Selling diversity to white men: How disentangling economics from morality is a racial and gendered performance

Abstract

Diversity professionals include business scholars, management consultants, diversity officers, and human resource professionals, who claim that the business case is about economics, not about morality or social justice. Drawing on 2 years of ethnographic research, this paper finds that diversity professionals sell diversity to white men—literally to obtain new clients and, metaphorically, to gain supporters for their practices—by performing economic rationality. In examining the intersection of economics and morality through the business case, this article argues that economic rationality itself is a racial and gendered performance. Moreover, insofar as diversity is a managerial discourse that employs ideas and models of the economy to design organizational techniques that improve business, it claims that through the business case, diversity professionals perform the economy itself. Thus, this research unsettles pervasive scholarly and popular assumptions that capitalism is intrinsically amoral. Finally, it characterizes organizational practices wherein diversity professionals perform economics as amoral and unracial as white economics. White economics, in other words, reproduces the everyday operation of neoliberal organizations as purportedly amoral, and hence, unracial and ungendered.

Introduction

In February 2015, I assisted Keith, a board member of American D&I, ¹ with a presentation to a client, a multinational bank, in honor of African-American Heritage Month. American D&I is a non-profit organization located in the southern United States, which hosts networking events and trainings, develops organizational metrics, and provides consultancy services on diversity and inclusion. Intending to provide a brief history lesson in the Civil Rights Movements, I asked Keith if I could include the story of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American child who, in 1955, was lynched for allegedly flirting with a white woman. I imagined I would say that the 1960s movements led to affirmative action policies, and that these practices paved the way for diversity management. As we sat across from each other at a folding table in a brown and gray open-concept office, Keith told me sternly, ‘Nah, they don’t want to hear that’. After a moment of silence, I asked him why. He replied, ‘Let me put it this way, I asked [them], can I talk about [how] the playing field was not level and is still not level today? And [the client’s representative] said, “Mmm nah don’t mention that”’. Keith then said he was going to tell them how diversity was going to make them money.

Through 2 years of ethnographic research among diversity professionals, I found that these management actors use the business case—or economic justifications—to sell diversity to a white male workforce. They do this literally and metaphorically: to enlist white men as new clients and as advocates of diversity. Diversity professionals—who include business scholars, management consultants, diversity officers, and human resource professionals—insist that the business case is absolutely necessary to institutionalize diversity programs and initiatives. These practices confirm what Anna Lorbiecki and Gavin Jack (2000) found, which is that, since the 1980s, diversity professionals gradually disentangled economic and moral justifications for diversity management. In this article, I show that while diversity professionals sell diversity by framing it exclusively in terms of its economic benefits, they do not claim to be amoral actors. I suggest, hence, that they are strategists concerned with making marginalized knowledges legible to the norms of Eurocentric institutions (Collins, 1990; Swan, 2010; Swan and Fox, 2010). Thus, I argue, the moral detachment from economics, and economic rationality itself, is a racial and gendered performance. Moreover, insofar as diversity is a managerial discourse that employs ideas and models of the economy to design organizational techniques that improve business and the economy, I suggest that these socio-economic practices perform capitalism itself (Callon, 1998; Thrift, 2005). Thus, this research unsettles pervasive scholarly and popular assumptions that capitalism is intrinsically amoral.

Studying managerial knowledge production

Diversity professionals are managerial actors who create economic value in and of diversity management. From July 2014 to June 2016, I conducted ethnographic research of diversity professional networks in the United States, collecting qualitative data through three main sites: (1) at a diversity non-profit organization, which I call American D&I; (2) at over 50 events, including workshops, trainings, and networking events; and (3) at three national and international diversity conferences. To obtain fieldwork research access to American D&I, I introduced myself to the Chairman of the Board during one of their public diversity events; I offered, in exchange, to volunteer for his organization. He readily accepted. Across these sites, I observed and interviewed diversity professionals that included management consultants, employees from management consultancies and human resource and diversity departments, as well as Chief Diversity Officers, executives, and board members of various for-profit and non-profit firms. In the words of Laura Nader (1974), I ‘studied up,’ tracing the relation between powerful decision-makers and structural inequities. I followed ‘the problem’, observing and inquiring into how professionals attempted to institutionalize diversity after the systemic dismantlement of affirmative action in the corporate workplace (Marcus, 1995).

To study up I employed what Hugh Gusterson (1997) termed a ‘polymorphous engagement’, which means ‘interacting with informants across a number of dispersed sites, not just in local communities, and sometimes in virtual form; and it means collecting data eclectically from a disparate array of sources in many different ways’ (p. 116). In studying nuclear weapons laboratories, Gusterson showed that some ethnographers need a creative approach to collecting data, such as those that trace the production of knowledge and objects across public and private spaces wherein access may be limited. Employing this approach, anthropologists have studied secret Hollywood communities (Ortner, 2010), transnational-immigration institutions (Feldman, 2011), drug trafficking policy makers (Tate, 2015), and Wall Street bankers (Ho, 2009). In the 21st century, the production of diversity and the diversity management field itself are also dispersed across a number of actual and virtual sites across the United States and the world. I collected data by conducting participant observation and interviews in Southern and Northern California, major cities in Texas, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Washington D.C., and virtually, in Alabama, Ohio, and Maine. I also compiled scholarly and popular literature of diversity management and created a ‘modern archive.’

