The aim of this study was to contribute to the development of a critical, non-essentialist conceptualization of diversity. We have attempted to do so in two ways. First, through CDA, we examined HR managers’ definitions of diversity and their diversity discourses as products and producers of management practices structured along existing power relations. Second, by focusing on rhetorical schemes and grand Discourses, we analysed how power enters HR managers’ local discourses of diversity through the very micro- dynamics of language. In this concluding section, we focus on our main findings with respect to both types of contribution.
HR managers generally define diversity on the basis of a few selected diversity axes and as a group phenomenon. These definitions fix diverse employees’ representations by constructing them solely as members of reference groups sharing given essences, such as disability, gender, or culture. Through this type of representation, diverse employees are discursively denied full subjectivity and agency. As managers, our speakers are, however, not interested in the demographic difference per se, but rather in how that difference can or cannot be used to attain organizational goals. In the former case, they construct difference positively as additional value; in the latter, they construct it negatively as lack. In both cases, diversity is conceived in a very selective and instrumental way with reference to the productive process in the specific organizational context. In this way, these diversity discourses clearly reflect existing power relations between management and employees in the organization. At the same time, diversity discourses are also actively deployed to reaffirm those class relations. Specifically, managers do so by comparing different groups of employees and using the more compliant or productive group as the norm against which all employees are evaluated. Although two diversity discourses challenged practices between groups of employees, we did not find any discourse challenging managerial practices and the underlying power relations.
Power further enters HR managers’ local discourses of diversity through the micro-dynamics of language. Diversity discourses both reflect and reaffirm existing management practices because HR managers draw heavily from grand Discourses of economic rationality in terms of organizational needs (customer care, quality, competence, and teamwork) and compliance (availability, loyalty, and work pace). By so doing, they not only draw their own legitimacy from these grand Discourses, but also contribute to reaffirming them as hegemonic. In two instances, HR managers relied on the grand social Discourses of culture and equality. However, these discourses of diversity failed to question existing power relations because they promoted equality only between different groups of employees rather than between employees and management.
With respect to the rhetorical schemes used, group-member and essence- group liaisons of coexistence appeared in representations of diverse employees, thereby denying their agency. Rhetorical schemes based on the structure of reality, such as liaisons of coexistence, liaisons of succession, and hierarchies, were the most common throughout the texts. Because these schemes promote the existing reality, they are particularly used in discourses of difference as lack and in those reaffirming managerial practices. In contrast, rhetorical schemes aiming to establish a new reality, such as examples, illustrations and models, were used in only two types of diversity discourse: discourses of difference as additional value and those challenging intergroup practices. However, in both cases, they failed to question existing manage- ment practices because they reinscribed diversity within organizational grand Discourses or did not address the management–employees relationship.
As a final reflection, we point to two main limitations of this study. First, we only analysed texts produced by managers. This does not allow for investigation of whether and how employees co-construct an organization’s discourses of diversity, resist objectification, and affirm themselves as agents. Future research may benefit from a more dialogical approach to diversity discourse. Second, the findings of the study reflect our methodological choice to analyse diversity discourses across organizations. A more in-depth analysis of one organization may offer additional insights into the mutual relationship between discursive and other management practices. Ethnographies can elucidate the non-discursive ways in which diversity practices reinforce or challenge power relations. If diversity research is to overcome the limits of its managerial roots and promote practices that truly value differences within equality, it will need to address critically the role of power in the construction of difference and its managerial use.