Content area
Full text
Peter Herriot and Carole Pemberton. Competitive Advantage Through Diversity: Organizational Learning from Difference. London: Sage Publications, 1995, 230 pages, $69.95 hardcover, $29.95 softcover.
Reviewed by Sandra A. McIntire, Assistant Professor, Rollins College, Brevard Campus, Melbourne, FL.
Don't be misled by the title! This is not just another book touting a diverse work force and providing "how to" advice on diversity training, nor does it say much about competitive advantage. As the subtitle suggests, the bulk of the book's content concerns organizational learning and organization development.
The authors do advocate an appreciation of the diverse knowledge and experiences people bring to organizations, although their focus is not necessarily on characteristics such as race, sex, or ethnic origin. Competitive advantage appears to provide the underlying motive for valuing diversity; however, the book's arguments and case studies concern single organizations and seldom explore competition among organizations.
Peter Herriot and Carole Pemberton, researchers and practitioners in the United Kingdom, draw on a number of well-known sources to describe how many popular management practices are incompatible with long-accepted theories of organization development. They side with the OD theorists, but along the way they provide useful illustrations and case studies to make their points. For instance, they argue that pay for performance programs reward individuals, whereas innovation often depends on appropriate cultural and social interactions. Likewise, using biographical data of current organizational members to predict success for new recruits clones those in power. The book adopts a sociotechnical systems view of organizations, and its arguments and rationales are solidly grounded in organization development theory (e.g., Lewin's field force analysis).
The authors identify three types of "knowing" that are important to organizations. The first is "knowing how," expertise in problem...