While most of my interlocutors sought to institutionalize diversity in for-profit organizations, I found that diversity professionals advocate for the utility of the business case, regardless of industry. I collected data on how diversity professionals defined, characterized, and operationalized their work, and in particular, how they acquired clients and trained others. I conducted 1–1.5 hours long interviews with 40 consultants, professionals, executives, and board members over phone and video calls, in their offices, and over lunch. In one occasion, I assisted a diversity consultant with a presentation on organizational culture, which in para-ethnographic fashion (Marcus and Holmes, 2006), entailed delivering insights to the human resource professionals to improve the efficacy of their training. As an anthropologist in business, gaining familiarity with such a (relatively) foreign culture meant ultimately becoming a collaborator. Anthropologists have long engaged in the moral and ethical debates over their complicity in reproducing the phenomena they study (Hale, 2008). I learned that in studying up, this complicity in many ways is necessary to unearth the norms and ideologies that undergird powerful institutions. With this comes a responsibility to engage critically with our data, research interlocutors, and communities in efforts to produce knowledge that can extend our understandings of the historic, cultural, and systemic ways in which power is reproduced.

Thus, I respond to feminist standpoint epistemological concerns with the politics of knowledge production and the social positioning of researchers (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 2004). During data collection, I was acutely aware of how my presence as a woman of color, in some instances, enabled me to acquire access, while in others, it limited it. I learned that a familiar ‘brown’ face often indexed to my research subjects a sympathetic and trustworthy researcher. Powerful actors volunteered their time and energy to this work and for that I am grateful. I would like to stress to them that my critiques of their work is done with the best of intentions to advance strategies for dismantling systemic racial and gender inequity. I also learned by interviewing white diversity professionals that not being white foreclosed opportunities for witnessing conversations on subjects that they were comfortable speaking about only among themselves for fear of being judged (or worse, called ‘racist’). I believe, hence, that white diversity scholars play an important role in revealing the private ways by which managerial discourses on race and gender are produced. Thus, I foreground a paradox: whereas my own social positioning enabled me to quickly establish rapport with diversity professionals, I found that diversity professionals themselves abstract their own to sell diversity.

The business case and the reproduction of whiteness

Critical diversity scholars have shown that the business case reproduces whiteness. One way this happens is through diversity professionals’ centering of white men in the production of diversity. Since diversity differs little from affirmative action programmatic structure, social scientists have argued that the business case is a strategy to advocate for programs that address social inequities (Kelly and Dobbin, 1998; Kirton et al., 2007; Swan and Fox, 2010). Sara Ahmed (2007) wrote, the ‘diversity term “arrived” partly as the result of the failure of other terms, especially “equality”, to work’ (p. 237), because institutions failed to take seriously demands for social change. Thus, some suggested that this meant, ‘repackaging equal opportunity’ to make these practices palatable to a white leadership and workforce (Gordon, 1992; Liu, 2017a; Lorbiecki and Jack, 2000; Lowery, 1995).

For instance, in asking how these practices can benefit them, diversity professionals center white men, overprivileging them (Grimes, 2002). They champion the financial benefits of the business case for executives, shareholders, and corporate elites—positions almost exclusively occupied by white men (Lee Ashcraft and Allen, 2003). They also advocate for deriving business value from marginalized identities (Gordon, 1995; Melamed, 2006, 2015; Shankar, 2015; Urciuoli, 2016). In this way, Helena Liu (2017a) wrote, diversity was constructed ‘on white terms,’ essentializes non-white differences, and reinforces power inequities along racial and gender lines.

Diversity also reproduces whiteness by reinforcing historic power relations embedded in organizational norms (Ahmed, 2012; Grimes, 2001; Hunter et al., 2010; Lee Ashcraft and Allen, 2003; Liu, 2017a). For instance, whiteness operates through invisible norms that privilege white groups at the expense of others (Baldwin, 1962; Dyer, 1997; hooks, 1997; Yancy, 2012; Al Ariss et al., 2014). Stella Nkomo (1992) showed that as a group, white men established the organizational norms from which they benefit, but scholars and practitioners tend to assume that they, along with organizations, are raceless. Diane Grimes (2002) also showed that ‘individualism can mask and therefore normalize whiteness and white privilege’ (p. 396). Positioning whites as raceless, Stella Nkomo and Akram Al Ariss (2014) wrote, reproduces individualist ideologies, such as merit, which assume that white men have historically been promoted due to competency and not through the exclusion of other racial groups.

Since the 1980s, economic rationality has become the normative order of neoliberal organizations, reflecting the institutionalization of neoclassical market ideologies, but few have interrogated it in relation to whiteness. Some social scientists of finance showed that the fixation with economic competition and conquest is linked to masculinity and whiteness, reflecting the performance of socially acceptable gender norms (Hozic and True, 2016; Liu and Baker, 2016; Liu et al., 2015; Zaloom 2006). In an ethnographic study of Wall Street, (Karen Ho, 2009) showed that whereas white men are presumed competent investment bankers, women of color are not. Ho wrote that investment bankers are recruited through assessments of ‘smartness’, which is represented in bodies that reference a ‘default [for] upper-classness, maleness, whiteness, and heteronormativity’ (Ho, 2009: 41). Additionally, Louise Ashley and Laura Empson (2013) showed that a sector of law firms hire upper-class white men to brand their firms as knowledgeable. Talent, thus, is not race or gender neutral; rather bodies are culturally signified, semiotically representing concepts, values, and potential for action. Yet, while social scientists problematized the cultural and historical conditions that reward white men for their self-interested economic behavior, economic rationality itself has yet to be understood as a racial and gendered performance.

