Narratives of Diversity in the Corporate Boardroom: What Corporate Insiders Say About Why Diversity Matters
26 Pages Posted: 9 Jun 2009 Last revised: 26 Dec 2014
Date Written: September 3, 2009
Abstract
Over the last generation, the concept of diversity has become commonplace and taken-for-granted in discourses ranging from law to education to business. In higher education, for example, it is hard to imagine a faculty job search or a student admissions discussion that was not heavily laden with talk of diversity, in the sense of the representative inclusion of women and racial and ethnic minorities in a group or organization. In this paper we present the results of an interview-based study of the discourse of diversity in a particular business setting: the corporate boardroom. Our principal observation is that - thirty-one years after the Supreme Court's Bakke decision introduced the term into public discourse - corporate insiders appear not to have arrived at a master narrative to explain the pursuit of diversity on boards of directors. Instead, their accounts stress a variety of factors and feature few concrete examples.
Keywords: diversity, race, gender, corporations, board of directors
JEL Classification: K, K22, K4
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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