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Full-Text Articles in Critical and Cultural Studies
Reconsidering Consultants’ Strategic Use Of The Business Case For Diversity, Jennifer Mease (Also Peeksmease)
Reconsidering Consultants’ Strategic Use Of The Business Case For Diversity, Jennifer Mease (Also Peeksmease)
Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications
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 …