ABSTRACT
The workplace provides an acute, in many ways distinctive arena in which ‘diversity issues’ are interpreted, negotiated and applied. Employment will be a prime focus of discrimination legislation: the ‘hiring and firing’ of staff, their wages, their working conditions and the requirements of their roles are fraught with potential for unfairness, insensitivity, uneven ‘playing fields’ and the informal workings of prejudice. It is also as workers, or would-be workers, that individuals are most likely to raise claims of conscientious objection – which, very often, will consist precisely in an objection either to the requirement to take on a role itself, or (where a role has already been accepted) to fulfil a particular task within it. Among workplaces in general, schools and other educational institutions hold particular social and political importance given their instrumental role in the development of citizenship, the construction of identity and, in more prosaic terms, the dissemination of knowledge. When addressing diversity, the realm of formal education thus poses specific, pressing questions precisely because of the particular kinds of power and influence at work within it. It is, outside of the family, the institution of contemporary civil society in which such influence is starkest, strongest and most instrumental in terms of citizens’ views on and experiences of the social dynamics through which ‘diversity issues’ play out. Our focus in this chapter is on educational institutions both as workplaces and as sites of these kinds of influence.
