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This article introduces applied tensional analysis as a methodological framework that integrates constitutive ontologies (that depict organizations as processes in constant states of emerging or becoming) with the applied need for practitioners to understand and navigate the everyday exigencies of their organizational experiences. Applied tensional analysis centers analysis on tensions as the key to understanding organizational becoming in contrast to approaches that assume organizations are stable entities and consequently focus on patterns, themes, or laws. The applied tensional analysis framework offers four analytical foci (context, tensions, enacted responses, and repertoires) organized into two loops (analytical and change) as guides for data collection and analysis. While the analytical loop orients scholars to the current and past configurations of an organization’s emergence, the change loop emphasizes the multitude of available responses to a particular tension and the constitutive implications of those responses for organizational becoming. As a new methodological approach, applied tensional analysis suggests that organizational knowledge requires more than awareness of what an organization is and includes awareness of organizational potential and what an organization might become.

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.

This article addresses how diversity consultants manage the dual demands of social justice and organizational goals or priorities. I suggest that navigating this "discursive paradox" is one of-if not the-defining feature of diversity work. To investigate this discursive paradox, I analyze diversity work as a process (rather than a collection of products) as evidenced in interviews with 19 diversity consultants. The results offer two derivative discursive paradoxes that emerged in consultants' talk about diversity work: the tension between broad and narrow constructions of human differences and the tension between emphasizing change at the organizational and individual levels. Rather than framing these tensions as inherently problematic, I examine how consultants use them to create possibilities for change. Consequently, this work offers a promising approach for understanding and facilitating other forms of socially motivated organizational change, such as organizational sustainability or health and well-being campaigns.

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