THE FACULTY OF ARTS  
DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL SCIENCES  
SECTION FOR GENDER STUDIES 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Who Deserves to Be Included? 
Diffraction of Diversity and Inclusion in Swedish International Organizations 
 
 
 
By Kanae Wada 
 
 
 
 
Essay/ Thesis:                           30 hec 
Program and/or course:                    Master’s Programme in Gender Studies 
Level:                                  Second Cycle 
Semester/ year:                           Spring/2023 
Supervisor:                              Lena Martinsson 
Examiner:                               Volha/ Olga Sasunkevich 
 
 
 
  
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Abstract 
 
My thesis explores how diffraction on D&I is created by the entanglement of the 
nature of institution (institutional will and wall) and dissemination of neoliberal rationality, and 
how it perpetuates power relations that creates inequality and exclusion. I will explore this 
through critical discourse and intersectionality analysis thereby aiming to offer suggestions to 
improve diversity and inclusion (D&I) work at the Swedish organizations. Currently, many 
Swedish firms are actively working on enhancing diversity and inclusion within their 
institutions. However, as scholars point out, institutional commitment to democratic values 
including diversity and inclusion is taking different forms than social justice context, such as 
companies’ profitability and productivity become motivations in D&I work rather than 
mitigating inequality and oppression (Brown, 2005; Knights & Omanović, 2016). The goals of 
writing this thesis is to suggest how D&I work can be further improved as a means of mitigating 
inequality and exclusion of employees, especially those who are underrepresented in the 
workplace. 
 
Keywords: diversity, inclusion, diversity management, differences, neoliberalism 
  
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Acknowledgement 
 
First of all, I would like to thank Lena Martinsson for providing me constructive feedback on 
my draft and supporting me when I felt stuck and did not know how to get out of the situation. 
 
I would like to thank my classmates for being through this tough journey together. Your 
presence really helped me when I was about to give up on finishing this thesis. 
 
I would also thank practitioners who were willing to take time and talk to me. I offer critical 
analysis throughout this thesis, but it is not because I did not like what you are doing or anything 
like that. I would like to contribute to improving D&I work by offering another perspective on 
how to deal with issues. I hope some of you find this helpful in thinking about the further 
development of D&I work. 
 
Last but not the least, I would like to thank Victor for always supporting me no matter how 
frustrated and stressed I was. I would not have been able to finish this without your daily 
encouragement. 
 
 
  
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Table of Contents 
Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... 2 
Acknowledgement ..................................................................................................................... 3 
Abbreviation .............................................................................................................................. 6 
Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 7 
Background ............................................................................................................................. 7 
Purpose and Overview of the thesis ......................................................................................... 8 
Research Questions ................................................................................................................ 9 
Overview of previous research on diversity in Organizations .................................................. 10 
Theoretical Framework ........................................................................................................... 13 
Diffraction: Theoretical entanglement that creates discourse on D&I ...................................... 14 
Institutional will and institutional wall ...................................................................................... 15 
Neo-liberal Rationality ............................................................................................................ 16 
Methodology ............................................................................................................................ 18 
Critical Discourse Analysis ..................................................................................................... 19 
Intersectional Analysis ........................................................................................................... 20 
Data Collection and Research Ethics ..................................................................................... 23 
Source Data........................................................................................................................... 23 
1) Official Documents ...................................................................................................... 23 
2) Interviews .................................................................................................................... 24 
3) Survey ......................................................................................................................... 25 
Ethical Considerations ........................................................................................................... 26 
Companies and People that Participated in the Study ............................................................ 26 
Positionality ........................................................................................................................... 28 
Limitations of the Study .......................................................................................................... 29 
Analysis Part: Diffracting Diversity and Inclusion ................................................................ 31 
Analysis of Saying D&I ........................................................................................................ 32 
D&I as a premise to success and loss of social justice ........................................................ 32 
Generalized Us vs. Othered Them ..................................................................................... 40 
Analysis of Doing D&I  ........................................................................................................ 44 
The shift from Diversity to Inclusion: Progress or Regression? ........................................... 46 
Change in the institutional will ............................................................................................ 49 
Leadership and Career Development as Means of Including Those Who are Excluded? .... 54 
Diffraction of Diversity and Inclusion: Conclusion and Suggestions for Future D&I Work 57 
Further Remarks...................................................................................................................... 58 
List of references .................................................................................................................... 59 
Research Publication ............................................................................................................. 59 
Official Documents Published by Companies ......................................................................... 62 
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Appendix 1: Consent Form ..................................................................................................... 64 
Appendix 2: Survey “D&I work in Your Workplace” .............................................................. 66 
 