To trace the performance of economic rationality as a strategy to sell diversity to white men and to institutionalize previously marginalized knowledge practices, I build on standpoint feminist theorists approaches to interrogate whiteness in organizations (Grimes, 2001). Diversity professionals are, in Patricia Hill Collins’ terms, ‘outsiders within’ the organization, whose work suggest that ‘it is impossible to separate the structure and thematic content of thought from the historical and material conditions shaping the lives of its producers’ (Collins, 1986: S16; Liu, 2017b). Attempts to validate marginalized knowledge in Eurocentric institutions detach it from its cultural and political contexts (Collins, 1990; Haraway, 1988; Harding, 2004). Abstracted knowledges, thus, end up representing the locations and interests of white male standpoints as, since the Enlightenment era, this group has controlled the processes of knowledge production and claimed to represent the universal human condition. Herein, I inquire into how diversity professionals abstract marginalized knowledges and perform economic rationality as a means to legitimize diversity in neoliberal organizations.

From capitalist ideology to managerial discourse

Since the late-1980s and with the rise of neoliberal economics, diversity professionals produced a new managerial discourse that tied concerns with social justice to company performance, effectively disentangling economic rationales from moral ones (Lorbiecki and Jack, 2000). Scholars and practitioners often credit R. Roosevelt Thomas as influential for constructing the ‘business case’. In the early 1990s, Thomas published a Harvard Business Review article, and then a book, arguing that diversity is valuable insofar as it goes ‘beyond race and gender’ to address concerns with performance, productivity, and growth (see also Cox and Blake, 1991; Thomas, 1991). This meant spending less on the costs of not having diversity—such as on high employee turn-over, low employment morale, and opportunity costs—and investing more on innovative and problem-solving teams that could deliver business insights (e.g. Ely and Thomas, 2001). These managerial discourses are tied to the restructuring of corporations: the minimization of bureaucracy and the emergence of talent as organizational value (Ho, 2014; Sennett, 2007).

After the 2008 economic recession, social scientists argued that diverse leadership could help organizations, banks, and governments manage global economic uncertainty and achieve ‘higher inclusive growth and genuine financial stability’ (El-Erian, 2016: xxiv; Page, 2019). In 2018 California passed the ‘Board Gender Diversity Law’, requiring publicly held corporations headquartered in California to have at least 1 woman in their board by the end of 2019 and 2 by 2021. California Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, the architect of the bill explained, ‘The whole country should do it . . . it’s better for business; it’s better for the economy’ (Weiss, 2019).

Ideological critiques of the business case have largely assumed a dichotomy between economics and morality. Deborah Litvin (2002) characterized the business case as ‘an exercise in enlightened self-interest’ (p. 167) that enables commitment to diversity, while foreclosing possibilities for systemic change. Through the business case, Litvin wrote, managers determine which strategies, priorities, and procedures can be utilized in organizations to create change, instituting an ideological ‘iron cage’ that does not allow other strategies to be taken seriously. Others have written that the business case depoliticizes discussions of race and gender and demobilizes social justice activism (Berrey, 2015; Dickens, 1994; Litvin, 1997, 2006; Perriton, 2009).

Other critics have shown that the business case falsely assumes that all business decisions are made rationally. Most notably, Mike Noon (2007) argued that the business case is ideologically ‘fatally flawed.’ He also wrote that diversity professionals put too much faith in the market to benefit minority groups, when business leaders may argue that it is more economically beneficial to discriminate on race. Similarly, Colin Duncan (2003) showed that employers’ seemingly economically rational decisions to not hire older workers are actually based on social prejudices of this group as lazy, incompetent, and hence, expensive. In contrast, Frances Tomlinson and Schwabenland (2010) showed, organizations can advocate for a business case that is morally righteous and economically productive.

Science and technology scholars of the economy, on the other hand, have shown that ‘economics’ is a performative discourse; the institutional employment of ideas and models of the economy perform it (Callon, 1998; MacKenzie et al., 2007; Muniesa, 2014). Homo economicus, Michel Callon (1998) argued, is the product of economics, rather than a ‘natural’ state of being. In this sense, we can understand managerial discourses as producing and performing a kind of economics that is purportedly detachable from morality. Hence, ideological critiques of the business case reflect the politics and the effects of managerial discourses, and how diversity professionals as economic actors conform to—and reproduce—normative organizational ‘socio-economic’ practices (Bear et al., 2015; Cattelino, 2009).

Moreover, Nigel Thrift (2005) argued that by employing and producing knowledge over capitalism to improve business, business scholars, management consultants, and ‘gurus’ shape the world economy and produce new subjects. Organizations and the economy are ‘co-produced’ as (somewhat) coherent processes (Jasanoff, 2004; Thrift, 2005; Woolgar et al., 2009). Diversity, in short, ‘does’ things in the world (Ahmed and Swan, 2006; Benschop, 2001). As a managerial discourse, diversity professionals present the unique opportunity for examining the deployment of economic rationality and the performance of the economy itself, as a racial and gendered process.

Amoral economics or white moral economics?

Since the 1980s, neoliberal organizations from corporations, small-businesses, non-profit organizations, to states operate on the assumption that ‘we are only and everywhere homo oeconomicus’ (Brown, 2015: 9). In this context, Katherine Browne (2009) argued that popular and scholarly understandings of capitalism have been inadequate for examining the relationship between economics and morality. Browne showed that most studies of capitalism can be split into two groups; one has drawn on Marxist theory to critique these markets as immoral, greedy, and destructive. The other—including business and organizational scholars—has largely assumed that the economy is amoral, driven by rationality and self-interest. Economic anthropologists, however, have long agreed that homo economicus is a cultural and historical construct, inscribed into how Western society understands and reproduces the economy (Cancian, 1966).

