Legitimizing a Diversity Policy in a Challenging Environment: A Case Study of a French Business School

Abstract

D iversity policies have become prevalent in today's business world (Chanlat et al., 2013) and they are key strategic elements for organizations worldwide. Yet although the policies are often praised for the principles they defend, stakeholder acceptance remains precarious in practice (Maxwell et al., 2001). The literature reveals that diversity management, which refers to how diversity policies are implemented, has been explored in a variety of contexts (Haas and Shimada, 2014), but how they are legitimized is still an important issue to be addressed.The legitimacy of policies promoting social values -defined by Suchman (1995, p. 574) as "a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs and definitions" -is a growing concern for organizations (Reast et al., 2013). The primary difficulty managers face is gaining acceptance of these policies on three dimensions at once: moral (a normative assessment of the policy's rightness for the organization), pragmatic (a cost-benefit assessment of the policy's value) and cognitive (the mere assessment of policy acceptance and understanding) (Claasen and Roloff, 2012). Research has shown that these dimensions interact and influence stakeholder perceptions of overall legitimacy, and they therefore require strategic handling (Tost, 2011). Thus, the crucial question for organizations is how to select and combine the most appropriate legitimization strategies (Scherer et al., 2013).This task is all the more difficult in challenging environments, where organizations are confronted with competing and sometimes mutually exclusive demands (Greenwood et al., 2011) due to turbulent market conditions, conflicting norms and rules and the various expectations of a high number of heterogeneous