  
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Abbreviation 
D&I: Diversity and Inclusion as a management tool. I will distinguish this from diversity and 
inclusion as human rights and concepts for enhancing social justice 
 
  
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Introduction 
 
Background 
 Diversity and Inclusion. Recently, these words or similar concepts appear every part 
of life. Especially, these concepts have gotten interest from companies. When you apply for a 
job, you will probably see how an organization is committed to equal treatment of all 
employees and applicants regardless of their backgrounds and how diversity and inclusion is 
important for their organizations.  
This research topic has been always in my mind because I thought that this would be 
one way to apply the knowledge that I have learned through the master’s program in Gendering 
Practices to outside academia and that I might be able to contribute to a better society by doing 
so. Furthermore, this is important for me personally as a student coming from outside the EU, 
I have felt unfit or struggled to be a part of Swedish society. My expectation of Sweden was a 
liberal and migrants-friendly country before coming; however, I have found that Sweden was 
not as open as it seemed, especially in the job market. When I looked for an internship 
opportunity for the second year of this master's program, I really struggled to find a place. I 
wondered if I was competent enough or purely just not wanted. However, other international 
students also had the same experiences. I was getting to wonder if people and companies cared 
about diversity and inclusion as much as they said in the statements and if diversity and 
inclusion efforts are really designed for everyone. I have encountered some people saying that 
many employers care about D&I very much recently and my education in Gender Studies will 
be appreciated; however, I have applied for several positions and I have not seen any signs that 
people appreciate it. 
Even though this thesis started with discouraging experiences, my motivation in writing 
this thesis is hopeful. I have met people who are working hard to improve D&I in their 
organizations as a part of their jobs or even as a sidewalk in addition to the day-to-day duties 
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at the organization. I heard great stories about how each organization cares and approaches 
issues from different angles. I have also encountered many great opinions via responses to the 
survey. Even though I am being critical of what practitioners said during the interviews, this is 
not because I did not like what they said or anything like that. I want D&I initiatives to be 
critical of norms and beliefs that are embedded in the organizations and cause exclusion. To do 
so, I found that it is important to denaturalize thoughts that are taken for granted and uncover 
the ground that determines who is seen as (un)deserving to be included.  
 
