea's linguistic and cultural homogeneity (Park Reference Park2008).

At the same time, however, the future prospects for Korean employees of foreign-based MNCs were often considered to be limited. In the case of Biodyne, even though the Korean employees were well recognized for their accomplishments, it was generally perceived that their current position as mid-level managers was about as far as they could be promoted. The next step up the ladder for them would be to take up a top position in the region or be assigned to the headquarters in Basel as part of the global-level management team; however, no Korean so far had ever achieved this. It was true that Asians in general had a much more limited chance of entering the circle of Biodyne's top-level management.Footnote ² Nonetheless, it was often considered (by Koreans themselves as well as their non-Korean colleagues) that Koreans were falling behind in their foray into higher management, compared to, for instance, Singaporeans and Indians.

While the actual reason for such disparity must be complex (possibly involving a range of issues from individual performance and social relations to ideologies about race and ethnicity), the typical explanation given, both by Koreans and non-Koreans, often involved the issue of communication. In interviews I carried out with Koreans working for MNCs in Singapore, for example, Koreans' English was often characterized as sufficient enough for carrying out routine job requirements, but inadequate for more serious and fast-paced discussions and debates in strategic meetings. The interviewees would report that they sometimes feel that they are unable to express their views and ideas as often and clearly as they would like to, because they were not comfortable in quickly formulating and confidently articulating their thoughts in English. The implication of such statements, then, is that Koreans are unsuccessful in advancing into the ranks of higher-level managers because of their weak communicative skills.

We should, however, be careful not to treat such reports at face value, for evaluations of competence are always shaped and constrained by language ideologies, and must be understood within contexts of power (Park Reference Park2010). This is particularly the case for English in South Korea, where the widespread ideology of self-deprecation frequently leads Koreans to downplay their competence in English, subjecting them to a feeling of anxiety and inadequacy (Park Reference Park2009). We must also remember that these Koreans were competent managers, as evidenced by the fact that they were recruited from the Korean country office to work at the regional headquarters. Thus, it is important for us to consider how such talk about Koreans' communicative “difference” is deployed within metadiscursive regimes that are linked with broader flows of power.

The Korean participant in the recorded interaction, Shin, could be one example of this. In late 2011, Shin became one of the candidates for a higher managerial position. While he was quite optimistic about the outcome, the promotion was given to another candidate, who was an Indian national. When Shin asked his supervisor why he did not get the promotion, the answer he received was that it was because of his English—Shin's line manager had complained that his English was difficult to understand. This surprised me, because though clearly not a “native speaker,” Shin appeared to me as reasonably competent in English; he was in fact a good communicator, using a mixture of logical argumentation and humor to convey his ideas in an engaging way. Shin was thus understandably upset by the supervisor's comment; he explained to me that no one, until that date, had ever complained to him about his English, and (probably rightly) suggested that it must have been office politics that cost him the promotion. Yet, Shin's story clearly resonates with the common argument I repeatedly heard (from people including Shin himself) about the position of Koreans in the global workplace: that Koreans cannot move further along the corporate hierarchy because of their communicative skills.

The fact that language and communication could be used as an explicit explanation for such outcomes suggests that diversity management in the global workplace does not simply operate on the level of overt corporate policy, but through metadiscursive regimes as well. It shows the extent to which older discourses of language and identity—in this case, that which essentially links “Koreanness” with a communicative competence lacking in value—still permeate talk about difference in Biodyne, despite its purported acceptance of diversity. While it is tempting to interpret this as a matter of discrimination and prejudice, it is important to explore the mechanisms through which such ideologies get inserted into everyday discourse, to carefully consider how this discourse about Koreans becomes a part of the normative ways in which difference is talked about under the regime of diversity management. This is because such metadiscursive regimes highlight not only the process through which different social groups come to be evaluated differently, but also how employees may be compelled to accept the realities of the workplace by adhering to normative ways of speaking (e.g. how Koreans may accept their position through an ideological conception of their own competence in English). This is indeed precisely the point about diversity management—how workers come to rationalize and internalize the logic of the capitalist workplace by understanding the self in those very terms. For this reason, metadiscursive regimes, which normalize and articulate particular orders of indexicality (Blommaert et al. Reference Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck2005), become critical in understanding the consequences of diversity management for people such as Korean employees of Biodyne. Let us now turn to the analysis of the metadiscursive regime of diversity in the interaction between Donna, Ranjit, Shin, and myself.

Juxtaposing discourses of communicative difference

Juxtaposition of older and newer discourses of language and identity was prominent in the interaction. The older discourse was reflected in the way in which essentialized conceptions of language and culture dominated talk about different speakers. The participants made frequent references to essentialized cultural categories based on nationality, which were in turn associated with particular communicative behavior—manifestations of what Billig (Reference Billig1995) calls banal nationalism. The following example, which occurred when I asked Donna and Ranjit how they would characterize their Korean co-workers, illustrates this.Footnote ³

1. (1)

   

In line 119, Donna offers the observation that Koreans “are very conscious about their language,” which she later clarifies as meaning they think a lot before speaking in English (line 136). While somewhat qualified (“most of them” in line 119), this characterization is a good illustration of the essentialized categories of national-level identities that are articulated through metapragmatic stereotypes (Agha Reference Agha2007:148) that typify certain communicative behavior as regularly associated with a group. This is illustrative of the way in which cultural difference was talked about in the whole interaction; stereotypical views about how each national group engaged in communication in the context of work were repeatedly articulated.

