Reconsidering Consultants' Strategic Use of the Business Case for Diversity

Abstract

The business case for diversity—the practice of connecting human differences to an organization's bottom line—has been critiqued for its compromised treatment of human difference. Through a grounded in action discursive analysis of 19 interviews with diversity consultants, this research identifies three occupational demands that prompted consultants to use the business case: organizational access, motivation, and emotion work. The analysis also identifies strategies consultants used that met these demands without relying on the business case: connecting to mission statements, connecting to individual tasks, appealing to personal experience, sequencing, combining, balancing discourses of emotion and business, drawing on spiritual grounding, and using humor. By identifying these alternatives, this analysis seeks to decrease consultants' dependence on the business case when meeting occupational demands and consequently mitigate the negative effects that scholars have attributed to its common use and consequent discursive dominance in diversity work. Additionally, the conclusions suggest that diversity professionals and scholars might more explicitly use the notion of “discursive merger” to advocate for social change in organizations.

Keywords:

• diversity
• organizational communication
• emotion work
• tensional analysis
• discourse analysis

Notes

1. Because this approach is invested in elaborating possible ways of dealing with the defining tensions of a consultants' subject position, rather than ethnographic accounts that fully represent the behaviors of one or a group of consultants, I cite the consultants without developing each participant's full character.

2. One consultant preferred that the interview not be recorded. Detailed field notes were taken following the interview.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer J. Mease

Jennifer J. Mease (PhD University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is a consultant with The Center for Intentional Leadership, a management consulting firm located in Charlotte, NC and is affiliated with the Communication Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her work focuses on how social bias is built into organizational structures, and how individuals and groups cope with, challenge, or change those structures. She would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their contributions to this manuscripts, as well as Dennis Mumby and Patricia Parker, who advised the dissertation from which this essay is drawn