Purpose and Overview of the thesis 
 My thesis explores how the diffraction of diversity and inclusion is created by the 
entanglement of the nature of institution (institutional will and wall) and dissemination of 
neoliberal rationality, and how it perpetuates power relations that create inequality and 
exclusion. I will discover this through discourse analysis and intersectionality thereby aiming 
to offer suggestions to improve diversity and inclusion (D&I) work at the Swedish 
organizations. Currently, many Swedish firms are actively working on enhancing diversity and 
inclusion within their institutions. However, as scholars point out, institutional commitment to 
democratic values including diversity and inclusion is taking different forms than social justice 
context, such as companies’ profitability and productivity become motivations to be committed 
rather than mitigating inequality and oppression (Brown, 2005; Knights & Omanović, 2016). 
The goal of writing this thesis is to suggest how D&I work can be further improved as a means 
of mitigating inequality and exclusion of employees, especially those who are underrepresented 
in the workplace.  
To do so, it is crucial to uncover how different powers that interplay in the current D&I 
work discourse and examine how it affects employees differently. I will conduct a qualitative 
analysis on D&I work to analyze norms and knowledge that constitute D&I work and elaborate 
on how these norms affect people from an intersectional perspective. Data examined in this 
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thesis are the interview data with D&I practitioners, the official documents issued by the 
organizations these practitioners are working for (e.g., annual reports and websites), and 
responds to the survey “D&I work in your workplace.” Information regarding these materials 
is further discussed in Data Collection and Research Ethics. Theoretical concepts, “institutional 
will/ wall” introduced by Sara Ahmed (2012) and “dissemination of neoliberal rationality” by 
Wendy Brown (2005) will guide me in analyzing how discourse on D&I is constructed and 
issues that current D&I cannot address. Thus, these theories offer what forms D&I discourse 
and how the entanglement of the institution and neoliberal rationality creates a distinct form of 
diffraction (Barad, 2007) of D&I in which the purposes and goals of D&I work have become 
different from what diversity and inclusion are supposed to do. By doing so, this thesis explores 
the discourse of current D&I work, what norms are being created through the documents and 
activities aiming to promote D&I, and how it affects employees with different backgrounds to 
improve D&I work from an intersectional perspective.  
 
Research Questions 
To reveal discourses on D&I work at Swedish organizations and its effects on 
employees to present some suggestions to make organizational D&I work better as a means of 
solving inequality and exclusion at work, this thesis will be exploring the following questions.  
- How have diversity and inclusion changed when it is incorporated into institutional 
practices? 
- What subjects are seen as (un)deserving and encouraged in D&I work?  
- Is D&I work overcoming or reproducing the weakness of diversity management 
that scholars have pointed out? (e.g., prioritization of profit, loss of emancipatory 
agenda, lack of attention to power relation that create differences and reproduction 
of minority group as subordinated to mainstream groups)  
 
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Overview of previous research on diversity in Organizations 
Before start talking about the project, I would like to introduce a brief overview of the 
evolution of “diversity” and “inclusion,” and the research projects on them. This part I will 
briefly review the literature on diversity management, which is the earlier version of D&I work. 
Diversity management started in the United States and it has influenced the direction of 
diversity management in Sweden. Therefore, I will first review studies focusing on the U.S. 
context and then proceed to explain how Swedish diversity management studies have 
developed.  
As Wendy Brown (2005) suggests that neoliberal rationality disseminates every domain 
of life and jeopardizes democratic values, the concept of diversity which is rooted in social 
justice also has been transformed into a means to increase the profits and productivity of the 
organization. Scholarly research on diversity finds the beginning of the concept in the United 
States in 1960’s, when Act 1964 has been enacted and discrimination based on individual race, 
sex, nationality and religion has been forbidden (Calvard, 2021). Another turning point is in 
1987, when an American thinktank organization, Hudson Institute published Workforce 2000 
which appeals to the need to prepare for the change in the workforce’s skills and demography 
(Lorbiecki and Jack, 2000; Calvard, 2021). Lorbiecki and Jack (2000) summarize the evolution 
of the concept of diversity into four categories: demographic, political, economy, and critical 
turns. The first demographic turn occurred when Workforce 2000 was released in which people 
noticed the heterogeneity of workforces and employers were urged to consider its influence on 
their business. In this context, the concept of diversity was used to include a heterogeneous 
population of workforces (Lorbiecki and Jack, 2000). The second turning point, the political 
turn occurred during the late 1980s to the beginning of the 1990s, diversity has been used as 
an alternative to “affirmative actions” and employed by the right-wing government. This 
political turn of diversity shifted to economic value and business cases where diversity is seen 
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as the key to the survival of a company and a diverse workforce is associated with higher 
productivity and profit (Lorbiecki and Jack, 2000). The fourth turn in diversity discourse is the 
critical turn (the mid-late 1990s) where diversity initiatives have faced backlash such as the 
question of its effects (Lorbiecki and Jack, 2000). Thus, diversity has shifted its focus from 
anti-discrimination against marginalized groups of people (e.g., women, people of colors, 
LGBTQ+) to the expanded population of workforces that sees difference as individual and 
diversity policies are employed for the business necessities and objectives (Kirton and Greene, 
2019, p.677). As corresponding to such business models of diversity, mainstream scholarly 
research has also focused on the business aspect of diversity, whether diversity is “good” or 
“bad” for the organization and teams, via self-evident reports and meta-analysis even though it 
endangers ambivalent results (Calvard, 2021, pp.22-3). Critical studies on diversity have been 
developed as a means of challenging this nature of mainstream research and they more focus 
on social justice aspects of diversity work.  
In the Swedish context, inspired by the U.S., diversity is seen as a management device 
for business and is often promoted with many business outcomes (De los Reyes, 2000, p.257; 
Romani et al. 2017). Scholars have pointed out that a shift from gender equality to diversity 
has lessened the radical emancipatory agenda that challenges taken-for-granted norms for 
changing power relations suppressing minority groups in Swedish society. By using arguments 
from Höök (2003) 1 , Romani and Holck (2017) argue that diversity has been approached 
through reactive measures and cultural assimilation in which differences are naturalized and 
not problematized in comparison with implicit norms prevalent within organizations such as 
White supremacy, class, gender, and ableism. This diversity’s non-norm critical attitude has 
been also problematized by De los Reyes (2016). In suggesting the limitation of the diversity 
 