To be sure, the national-level identity category of “Korean” was first invoked by my questioning. There is sufficient reason to believe, however, that such metapragmatic stereotypes were not simply triggered by my question, but derived more fundamentally from the way the participants understood social relations in their global workplace. First, the characterization of Koreans in this example is not produced as an isolated statement, but located within a network of comparative and relational observations about other groups also defined on the same level, suggesting how distinctions in nationality served as natural categories for making sense of communicative difference in the workplace. Thus, Donna immediately contrasts Koreans' communicative behavior with other groups such as the Indians and Chinese. Second, such network of contrast is produced collaboratively among the participants (Ranjit's contribution in line 124, and Shin's in line 140), which shows the extent to which this understanding of difference based on essentialized communicative behavior was a shared resource among the participants. Indeed, references to such cultural metapragmatic categories were repeatedly found not only in this interaction and among these participants, but in my interaction and interviews with other Biodyne employees, and with those working in other MNCs with whom I spoke in the course of my research.

The newer discourse of language and identity, in contrast, could be found in the way the participants treated such cultural difference as mundane or trivial. When I asked whether Koreans' (purported) communicative difference caused any difficulty for work in the office, Donna and Ranjit responded that it did not, explaining that such communicative difference is so pervasive and common in the regional office that there is nothing special about it. Ranjit said:

1. (2)

   

Ranjit describes the work of accommodation in the multicultural workplace as simply a matter of “tun[ing] our brain”—which seems to mean familiarizing oneself with the specific forms of English used by different speakers, in terms of accent, word choice, or grammatical structure. This in turn is represented as highly routine (“same with Shin, same with all other guys”, line 333), and “very easy” (line 332)—even though in reality such intercultural work may not necessarily be so simple or straightforward. In contrast to more essentialized discourses of language and identity, in which linguistic and cultural difference is considered to be natural and fundamental, and thus a potential barrier to cross-cultural understanding, Ranjit's formulation of cultural difference as mundane and routine does not take difference as essential, but something that can be overcome by a technologized accommodation to the Other (e.g. “tuning our brain”), particularly by seasoned workers of MNCs who have developed great familiarity with diversity. Such reflections of ideologies of commodification, what we might identify as “technologization of discourse” (Fairclough Reference Fairclough2002), are also articulated by Donna later, as given in (3).

1. (3)

   

Switching from talk about intra-office communication (that is, communication with colleagues in the same office) to communication with people in country offices (whose communicative practices may be even more diverse), Donna lists various strategies for intercultural communication—for instance, noting different preferences for using email vs. telephone, or for using English vs. other languages. While Donna's list essentializes communicative difference along national boundaries, it also technologizes it—that is, divergent communicative practices are represented as differences that can be easily learned and overcome once the appropriate technique for speaking with each respective group is identified. Thus, in this sense, the older discourse of language and identity is interlaced with a new discourse in which communicative difference is only a matter of technical acquisition that can be facilitated by being a part of the corporation and its immanent diversity.

The way Donna and Ranjit talked about communicative difference at Biodyne, then, is highly congruent with the discourse of diversity management. Cultural and linguistic difference is seen not as something that should be suppressed—it is not seen as representing a fundamental barrier to mutual understanding to begin with—but something that can be effectively managed through technological adaptation, for the purpose of facilitating smooth interpersonal relationships and collaboration. This illustrates how older discourses that emphasize essentialized cultural and linguistic boundaries may not be abandoned, but reworked into a newer discourse that frame them as manageable within the context of the MNC.

Rationalizing contradictions of diversity management

What effect is produced by this particular way of talking about communicative difference, by this juxtaposition of discourses via routinization and technologization of communicative difference? At least one effect is how it may place responsibility on employees who fail or refuse to adopt such a technologized perspective on diversity. After some extended discussion of the mundaneness of communicative difference at the regional headquarters, when I sought to confirm whether Koreans were truly no different from other nationals in this regard, Donna mentioned that there actually is “one different thing about Koreans” that might be problematic.

1. (4)

   

Donna goes on to suggest that Koreans' slowness to express their views could work to their disadvantage, because it means that they may be seen as too quiet in meetings—that is, not contributing new ideas and opinions—and thus as less competent than people who more actively and quickly present their thoughts. Perhaps it is significant that, in contrast to her statement in (3), where she was talking about communication with country offices, Donna shifts to talking about intra-office communication among colleagues, and particularly internal meetings, where one's performance can have important consequences for evaluation and promotion. Donna considers Koreans' communicative practice and style as “problematic” not because it is a matter of whether colleagues can adapt to Koreans' mode of communication (which she and Ranjit claim is not a problem), but because it implies a failure on the part of Koreans to demonstrate their own worth; that is, Koreans' difference is no longer treated here as a matter of varying communicative style, but a matter of whether the employee is appropriately disposing herself as an ideal worker who can effectively and actively contribute to the corporation. Similarly, when Ranjit argues that the problem with Koreans is more a matter of “confidence” rather than linguistic competence per se (lines 461–63) this may be a recognition of Koreans' competence in English, but it also frames the problem as a matter of self-understanding and responsibility—that is, they are not properly positioning themselves as the type of worker that they are expected to be.

