“We Don’t Want Complaining Women!” A Critical Analysis of the Business Case for Diversity

Linda Perriton

79 citations0/0 files storedManagement Communication Quarterly

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Gender Diversity and Inequality Gender and Feminist Studies Gender Studies in Language

Abstract

The author explores how the corporate discourse of “the business case” works to frame, restrict, and depoliticize the discussion of gender in the workplace. In turn, bemused and surprised by the ease with which women have been persuaded it is not “businesslike” to complain, the author explores how women’s linguistic choices shape their corporate lives. By examining the didactic and embedded “gender work” of a women’s leadership event and reflecting on her own, occasional, weakness for the discourse, the author contributes to the understanding of how a seemingly positive and popular communication strategy reproduces unequal gendered relationships in the workplace. The author rejects the claim that using a business case discourse is an effective strategy in improving the recognition, promotion, and rewarding of women in organizations.

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References

1983The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields 2004The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields 2001Diversity Rhetoric and the Managerialization of Law 2007‘You end up doing the document rather than doing the doing’: Diversity, race equality and the politics of documentation 2005Discourses of Work-Life Balance: Negotiating 'Genderblind' Terms in Organizations 2004Deconstructing Difference: The Rhetoric of Human Resource Managers’ Diversity Discourses 2004Reworking Gender: A Feminist Communicology of Organization 2004Marketization and the Recasting of the Professional Self

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2013Ethical paradigms as potential foundations of diversity management initiatives in business organizations 2017The Business Case of Gender Equality in Swedish Forestry and Mining ‐ Restricting or Enabling Organizational Change 2020Selling diversity to white men: How disentangling economics from morality is a racial and gendered performance 2014The Australian mining industry and the ideal mining woman: Mobilizing a public business case for gender equality

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