Organizational scholars have called attention to the study of how economic decisions are influenced by morality (Schröder, 2013; Tomlinson and Schwabenland, 2010). Rather than suggest that morality is interjected into economics, I build on a third body of scholarship that examines capitalism as a moral economy, drawing on historians of 17th and 18th centuries mercantile capitalism, J.G.A. Pocock (1985) and Albert O. Hirschman (1997) (Browne and Milgram, 2009; Ho, 2012; Maurer, 2005, 2009, 2013; Yanagisako, 2002). Hirschman showed that early capitalism was characterized as le doux commerce (or a ‘gentle commerce’), as philosophers theorized the economy as helping drive economic actors’ sense of comportment and gentile mannerisms. For example, he showed that whereas Adam Smith (1776) conceptualized that the ideal economic man would use his passions to maximize self-interest and achieve material self-improvement and Niccolò Machiavelli saw the pursuit of self-interests as taming unruly passions, both conceptualized capitalism as beneficial for the welfare of Western society (Hirschman, 1997). Commerce, Hirschman (1982) wrote, was a ‘powerful moralizing agent’ (p. 109). Additionally, Pocock (1985) wrote that the eventual financial revolution helped constitute a civil and cultured ‘society’ that achieved its interests through the market (for a summary, see Maurer, 2013). These economic and political revolutions shaped Western society to such an extent that Pocock (1985) argued for the re-naming of the Enlightenment period from the Age of Reason to the Age of Virtue, wherein ‘Virtue—a synonym for autonomy in action—was not merely a moral abstraction, but was declared to be a human necessity’ (p. 122).

Le doux commerce emerged through the racial relations of its time, and as such, I contend, the moral economy has always been racial. In his book, Hirschman (1997) observed in almost a side-note,

The persistent use of the term le doux commerce strikes us as a strange aberration for an age when the slave trade was at its peak and when trade in general was still a hazardous, adventurous, and often violent business (p. 62).

Pocock (1985) also wrote that le doux commerce was characterized by ‘virtue [which was] civil and could exist only when the barbarian had been socialized into productive capacity and cooperative labor’ (p. 150). While neither Pocock nor Hirschman named race, the gentile mannerisms of white society were constructed in relation to the barbarian racial other, which was imagined as unruly, uncivilized, and unhuman. Thus, we can understand the capitalist moral economy as white.

Cedric Robinson (1983) argued that capitalism is racial, because it has always required the systemic enslavement and dispossession of racialized human lives. To extend our understandings of racial capitalism, I suggest that economic rationality is—rather than opposed to—tied to the enactment of morality and whiteness. Performances in amorality, therefore, need to be interrogated as abstractions of race and gender from their social, historic, and hierarhical ways of knowing and being in the world. In what follows, I will trace how and why diversity professionals choose to perform amorality and economic rationality. I explain, first, that this is a decision taken after having identified white men as key clients that can enable them to institutionalize diversity management practices.

The strategic inclusion of white men

After year of attending American D&I events, the Chairman of the Board invited me to attend their week-long diversity management training so that I could gain an overview of the field. The training took place in 2015, in the city where American D&I was headquartered, and in an office-space complex inside a large shopping mall. It was led by two American D&I consultants and attended by twenty-four human resource professionals and diversity officers from corporations, non-profits, and universities. We learned about affirmative action, the business case, inclusive leadership practices, and other diversity management skills regarded as critical for creating structural and cultural change in organizations. On the first day, the facilitators asked us general questions to gage where each company was in their ‘diversity journey’. Some representatives mentioned that their company executives were just beginning to talk about it. The conversation progressed to address basic definitions of diversity and inclusion. It went as follows:

Facilitator one (F1):

How do you know if your team or organization is ‘diversity aware’?

Audience member one (A1):

Being knowledgeable—meaning that you [have bought] into and can articulate the diversity case. Also, recognizing that everybody brings different things to the table and [so you have to] be open to learning. Having differences in terms of education, experience, race, gender, culture, etcetera.

F1:

I like that you started with education and experience because when it comes down to it, education and experience may be the most impactful to businesses.

A2:

Being able to quantify the business model.

A3:

Luzilda said creativity and innovation.

F1:

It is interesting to point out the different words that people from different generations use.

A3:

Are white men diverse too?

F1:

Absolutely, in experience, thought, heritage yes. We all can find diversity. Those of us that are African-American can sit at the table and find a lot of diversity.

F2:

It’s been the case that diversity [lately] focuses on white men.

A1:

Absolutely, that’s why we focus on inclusion.

F1:

We focused on race and gender so much [that] we excluded them. That was not the intent. So now we are intentionally including everyone.

In this short exchange, the program facilitators asserted that diversity is both about organizational value and about including white men. They claimed that what is of value are not the traditional racial and gendered categories that long characterized affirmative action programs, but a ‘potential’ that all individuals possess, including white men. Thus, racial categories are employed without regard for how individuals’ racialized and gendered positioning in the organization is shaped by power, but as a foil for understanding the importance of including white men in diversity.

Moreover, the inclusion of white men is framed as a strategic response to their exclusion in affirmative action—a practice that is largely seen as counterproductive. This theme emerged often when I asked senior diversity professionals in interviews to characterize the transition from affirmative action to diversity management. A consultant and managing partner of a large diversity firm, Pam, explained,

[Diversity management] isn’t just a training program on sensitivity, which years ago it used to be not only that. That used to be, ‘Let me beat you up and make you feel guilty’, but now it’s totally different . . . Very few—I don’t even know of any firms that do that anymore—beat up on people, because it didn’t work. It works for a couple of days. People felt guilty, then they became very angry.