1 I wish to read this publication but could not, due to my inability to read Swedish academic text. 
Höök, P. (2003). Jämställdhet på hög nivå. Mansdominans i förändring om ledningsgrupper 
och styrelser (SOU 2003:16). Stockholm: Fritzes. 
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approach as anti-racism and anti-discrimination strategies, she points out “Structural social 
inequality and relations of power were discursively reduced to differences that must be 
accepted in the same way that ‘we’ are expected to accept ‘opinions.’ In this way, the authorities 
redefined racism and discrimination within a framework of tolerance and called for a politics 
of acceptance where there was an ‘us’ that was invited to accept ‘them’” (De los Reyes, 2016, 
p.36). As a result of this non-critical approach in diversity management, inequality, and 
discrimination have been reproduced despite the diversity initiative at the organizations. The 
business model approach that merely conceptualizes differences as homogenous and sees 
through its association with profit put people suffering intersecting disadvantages in more 
vulnerable situations (Knights and Omanović, 2015). Romani et al. (2019) develop the concept 
of “benevolence discrimination” in which people (human resource professionals in their 
empirical example) who try to help foreign-born workers can actually reproduce discrimination 
by not acknowledging taken-for-granted norms within an organization, such as Swedish-ness 
and language. Thus, they maintain power dynamics between us (Swedes) and them (foreign-
born workers) as inferior and always in need of help.  
 My research also follows what critical diversity studies have pointed out and I will 
address if D&I work, which is seen as a developed version of diversity management, challenges 
the weakness pointed out by scholars or if D&I is an even more de-radicalized version of 
diversity management as a shift from gender equality to diversity management make it weaker. 
D&I is a recent initiative at the organizations on which there are not many studies done. I am 
hoping that my study can contribute to both research fields (e.g., critical organization studies, 
critical diversity management studies, and gender studies) and practitioners by uncovering 
discourses on D&I work and its effects.   
  
