The Communicative Construction of Diversity: Culture, Power, and Organization in Contemporary Societies

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have become central themes in contemporary organizational discourse. At their core, DEI frameworks seek to promote the voices and participation of vulnerable, underrepresented, or marginalized groups, typically identified as women, ethnic minorities, migrants, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ communities. Yet DEI is too often framed as a set of managerial tools, compliance procedures, or symbolic commitments, rather than as a communicative, cultural, and political process through which inclusion and exclusion are continuously produced and contested.

This Research Topic is premised on the idea that organizations are not neutral containers of diversity but communicatively constituted spaces in which identities, hierarchies, belonging, recognition, and participation are negotiated through discourse, everyday interaction, technologies, and institutional routines (Putnam and Cheney, 1985; Cooren et al., 2011; Brummans et al., 2014). From this perspective, diversity encompasses multiple and intersecting dimensions such as gender, race and ethnicity, disability, age, class, sexuality, migration background, religion, and neurodiversity.

Critical scholarship has shown that the language of inclusion can coexist with persistent inequalities. Ahmed (2012) showed how diversity work can become procedural or performative, while Williams, Korn and Chang (2021) found that many workplace inclusion strategies fail when they ignore structural bias and organizational culture. Recent debates on diversity washing and the paradoxes of DEI further expose the gap between organizational rhetoric and structural change (Toma, 2024).

Recent research also suggests that diversity outcomes depend less on formal policies than on the communicative and relational climates of workplaces. Inclusive strategies can foster employee engagement, trust, and innovative work behavior when reinforced by consistent organizational practices, leadership commitment, and everyday recognition (Shore et al., 2018; Elamin et al., 2024). By contrast, diversity statements alone do not automatically generate inclusion and may even produce selective, symbolic, or even counterproductive effects when disconnected from organizational change (De Saint Priest and Krings, 2024).

These organizational tensions are further reshaped by digital environments, where platforms, data systems, and artificial intelligence increasingly mediate inclusion, participation, visibility, and control. Platform infrastructures and AI tools now influence hiring, evaluation, visibility, workflow coordination, employee surveillance, and communicative exchanges, often reproducing biases while also opening new possibilities for accessibility and participation (van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal, 2018; Bucher, 2018; Costanza-Chock, 2020). A growing body of work shows how algorithmic systems may reproduce discrimination in hiring and workplace evaluation, making communication and governance increasingly inseparable (Noble, 2018; Benjamin, 2019; Raji et al., 2020).

Against this backdrop, this Research Topic invites theoretical and empirical contributions that examine the communicative construction of diversity in contemporary organizational contexts. We approach communication not simply as a channel for transmitting inclusive values, but as the arena in which decisions are made about whose voice counts, who is heard and represented, and who can access resources, authority, and decision-making power. This includes internal communication, leadership discourse, organizational storytelling, recruitment narratives, media visibility, digital participation, and everyday workplace interactions. The Topic aims to move beyond purely normative or managerial framings of DEI by foregrounding the communicative processes, everyday practices, technological mediations, and power structures through which inclusion and exclusion take shape. We particularly welcome critical, intersectional, and comparative work, as well as qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method approaches that link organizational communication with broader questions of inequality, power, and technological change.

Suggested themes include, but are not limited to:

• communication and the construction of diversity in organizations
• gender, race, class, and intersectionality in organizational contexts
• voice, silence, listening, and participation in organizations
• leadership communication and inclusive cultures
• disability inclusion and accessible communication
• NGOs and advocacy communication
• public administration and inclusion policies
• diversity washing and symbolic inclusion
• AI, hiring algorithms, and bias
• recruitment and employer branding
• qualitative and ethnographic approaches to DEI
• digital methods in organizational communication.

References

Ahmed, S. (2012) On being included: racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Benjamin, R. (2019) Race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new Jim code. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Brummans, B. H. J. M., Cooren, F., Robichaud, D., and Taylor, J. R. (2014) Approaches to the communicative constitution of organizations. In: L. L. Putnam and D. K. Mumby, eds. The SAGE handbook of organizational communication. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, pp. 173–194.

Bucher, T. (2018) If…then: algorithmic power and politics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cooren, F., Kuhn, T., Cornelissen, J. P., and Clark, T. (2011) Communication, organizing and organization: an overview and introduction to the special issue. Organization Studies, 32(9), pp. 1149–1170.

Costanza-Chock, S. (2020) Design justice: community-led practices to build the worlds we need. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

De Saint Priest, G., and Krings, F. (2024) Diversity statements and inclusion outcomes: symbolic commitments and organizational effects. Frontiers in Psychology, 15.

Elamin, A., et al. (2024) Diversity management, employee engagement and innovative work behaviour: the role of inclusive organizational climates. Frontiers in Psychology, 15.

Putnam, L. L., and Cheney, G. M. (1985) Organizational communication and the study of organizations. In: R. D. McPhee and P. K. Tompkins, eds. Organizational communication: traditional themes and new directions. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications, pp. 130–166.

Noble, S. U. (2018) Algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. New York: New York University Press.

Raji, I. D., Smart, A., White, R. N., Mitchell, M., Gebru, T., Hutchinson, B., Smith-Loud, J., Theron, D., and Barnes, P. (2020) Closing the AI accountability gap: defining an end-to-end framework for internal algorithmic auditing. In: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. New York: ACM, pp. 33–44.

Shore, L. M., Cleveland, J. N., and Sanchez, D. (2018) Inclusive workplaces: a review and model. Human Resource Management Review, 28(2), pp. 176–189.

Toma, C., ed. (2024) Editorial: paradoxes of diversity, equity and inclusion. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, Article 1501574.

van Dijck, J., Poell, T., and de Waal, M. (2018) The platform society: public values in a connective world. New York: Oxford University Press.

Williams, J. C., Korn, R. M., and Chang, P. (2021) Bias interrupted: creating inclusion for real and for good. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.

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• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
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Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review

Keywords: communication, diversity, inclusion, bias, intersectionality

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