It's Good to Be Different: How Diversity Impacts Judgments of Moral Behavior

Recently, conversation on diversity and inclusion has been at the forefront in the media as well as the workplace. Though research has examined how diversity impacts organizational culture and decision-making, little attention has been given to how corporate diversity impacts consumers’ responses to the firm. This article establishes a link between diversity and the perceived morality of market actors. A series of studies demonstrate that greater diversity (racial, gender, or national) in a corporate team leads to perceptions of greater morality of the firm and its representatives and, as a consequence, results in more favorable consumer attitudes and behavior towards the firm. This positive effect arises because consumers perceive diverse teams as possessing higher perspective-taking abilities. Since marketplace morality is concerned with the greater good, we argue that higher perceptions of perspective-taking signal that the team will safeguard the broad interests of the community rather than serve narrow interest groups. The findings have broad implications since consumers are increasingly concerned with moral consumption. Our research suggests that diversity in the workforce is not only important for team performance and social equity but can shape consumers’ sentiments and behaviors towards the firm.

#MeToo will sustain demands for US corporate diversity

Significance That turned the eleven-year-old MeToo movement into a central pillar of a broader drive in the United States to address gender, race and social inequality. Since then, the technology sector has become a bit more hospitable to women but still has much to do on employment and workplace culture. Impacts COVID-19 has stalled some of the momentum to #MeToo reforms. The tech sector's persistent poor gender diversity potentially hurts industry competitiveness. Few US states have yet extended sexual harassment protections to cover race, ethnicity and gender identity.

On the edge of diversity: Anti-Muslim racism and discrimination in white diversity spaces

This article traces the development over the last decades in France of anti-Muslim racism and discrimination within professional and organisational fields. It shows how, in the wake of 2004 law banning religious symbols in schools, new demands for religious neutrality have spread far beyond educational grounds, to permeate a variety of institutions, including those purportedly designed to fight against discrimination and achieve equality. Drawing on a longitudinal, qualitative analysis of workplace diversity policies, I show the eviction of faith diversity from corporate diversity procedures through the implementation of ‘white diversity’ concepts, based on two tenets: first, patterns of Muslim racialisation, as faith options are turned into ‘personality styles’ and ‘identity problems’; second, the perceived legitimacy and widespread social acceptance of this ‘respectable racism’, woven into claims upon meritocracy, and disguised as ‘corporate culture’.

Diversity as Immigration Governmentality: Insights from France

This article aims to examine the ambiguous connections between immigration, diversity politics, and white supremacy in twenty-first century France by considering them both theoretically and empirically. It offers to elucidate the ways in which the recent growth and expansion of the diversity framework in Europe and France have gone hand in hand with the unfolding of particularly repressive migration policies, hostility towards migrants, and outright institutional racism. Drawing on qualitative longitudinal data on corporate diversity policies, based on semi-structured interviews (n = 86), the article also relies on secondary data analysis from other policy domains (migration, education, urban development), favoring a globally comparative lens. First, I engage with some major trends of the recent reinvention of diversity at the EU level, underscoring the ambiguous effects of Europeanizing antiracism and nondiscrimination in a reverse sequence; second, I critically revisit the ways in which this European reinvention, combined with the legal universalization of equal opportunity, has given rise to the articulation of “white diversity” conceptions; then I explore their even more problematic nexus with governing migration. Finally, I call for a critical scrutiny of how universalized and thoroughly individualized notions of diversity diversification may emerge as instrumental in upholding hegemonic whiteness, in the fields of race relations as well as international migration.

Barriers and Mitigating Strategies of Entrepreneurial Business Growth: The Role of Entrepreneur Race and Gender

In this study, we investigate the obstacles to growth and the mitigating strategies of high-performing (over $1 million in revenues) entrepreneurial businesses, and how these differ between businesses owned by Black and White entrepreneurs and between female and male entrepreneurs. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and qualitatively analyzed using grounded theory and thematic analysis methods. Findings reveal that the lack of access to capital is faced by all groups of entrepreneurs, but that Black and female entrepreneurs additionally faced racial discrimination and gender bias obstacles to their business growth. While all entrepreneurs used social capital strategies to mitigate the barriers to growth that their businesses faced, Black and female entrepreneurs additionally employed faith and prayer as well as business engagement in governmental and corporate diversity initiatives as strategies to overcome the obstacles. Implications of the findings for the entrepreneurial business growth of racial/ethnic minority and female-owned firms are discussed.

Developing a Measurement Plan for Monitoring Diverse Friendships in the Workplace

Corporations have failed to charge human resource officers with the responsibility of facilitating the unique diverse relationships needed for enriching their own workforce. Often, at best, training programs introduce intercultural sensitivity and only suggest the actual need for employee connections with diverse others. The trainers hesitate to discuss how to monitor and facilitate accountability for forming the diverse relationships that make others feel a sense of inclusion and create safe places for voices to be asserted. This chapter calls for a human resources plan for raising the awareness for engaging in the actual networking, accountability, and the building of the human relationships that enrich the vitality of the workplace. This plan sees the corporate diversity mission as a persuasive message and thus looks at how employees may become involved in the mission in different ways related to their values, their relevant impressions, and possible outcomes.