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Theoretical Framework  
Scholars have pointed out the morph-ability of the language of diversity. As Prasad and 
Mills (1997) argue “workplace diversity itself may not hold uniform connotations, signifying 
different things to different groups and individuals within organizations and society,” language 
of diversity and inclusion mean differently to different organizations and practitioners. By 
echoing claims by Prasad and Mills (1997), Ahmed (2007, 2012) points out the circulation and 
mobility of the concept through her analysis of how diversity workers at the university work 
with the term “diversity.” Without offering a specific definition, diversity has a risk of being 
understood in the way that does not challenge social inequality or hamper them from making 
actions (Ahmed, 2007, p.240). Diversity morphs as a strategy to get embedded within an 
institution by making connection with words, images and bodies that an institution value 
(Ahmed, 2007, pp.242-4).  
The aim of the theoretical framework I am going to use is to uncover the specific form 
of D&I as a part of institutional practices. As the scholars I referred to above suggest, the 
definitions of diversity and inclusion morph based on what perspectives people see it and what 
people want out of it. I chose discourse analysis as a part of my analytical tool to tease out 
norms and power that determine ways that organizations see and do D&I work if I borrowed 
the words of Ahmed (2012), circulation of D&I within the organization.  
How I chose each theory in the analysis of D&I discourse is inspired by the diffraction 
perspective introduced by Karen Barad (2007). It serves as a theme throughout this thesis which 
captures the entanglement of power that consists of saying and doing D&I and shows how that 
entanglement engenders the uniqueness of D&I when it becomes a part of institutions. As 
mentioned in the literature review part, diversity and inclusion which are rooted in social justice 
discussion become a business management tool that often prioritizes business profits, such as 
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increased productivity and competence, and overlooks systematic inequality and exclusion that 
are reproduced by prevalent discourse. Two points that D&I as a business management and 
D&I as a basic human need are also mentioned many times in the documents as well as in the 
interviews. However, I found that they are not two separate things. Rather, they are influencing 
each other in developing, motivating, and hampering D&I work. Especially, when diversity 
and inclusion are getting into a part of institution will, diversity and inclusion have to deal with 
the nature of institution (Ahmed, 2012). In that process, neoliberal rationality (Brown, 2005, 
2015) as what an institution is built upon and what an institution wants out of D&I work 
becomes a power that consists of D&I discourse.  
By conceptualizing these theories through a diffraction perspective, I will elucidate how 
these factors intertwine and create the complexity of D&I work discourses. These two factors 
are interdependent and in a becoming process, such as the nature of the institution combined 
with neoliberal rationality affects the way in which D&I is used and promoted and change in 
the market where sustainability becomes a business imperative affects institutional attitudes 
towards D&I issues. In the critical discourse analysis part, these theoretical perspectives play 
an important role in uncovering what knowledge is taken for granted, what makes that 
knowledge mainstream, and how they contribute to (re)produce norms. Intersectionality as an 
analytical method uncovers problems of power relations that are reproduced and determine 
who (un)deserves to be included in D&I discourse. 
 
Diffraction: Theoretical entanglement that creates discourse on D&I 
What I am trying to do in this master thesis is to bring the intra-action/diffraction 
perspective to conceptualizing the uniqueness of diversity and inclusion measures when they 
are incorporated into organizational practices as D&I work. Diffraction is the theoretical 
concept developed by Barad based on the physics phenomenon that waves or beams of light 
change their patterns of movement when they encounter an obstruction (Barad, 2007, p.74). As 
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an analytical tool, the diffraction model attends to “specific material of entanglements” (Barad, 
2007, p.88) that enable researchers to scrutinize how each constituent factor is connected to 
each other and these entanglements creating differences by becoming (Barad, 2007, p.381).  
Having diffraction theory as a theoretical theme of this thesis allows me to dissect the 
complexity of D&I work, such as how different factors, institutional will and are interplaying 
in promoting D&I at work, what risks or pitfalls current D&I has, and how D&I can be more 
developed as a means of challenging causes of inequality and hostility at work. Diffraction will 
be a key throughout the thesis as it shows how D&I is characterized by the overlaps of different 
factors. 
 