Additionally, Megan, a veteran scholar and consultant, suggested that inclusion was a response to backlash from affirmative action. She said,

The [diversity] conversations switched to a softer kind of language. And [with it] this idea that everyone is diverse. So companies started feeling more comfortable in looking at diversity in a broader sense and even having initiatives that were labeled diversity management.

She explained that this did not only have the effect of including more people; it worked specifically to include white men:

That language came out of [debates in] deep diversity versus visible diversity—and that came out of a broader conversation—some people say cynically [as] a way to include white men who were beginning to feel left out . . . [In this sense] everyone is diverse; everybody belongs to some social identity group.

Then she concluded, ‘We used all of these little exercises to demonstrate how everyone is diverse. People wanted this “awareness” training’. Another senior diversity consultant, Cassey, said that in contrast to diversity practices that overly focused on representation, the framework of inclusion aimed to address the cultural contexts that breed resentment, because ‘The inclusion piece is performative, actionable’. She explained,

The diversity piece evolved out of the civil rights laws, the E.O. [equal opportunity] laws and ultimately executive orders that said you have to open up the U.S. workforce and make it available to other people who didn’t have access to it. Then the politicization of the ratio language [having proportional representation across workplaces and city demographics] and . . . reverse racism [came about] . . . That resulted in a push-back . . . but I think as the movement matures, people look at it differently and the profession grew, and they began to see that the diversity and inclusion piece had to do with culture change.

Consistently, diversity professionals characterized the business case for diversity as a means to include white men and replace affirmative action strategies. Critical scholars of diversity and whiteness have provided numerous explanations for why affirmative action policies and practices spurred resentment among white men. They explained that white men apply principles of liberalism, such as meritocracy, to oppose affirmative action and diversity initiatives (Berry and Bonilla-Silva, 2008; Nkomo and Al Ariss, 2014). They also showed that white men tend to employ individualized definitions of discrimination and locate experiences with racism as circumstantial, rather than systemic, and hence in doing so, they imagine themselves as subjects of racism (Cabrera, 2014a, 2014b; Rodriguez and Freeman, 2016). These responses to affirmative action can be read as an effect of mainstream understandings of intersectionality, which detach identity formation from historical and material conditions (Liu, 2018).

In interviews, diversity professionals expressed awareness over white individuals’ assumptions that race and racism have to do with individual beliefs, rather than systemic inequities (DiAngelo, 2018; Hill, 2008). Rather than challenge these liberal ideologies, they employ the business case to include white men that have long resisted workplace practices, programs, and initiatives tailored to people of color and white women. The business case for inclusion, in effect, was shaped in responses to and in attempts to address white male reservations with diversity. This move to ‘intentionally includ[e] everyone’ was strategic, diversity professionals said, as it enabled them to continue advocating for the alleviation of social inequities in organizations.

Appealing to economic interests, employing market logics

Diversity professionals sell diversity to white men by appealing to them as economic actors who are rational and self-interested. For instance, at a 50-person (small) event I attended for fieldwork that took place in Southern California on October 2015, a panel of speakers had a discussion on ‘multicultural leadership’. The moderator facilitated a 2-hour discussion among three senior managers from large multinational corporations and a university administrator. In answering a question about mentorship strategies, one panelist said they created a mentorship program that is ‘as inclusive and diverse as possible’. She said that they ensure that 65–70% of their mentees are people of color and women, and 30% are white male, ‘So [white men] feel they have a stake in it and see it works’. More than lip service, diversity professionals design organizational strategies that include white men in diversity programming. They make white men into candidates for resources available through avenues once reserved for underrepresented groups.

Diversity professionals claim that to sell diversity, they need to foreground the interests of white men. In 2014, early in my research, the Chairman of American D&I asked me to write a report on the demographics of executives and board members of a specific industry. After some research, I reported that over 70% of this corporate leadership was composed of white men, whereas women of color only held 3% of those same seats. In his review, Peter, a white senior training facilitator, stressed, ‘You need to think about the “What’s In It For Me?” Why should they care about this?’ What I wrote, he said, is just information; it did not help organizational actors obtain ‘buy-in’ from executives or enroll individuals to commit to the hard, year-after-year work of changing organizational culture. He said, ‘business people always want to know what’s in it for them’. In 1 month of editing, I tied literature from McKinsey & Company, Deloitte University Press, and Harvard Business Review on the business case with academic articles that showed that innovation had stagnated in that industry after the 1990s. I recommended investing in talent development and in creating an executive council that would oversee the business strategy. The publication was circulated by American D&I, first for a fee, and then made available online for free.

I regularly heard diversity professionals ask others to think about ‘What’s In It For Me?’ At an American D&I conference of about 500 attendees, which took place over several days and dozens of concurrent presentations, I attended a panel titled, ‘Diversity 2.0: The Next Phase of D&I Requires Strategic Business Alignment’. The hotel event room in which the panel took place contained about 70 chairs and 40 attendees facing a long white-draped table with 4 presenters. A moderator, a woman of color, stood behind a tall wooden podium. She started the conversation by asking the presenters, two Senior Vice Presidents of Human Resources and two Chief Diversity Officers, how they manage individuals’ assumptions of what constitutes diversity and diversity work. They responded:

Panelist One:

[That question] gets to why peoples’ perspectives are different and [some] may not see a need for these [diversity] policies to go through. Raise your hand if you identify as a straight white male? [One person raised their hand] Thank you for raising your hand, I can say one of the mistakes we have made as D&I practitioners is not included straight white men in the conversation. We have done this work a disservice. This is not us versus them, this is how do we build world-class institutions where our institutions can outperform . . . A lot of times you see women, gay women, however you identify underrepresented groups, and they are all talking to each other. You know what white straight men are saying, ‘I don’t have a seat at that conversation’. [But] . . . some of my strongest allies, as white men, say, ‘If this is really about outperforming, then I need to join you in that’.

