# The Assemblage and Dismantling of Access Barriers in Administrative Bureaucracies: Constructing the Problem of Diversity in the German Welfare State

## TL;DR

The paper examines how diversity management concepts, like 'structural barriers' and 'diversity sensitivity', become accepted realities in German welfare state bureaucracies.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel approach by applying science and technology studies to analyze how diversity management is enacted through sociotechnical assemblages in administrative settings.

## Key findings

- Diversity management concepts are constructed through sociotechnical assemblages in German bureaucracies.
- The ontology of diversity management is rooted in sociological perspectives on social mobility.
- Techniques and instruments are used to make abstract diversity concepts visible and actionable in municipal administrations.

## Abstract

The article extends the literature on the construction of “diversity management” by personnel managers in corporate America. Such research has highlighted that Human Resource (HR) specialists draw heavily on social-scientific thinking in implementing various remedies against discrimination. However, it has paid less attention to how such esoteric views of reality, comprising such “things” as “structural barriers” impeding occupational advancement and “diversity sensitivity,” have been successfully established as a self-evident reality in the workplace. In order to more thoroughly investigate how the world of diversity management is established outside the circle of academic specialists, the article employs perspectives from science and technology studies on the ways in which sociotechnical assemblages, i.e., networks of human actors and material devices, enact scientific ontologies. It applies such perspectives to a German case of diversity management, a program of “intercultural opening” that seeks to make bureaucracies of the welfare state more accessible to immigrants. The article delineates the specific ontology behind this version of diversity management, rooted in sociological perspectives on social mobility, and explores the various techniques and instruments through which officers of intercultural opening establish this ontology as a visible reality in municipal administrations.