In A. Pullen & C. Rhodes (Eds.), The Routledge companion to ethics, politics and organizations. London: Routledge. (For information on the Companion, see http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415821261/) Please use the published chapter for citations. This version may differ from the published version. Ethico-politics of diversity and its production Pasi Ahonen & Janne Tienari Introduction Diversity emerged as a concept in the United States in the 1980s to provide a means of discussing what seemed like ever increasing dimensions of difference in society, from race and gender to age to sexual orientation and beyond (Cox and Blake, 1991; Johnston & Packer, 1987). Social inequities identified by the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements in the preceding decades were being addressed—at least to an extent—and there was an apparent need to move from emphasizing social divisions to the positive aspects of difference (Benschop, 2011; Kelly & Dobbin, 1998). The notion of diversity was borrowed from biology to do the task (Litvin, 1997). Thirty years on, a domain of diversity knowledge has developed that not only encompasses relevant differentiating ‘factors’ at both societal and personal level but also seems to render these differences governable and manageable through various mechanisms and techniques. In this chapter, we explore the ethico-political character of diversity and its production in and for organizations. Our focus is on the politics of diversity as a form of knowledge, and on the ethics of the means by which that knowledge is produced. Here we build on the work by Barbara Townley (1993, 1994) and her adaptation of Michel Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge to the human resource management (HRM) context. HRM knowledge and its specific forms, Townley argues, are directly linked to the ways in which HRM has and can have effects: ‘HRM serves to render organizations and their participants calculable arenas, offering, through a variety of technologies, the means by which activities and individuals become knowable and governable’ (Townley, 1993: 526). Although HRM still remains one of the key organizational functions where diversity plays a role, our examination of diversity is wider, as we aim to examine it as a broader organizational notion with a number of applications outside the domain of HRM. The ethical dynamics of diversity research and its politics is an issue that has thus far not received a great deal of attention (Jonsen et al., 2011). However, different approaches and ways of researching diversity lay claim to particular moral and ethical considerations, although the ethical underpinnings of the different approaches to diversity are more often than not left unarticulated and unspecified. They are assumed and asserted rather than argued for. It is here that the work by Foucault and Townley’s application of it (1993, 1994) becomes useful; through unmasking the specific mechanisms by which HRM constructs its object, the employee, by identifying pertinent characteristics and making them comparable and calculable in particular