Moderator:

Part of the problem is they want to help and don’t know how to help—can one of you speak to, what have you done to help them understand, why diversity is important?

One panelist responded that white men have to ‘understand that [their] interest is the interest of the organization. [So] what’s the WIIFM, “What’s In It For Me?”’ She stressed that this question also needs to also be ‘what is in it’ for the organization. Reframing the conversation in this way, she said, would change the diversity conversation from competition to a ‘win-win’ situation that benefits all employees and organizations. She said, ‘There’s a scarcity mindset and abundance mindset. [In the] scarcity mindset certain people have to win, and certain people have to lose. Abundance [theory] says [that] as we increase revenue, all of us win’.

Marxist theories of production capitalism pose a fundamental conflict between the economic interests of employers and workers, and historically, between white and non-white workers (Roediger and Esch, 2012). Insofar, as capital emerges not from production, but from speculation, the market is—at least theoretically—seen as a provider of infinite economic growth for organizations, employers, and workers (Gibson-Graham, 1997; Lee and LiPuma, 2004). In producing a managerial discourse of inclusion, diversity professionals deploy neoliberal and financial market logics. By reframing organizational economics from competition to abundance, diversity professionals propose that diversity enables white men both in and out of leadership positions achieve their economic interests. They sell diversity to executives by claiming that through it organizations can achieve sustainable financial growth, and to other white men that its programming benefits them. Thus, they make congruent the interests of the organization and white men. They also make the case to white men that their interests can co-exist with those of people of color and white women.

As a rhetorical device, the question ‘What’s In It For Me?’ helps diversity professionals advocate for the value of diversity and design organizational strategies that are, in effect, inclusive to white men. These practices reveal that by appealing to white men as economically rational and self-interested and deploying knowledge of the economy, diversity professionals render diversity with institutional legitimacy. In this way, they also reinscribe exclusive economic rationality as the normative order of neoliberal organizations.

The racial and gender performance of Homo Economicus

Diversity professionals train aspiring others to perform their own moral detachment to sell diversity. I experienced this personally, when Peter asked me to edit the report for American D&I to address the WIIFM. At that moment, I learned not to assume others would automatically express moral outrage over issues, such as lack of racial representation in executive positions. As Peter asked me to provide economic justifications for diversity, I also learned that this outrage was irrelevant to appealing to the potential readership of the report. This was part of diversity professional training. In an interview, Cyndi, a diversity coordinator at American D&I, said that when she was first hired at American D&I, multiple people told her, ‘Diversity is not about black or brown, it is [about] green’. They urged her to dispel the notion that diversity was about social justice or that it was only about race. She said that she was frustrated with this framing and that she hoped to transition to non-profit organizations, where she expected this to not be the case.

I heard ‘This is not about social justice’ uttered many times. In one case, at a free webinar hosted by a multinational bank, for instance, the Chief Diversity Officer, Mary, followed this phrase with the statement, ‘It is about how we can make money for the corporation’. In an hour-and-a-half workshop, Mary explained how she had successfully created a business case for her company. In another, at a workshop on metrics and analytics, Scott, a diversity officer from a multinational corporation with a few hundreds of thousands of employees, shared his company’s diversity strategy. He said, contextualizing the business case, ‘Between 1990s to 2000s, diversity was about doing “the right thing”, Well, WRONG’, he yelled the last word, ‘I hate to say it but that’s not going to work. If you don’t do it for profit, then the company is not going to be around to provide that service’. The performance of economic rationality, and amorality, Cyndi, Mary, and Scott, revealed, is necessary for selling diversity and for reproducing the diversity management industry.

In workshops and conferences, diversity professionals train others on how to sell diversity to white men by emphasizing projected economic benefits. Toward the end of his workshop, Scott said that to motivate them to do diversity work, his office started giving executives a 25% share of a bonus if they performed key diversity tasks by the end of the year, such as attending events and taking on program leadership roles. He stressed, ‘Incentive is paid out regardless of financial results [of diversity initiatives]. That’s how important it is to be working within the communities we serve’. Scott then said that when his colleagues and superiors challenged him—we listened attentively—that he responded with a short statement: ‘It’s going to work, believe me’. His tone suggested that we could use this explanation in the face of opposition. Scott concluded: since diversity became the norm, they dropped the incentive down to 15%, ‘And people still do it’.

Here, diversity professionals demonstrated two things. First, diversity professionals learn to perform—and compel others to perform—their moral detachment from diversity. They regard this performance as necessary to sell diversity. From this position they design organizational techniques that meet the economic interests of potential skeptics and critics of diversity, who they largely imagine as white men. Diversity professionals claim that by instituting these new practices they can silence opposition to diversity and gain new advocates for their programming. This, according to diversity professionals, effectively silences them. Second, diversity professionals train aspiring others that to sell the business case convincingly, they need to instill in others a sense of belief that diversity results in economic benefits. Often, the business case is framed as a long-term investment, as a result of consistent funding in diversity initiatives and programs. By paying out economic rewards early and regardless of short-term outcomes, diversity professionals, hence, ‘prove’ that diversity is, in effect, an economic managerial discourse. These financial incentives link diversity and inclusion to compensation and are an increasingly used organizational ‘best practice’ for diversity.