We can see here, then, the pressure to converge toward a particular corporate communicative style in which confidence and open expression of one's views is valued. Also, this style is not just presented as a matter of job-related competence, but of personhood and subjectivity; this communicative style is not simply a technical skill one has to acquire as an employee, but indexes one's responsibleness as a corporate worker. Such formulations can indeed serve as a powerful way in which contestations to the metadiscursive regimes of diversity may be suppressed. This can be illustrated by the next extract. Immediately after example (4) above, Shin jumped in to offer his opinion about Koreans' observed behavior, which became a site of minor tension in the interaction.

1. (5)

   

Shin first notes that Koreans' reticence may be due to their “fear” of speaking English (line 465), echoing Ranjit's diagnosis that this has to do with lack of confidence (line 467; also 461–63 in (4) above). But then he comments on how it may also relate to the norms of Korean corporate culture, in which respect for hierarchy and seniority remains an important principle (“you need to reserve some of your things, unless you are allowed to talk,” lines 470–71). In this sense, Shin's comment here may be seen as resisting Donna's evaluation of Koreans as failing to adhere to Biodyne's corporate communicative norms, which is implied through the way he prefaces his turn with “I need to be clear on this one” (line 464). That is, Shin draws attention to the contradictions in the metadiscursive regime of diversity management by pointing out the relativity of corporate communicative practice; if there is no universal ground for valuing free expression of one's opinion, should Koreans' practice still be seen as problematic?

Shin's critique, however, does not seem to be taken up by Donna and Ranjit, and almost goes unnoticed. Neither explicitly rejected nor actively supported, it simply serves as a basis for further talk about diversity that is ambiguous in its relation to the problem Shin raises. For instance, even though Ranjit appears to acknowledge Shin's point by agreeing that Koreans' difference may be explained by different communicative principles (“Don't talk unless asked”, line 475), the lack of any explicit comment about the inequalities that Shin problematizes makes the import of Ranjit's comment unclear. Immediately after Ranjit's comment, Donna goes on (line 476) to offer an account of her personal experience of participating in a meeting at the Biodyne headquarters in Basel, and there is ambiguity here as well. On the one hand, Donna can be seen as aligning her stance with Shin's, as she highlights how the interaction at the headquarters, with its communicative culture even more open than that of the regional office, made her feel awkward (line 483–84), thus implying she can sympathize with Koreans who struggle with Biodyne's communicative culture. On the other hand, Donna's account depicts the Biodyne headquarters as a “safe space” for employees to articulate their viewpoints; it emphasizes the egalitarianism (“sitting in a big circle”) and display of interest (“they asked for opinion”) that naturally led the participants to openly express their view without fear of being seen as wrong or “different” (“I could even say things like I don't know what I'm thinking of …,” lines 476–78). Through her story, the Biodyne headquarters, iconically located at the heart of the MNC, comes to represent the essence of the metadiscursive regime of diversity, in which everyone regardless of cultural background is seen as valuable and no contribution is useless to the corporation. But the important point about this is that everyone has to participate in this openness, and those who are less than able to do so due to their cultural difference (such as Koreans) cannot demand that their difference be recognized. Koreans who refrain from expressing their views in meetings can only blame themselves, because they are the ones who are not opening up to the “safe culture of diversity” that the corporation has so generously provided. In this sense, Donna's story disaligns with Shin's stance, defending the corporate order of communication and problematizing Koreans for their failure to adapt to that order.

Such ambiguity, I argue, reveals one important aspect of the metadiscursive regime of diversity in the data. The ambiguity here illustrates how the specific ways in which old and new discourses about language and identity are juxtaposed may work to deal with charges that diversity management only privileges particular styles of communication over others. On the one hand, we find persistence of an older discourse that articulates cultural difference in essentialist terms, with some communicative practices treated as more beneficial to corporate interests than others; on the other, this older discourse is juxtaposed with a newer discourse, in which no cultural difference is seen as lying outside of corporate governance and never rejected as irrelevant. Instead of emerging as a contradiction, this juxtaposition allows potential criticism of the metadiscursive regime to be neutralized. While some like Shin may point to this contradiction to highlight the difficulty Koreans face, the specific configuration of old and new discourses absorbs such critiques, turning them into just another cultural observation (as Ranjit and Donna do); instead, responsibility is placed on individual workers, who are expected to respond to the corporate order of diversity management as flexible workers who actively adopt technologized openness. The apparent lack of any uptake towards Shin's comment in this interaction demonstrates this effect, and it would not be too farfetched to suggest that this is one way through which Shin's (and all other Koreans') position within the company is reproduced.