Diversity Rhetoric and the Managerialization of Law

Abstract

This article examines the rise of diversity rhetoric in U.S. management and how that rhetoric reframes ideas inherent in civil rights law. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses of the professional management literature (mid‐1980s–mid‐1990s) illustrate a managerialization of law, a process by which legal ideas are refigured by managerial ways of thinking as they flow across the boundaries of legal fields and into managerial and organizational fields. The managerial conception of diversity adds a variety of nonlegal dimensions of diversity (e.g., personality traits) to the legally protected categories like race and sex, and it disassociates diversity from civil rights law.