Narratives of Diversity in the Corporate Boardroom: What Corporate Insiders Say About Why Diversity Matters

Authors

Kimberly D. Krawiec, Duke Law SchoolFollow
Lissa Lamkin Broome
John M. Conley

Document Type

Chapter of Book

Publication Date

2010

Keywords

corporate boards, diversity, race, gender

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.

Citation

forthcoming in,Discourse Perspectives on Organizational Communication (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011)