Diversity in the workplace is a phenomenon of great strategic and operational
consequences for both public and private organizations. The study presented in
this paper is part of an ongoing two-year research project to foster and maintain
diversity within a 14,000-employee statewide public agency called TRANWAY
and among the external constituents doing business with the agency.
Recognizing that the strategic use of language and actions constitutes the
communication foundation for organizational change, the authors developed an
action plan - a set of communication strategies — designed to achieve TRAN
WAY'S objective of enhanced diversification. The purpose of this paper is to
analyze the rationale for, and discuss the development of, these strategies.
Accordingly, the paper (a) recounts the events and the decisions affecting the
framing of the research, (b) describes the organization structurally and histori
cally, (c) presents the research methods for and findings of a one-year organiza
tional assessment, and (d) discusses the communication strategies generated
from the data.
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