Deconstructing Difference: The Rhetoric of Human Resource Managers’ Diversity Discourses

Abstract

This article analyses texts on diversity produced in 25 interviews with Flemish human resource (HR) managers from a critical discourse analysis and rhetorical perspective. Following critical discourse analysis, we analyse how HR managers define diversity, how their diversity discourses reflect existing managerial practices and underlying power relations, and how they reaffirm or challenge those managerial practices and power relations. Specifically, we examine how power enters HR managers’ local discourses of diversity through the very micro-dynamics of language by analysing the rhetorical schemes they use and the grand Discourses they draw from. This critical, text-focused approach to diversity discourses contributes to the development of a non-essentialist reconceptualization of diversity that acknowledges power.

Power in Management and Organization Science

“…She suggests that employees who feel precarious are more likely to feel the need to internalize this discourse in order to appear favorable to superiors. Similar results have been noted in relation to the way management accounting systems (Ezzamel and Willmott, 1998), project management (Hodgson, 2002;Clegg et al 2002), diversity (Zanoni and Janssens ( 2004), strategy (Knights and Morgan, 1991;Laine and Vaara, 2007) and billable hours (Brown and Lewis, 2010) can exert a discursive pressures that subjectify subordinates in this manner.…”

Gender essentialism and occupational segregation in insolvency practice

“…Essentialism is also strongly evident in diversity discourses -texts on the subject conceptualize by reference to biological categorizations (Litvin, 1997). Other investigations suggest that human resource managers may define diversity by reference to the socio-demographic traits of hypothetical individuals and ascribe these 'essences' to groups (Zanoni & Janssens, 2003). In law firms diversity agendas can formalize perceptions of difference founded on stereotypical assumptions (Ashley, 2010).…”

Discursive managerial practices of diversity and homogeneity

“…of social diversity, that is, their homogeneity, due to the underrepresentation of social groups such as women and ethnic and sexual minorities (see, for example, Zandvliet 2002, Wirth 2004, OSA 2005, Lopez-Claros and Sahidi 2010, Netherlands 2010. We assume, therefore, that social diversity is not a neutral or natural fact but a discourse that is informed by a constellation of social relations of power such as gender, ethnicity, and sexuality that constitute organizational members (Zanoni and Janssens 2003, Janssens and Zanoni 2005, Prasad et al 2006. In this paper, we explore the relationship between managerial understandings of diversity and of these three social relations of power.…”

“…Managers have drawn on prevailing discourses about ethnic minorities to explain their shortage at managerial level by situating that absence in 'their' culture (Zanoni and Janssens 2003, Subeliani and Tsogas 2005, Tilbury and Colic-Peisker 2006. For example, Subeliani and Tsogas (2005) explored the discursive practices of bank managers in their hiring and promotion of ethnic minority workers.…”

“…Categorical constructions of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality are examples of discursive practices that may constitute the ways individuals understand diversity and homogeneity. These discursive practices are not neutral but are products and resources of power, since their use privileges ways in which managers construct these categories and diversity itself Janssens 2003, Janssens andZanoni 2005). Since senior managerial discourses reflect and produce organizational culture, they 'constitute a key vehicle for the flow of norms, scripts, and models of management .…”