Through these incentives, diversity professionals materialize the economic promise of the business case, demonstrating that white men do not need to wait for diversity programming to be fully implemented to benefit from its financial rewards. These strategies for selling diversity reveal that the business case is performative. Through the employment of economic rationality and market ideologies in the design of organizational techniques, diversity professionals bring into being organizations and capitalism, not as ‘systems’, but as processes (Thrift, 2005). These processes are instituted across space and time, mediated by objects, such as bureaucratic documents, and through performative iterations. These sets of material and discursive practices are also racial and gendered.

Early in my fieldwork, I reflected on the prevalence of the business case in diversity management. In an interview with Denyse, an owner and CEO of a diversity consultancy, I asked her, ‘Do you think there is still a moral outlook on diversity?’ We sat having a salmon brunch at an upscale hotel restaurant, which she graciously paid for, as she knew that I was, at the time, a graduate student. She responded,

That’s a complicated question. It’s interesting, because I think in the corporate sector they try to address the issue of morals in terms of values. [By doing that] they sell it better to leaders to get on board in terms of economics: the monetary value, the business case. So the business case was always helping them to see that. But you can lose something if you don’t keep it connected, I think, to the moral case.

As a strategy to sell diversity, diversity professionals perform their own moral detachment over diversity and instruct aspiring professionals to do the same. Moreover, by training others to provide financial incentives for diversity, they anticipate and neutralize skepticism over diversity’s economic value. This enables them to achieve authority as management professionals who understand how business works and that organizational actors are primarily, and exclusively, concerned with ‘monetary value’. Thus, they abstract material experiences with racial and gendered systemic inequities and construct diversity as a managerial discourse that helps reproduce economics as purportedly amoral. Such practices reveal that, in a post-affirmative action era, economic rationality is a racial and gendered performance deployed to legitimize diversity as a managerial discourse of organizations, for profit and otherwise.

Discussion: On inclusion, whiteness, and performing immoral economies

Lorbiecki and Jack (2000) showed that diversity professionals constructed the business case amid the 1980s rise of neoliberal logics, and over time, effectively disentangled economic and moral justifications for diversity. Yet, through interviews and participant observations among diversity professionals, I found that these actors insist that to institutionalize diversity, they need to—metaphorically and literally—sell the business case to white men. They claim that whereas affirmative action was exclusive and enabled white men to feel resentful, the business case is inclusive as it allows for white men to economically benefit from its programming, and thus, become clients and advocates. Diversity professionals have expanded the definition of diversity to include white men. Through workshops, webinars, conferences, and at work, they also perform their moral detachments from social justice and instruct others to do the same. By performing economic rationality and deploying financial market logics, they produce rhetorical arguments and organizational techniques that convince executives, managerial actors, and working professionals of the financial value of diversity to white men and organizations.

I argue that these performances in rationality and economics perform the economy in racial and gendered ways. Whereas production models of capitalism suggest an inherent contradiction between workers and employers, and even across race and gender in the workplace, financial market logics enable diversity professionals to frame diversity through a rhetoric of economic abundance, wherein investments and speculations can be seen—at least theoretically—to provide for all employees, managers, and executives across race and gender. More specifically, ideas, models, and ideologies of financial markets are critical for designing and institutionalizing organizational techniques that are ‘inclusive’ as these are designed to improve business and the economy itself. Thus, these practices reveal a co-productive relation between diversity, organizations, and capitalism.

Here I make two broad points. First, these performances in the detachment of morality from economics reveal diversity professionals’ efforts to legitimize historically marginalized knowledges in business. Managerial discourses increasingly create values from embodied and emotional ways of being in the world, rather than from disembodied, emotionless, ‘God-eye’ perspectives (Illouz, 2007; Thrift, 2005; Haraway, 1988). Yet, diversity professionals’ work reveals that they face institutional demands to operate within financial ‘regimes of instrumental rationality’ (Batteau, 2013; Ho, 2009). This is, I suggest, because as opposed to organizational practices that center individual experiences, social justice morality is driven by collective understandings of racism and sexism. Diversity professionals transform these marginalized knowledges to make them legible to and necessary for neoliberal Eurocentric institutions. They abstract experiences with systemic racism and sexism, and in turn, perform economic rationality. These performances are, in essence, deployments in liberal ideologies that reflect and make invisible white Eurocentric socio-economic norms.

Second, this research demonstrates that economics and morality cannot be disentangled from the study of diversity or everyday organizational practice. By examining capitalism as a moral economy (Browne and Milgram, 2009), I contend that neoliberal economics is, rather than detachable from morality, tied to the performance of white morality. This white morality operates invisibly through organizational norms that privilege economic rationality and self-interests above all else; these behaviors are valued as they have historically been seen as reflective of a non-barbaric, civilized society. Diversity professionals, hence, perform a specific kind of moral detachment, namely that tied to social justice for racial and gendered systemic discrimination. Through the business case, they exchange one kind of morality for another, undermining their own desires for structural change.

While business is always personal (Hart, 2005), diversity professionals engage in racial and gendered performances that make their own moral concerns over social justice appear irrelevant. I characterize the material and discursive set of performances that enable organizational and economic practices to circulate as amoral, as white economics. White economics, I suggest, reproduces the everyday operation of neoliberal organizations as purportedly amoral, and hence, unracial, and ungendered. Thus, while social scientific understandings of capitalism have characterized this economic system as immoral, because it is exploitative, I suggest that amoral claims to economics are also immoral, because economics, in this sense, is racial and gendered.

