This paper critically analyses diversity management in organizations as an inherent part of technocratic ideology, which aims to displace the treatment of social inequality from the political instance to the human resources management of companies. From the analysis of the international and national literature on the subject it is discovered that diversity management has emerged as a response of North American managers to the affirmative action policies of the 1960´s and 1970´s. This literature advocates that diversity management is more effective to deal with social inequalities because it is based on meritocracy and makes achievable to reach economic benefits both to individuals and companies. The transplantation of these practices into the Brazilian context, on the other hand, bumps into a complication in terms of their adoption face to the myth of the Brazilian racial democracy, which masks prejudice and gets in tension with the ideology of diversity management.
Diversity; affirmative action; critical theory; racism