White economics helps explain how racial capitalism is reproduced in the 21st century through socio-economic practices that invoke, deploy, and reproduce financial market logics. It also helps explain why diversity work continues to be desired, as white economics creates opportunities for social justice to be channeled seemingly undetected into neoliberal organizations. Hopeful individuals find in the business case the potential to create sustainable structural changes. Yet, through the business case, such desires for social justice are transformed: they are abstracted, removed from their social and material conditions, and made operational within white organizational and socio-economic norms. These material and discursive practices reveal the immorality of amoral economics as they reproduce a neoliberal organizational and economic order that ensures the perpetuation of racial and gendered hierarchies.

Patrizia Zanoni et al. (2010) called on researchers to examine diversity in organizations in relation to power to propose new ways of relating and organizing. I found that the business case is contingent on and co-produces value-laden categories: business and social justice, rationality and irrationality, economics and morality, and whiteness and non-whiteness. Critical diversity scholars have proposed to challenge hierarchical binaries through inclusion. For instance, Melissa Tyler (2019) asked us to reject the binary of Self and Other, which reifies power differences between these categories, and develop an embodied ethics through ‘a recognition-based relationality as the base of organizational life’ (p. 64). Others showed that teaching through empathy might help enroll white men into diversity (Brewis, 2017; Cabrera, 2012).

These practices seem promising for creating solidarity across race, gender, and class. Yet, I have shown that diversity professionals advocate for the inclusion of white men by imagining them as exclusively economically rational. Insofar as inclusion is framed and designed through the business case, inclusion falls back on and reproduces these value-laden, hierarchical binaries. It reproduces, in turn, an ‘inclusion of unequal parts’. Insofar as this is the case, inclusion discourses need to be interrogated for their role in reproducing whiteness. Additionally, social scientists have shown that emotional subjectivity is a key way in which neoliberal capitalism is reproduced and feminist scholars long ago revealed that the production of capitalist value is dependent on affective labor (Bear et al., 2015; Hardt, 1999; Illouz, 2007). As such, alternative diversity practices need to take into account how inclusion and empathy-based practices help reproduce capitalism, or more specifically, racial capitalism. This entails accounting for the co-productive relations between race, gender, organizations, and economics. Otherwise, we risk reinforcing the pervasive (and incorrect) assumption that capitalism is amoral, and with that, structural racism and sexism.

Prior to the 1980s, neoliberal and financial logics were, rather than the norm, contested. Thus, as scholars and practitioners concerned with the relationship between organizational practice and broader systemic inequities, I suggest that we clarify, redefine, and reclaim what it means to ‘do business’ in organizations. J.K. Gibson-Graham et al. (2013), for example, published a workbook for creating more ethical economic practices. In a chapter titled, ‘Take Back Business’ they provide case studies of organizations that distribute economic surplus to meet the needs of a community, rather than the interests of a few shareholders. To apply these lessons in diversity management, hence, would entail drafting collective agreements over organizations’ social and economic role in their communities and beyond. Herein, I recall Yvonne Benschop and Mieke Verloo’s (2006) suggestion that organizational strategies can be transformative insofar as diversity practitioners collaborate with institutional actors who share similar visions for restructuring organizations. I add that insofar as organizations and economies are tied in co-productive relations, strategists seeking to create racial and gender equity also need to share a vision for transforming the economy.

Conclusion

The business case is driven by neoliberal logics that posit the exclusive enactment of economic rationality as legitimate organizational behavior. While this study takes place in the United States, since the 1980s, organizations around the world have operated on a drive for profit, productivity, and growth. Aware of this, diversity professionals often claim that one ‘cannot do diversity without doing business’ and formally set aside moral concerns with social justice. In this paper, I show that they do this to include white men, who they largely imagine as only economically self-interested. By tracing how diversity professionals disentangle morality from economics, I argue that the business case, and economic rationality itself, is a racial and gendered performance. Insofar as diversity professionals perform economic rationality and employ financial market logics to design and institutionalize diversity management practices, I suggest that these actors perform the economy itself (Callon, 1998).

Business and organization scholars have largely tended to characterize the economy as autonomous, amoral, and driven by rationality. Yet, economic anthropologists have long shown that economic behavior, and homo economicus itself, is a cultural construction. By situating this research within the study of capitalism as a moral economy, I show that diversity professionals are continuously enrolled into and produce a white moral economy, which regards economic rationality and the pursuit of self-interest as an economic and social value. I characterize, hence, a set of material and discursive practices that purport to disentangle economics from morality and help reproduce a view of capitalism as amoral as white economics. White economics helps us understand how racial capitalism is reproduced through socio-economic practices that invoke, deploy, and enact neoliberal and financial market logics. Thus, I argue that amoral economics is immoral, because it is racial and gendered.

To propose alternatives to the business case, I draw attention to critical scholars of inclusion who problematize hierarchical binaries between business/social justice, rationality/irrationality, economics/morality, and whiteness/non-whiteness. I suggest that inclusion discourses need to be attuned to a vision for creating alternative economic practices in and beyond organizations. Otherwise, these diversity practices can end up re-inscribing racial and gendered inequities into organizational norms and reproducing the pervasive assumption that capitalism is amoral. I also stress that diversity work needs to revisit its investment in capitalism by redefining (or reclaiming) what it means to ‘do business’ in the 21st century. This would entail questioning and proposing alternatives to neoliberal economics to, rather than reproduce it as a normative order, challenge its privileged status in the organization.