Institutional will and institutional wall 
Ahmed (2012) argues that even though diversity is a part of “institutional will,” which 
an institution is aiming to do, diversity workers have faced an “institution wall” when they are 
doing their job (Ahmed, 2012, p.26). By quoting sociologists, Peter L. Berger and Thomas 
Luckman, Ahmed elucidates that the heart of institutionalism lies in habituation, and it appears 
as resistance to those who try to change it (Ahmed, 2012, p.26). Concerning institutional will, 
this habituation is a “continuation of institutional will” that is already taking place and no 
longer need to “be willed” (Ahmed, 2012, pp.128-9). Therefore, diversity work becomes 
somewhat paradoxical: for diversity work (an institutional will) to be institutionalized, some 
of habits (another institutional will) have to be changed to be a part of the routines that 
constitute this habituation; however, diversity work faces an institutional wall because they are 
against what this institutional will stands for (Ahmed, 2012, pp.128-9). “Successful” diversity 
work requires the circulation of terms that are controlled in a way that is associated with other 
words that embodies “the histories of struggle against social inequalities” (Ahmed, 2007, 
p.254); however, the nature of institution appears as “barriers” when challenging norms in the 
15 
 
institution. 
I would like to use this theoretical framework as a ground that creates a distinct form 
of D&I work that is detached from the social justice context. When diversity and inclusion 
become D&I a part of an institution, D&I work is organized to be congruent with "what an 
institution wants" thereby not being able to problematize the norm that is causing inequality 
and is an institution built upon. This is also related to the question why neoliberal rationale 
occupies D&I discourse, such as how premises of commitment to D&I is often reduced to 
companies’ success or increasing profit and why D&I has to be developed in a way that does 
not address inequal power relations within organizations. This perspective is reflected in 
analyzing discourse in both saying and doing D&I, especially in combination with 
dissemination of neo-liberal rationality mentioned in the next part. 
 
Neo-liberal Rationality  
In “Neoliberalism and the End of the Democracy,” Wendy Brown (2005, 2015) 
elaborates on how neoliberal rationality as a governmental technic disseminates every aspect 
of life—including institutional practices and policies, and individual conducts—and 
jeopardizes the democratic value. She suggests that the market becomes a driving force of the 
states: economic calculation is applied in both institutional and individual conduct. As the 
state’s success is measured based on the success in the economy, the states openly correspond 
to the market needs through policies and laws, and cost-benefit calculation becomes the 
measurement in all dimensions of practices (Brown, 2005, pp. 41-2). The extension of 
neoliberal rationality to non-economic areas creates individuals as “entrepreneurial actors” 
whose moral autonomy is also evaluated by their economic capability and whose economic 
failure is thought to be their responsibility (Brown, 2005, p.42). Thus, Centring cost-benefit 
calculus diminishes the value of democratic credos from the free election, equal opportunities, 
and political participation (Brown, 2005, p.46).  
16 
 
The intension of using this theoretical perspective, on one hand, is to show how 
neoliberal logic characterizes one of the dominant discourses in D&I work. The language 
related to business profits is mentioned many times in both statements and interviews such as 
“competence,” “survival” or “productivity” as common knowledge on why organizations are 
promoting D&I thereby often being an important factor to deciding the circulation of D&I 
within an organization. On the other hand, this relationship between neoliberal rationality and 
democratic value has become more complicated than what Brown elucidates at the beginning 
of the twenty-first century. As I will discuss in analyzing doing D&I, the recent interests to 
SDGs have created a notion that D&I is a business imperative to succeed in the future. I think 
it complicates the dissemination of neoliberal rationality by creating a shift from “D&I is good 
for business” to “D&I is a necessity for good business” even though it does not change the 
motivation in enhancing D&I.  
 
  
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Methodology 
I am going to use two analytical methods for this thesis: critical discourse analysis of 
current D&I work and intersectional analysis of D&I work discourse and its effects on 
employees with different backgrounds. I understand a claim that discourse and intersectionality 
should be in the theoretical part instead of methodology; however, I believe that both discourse 
and intersectionality can unleash their full potential as analytical methods. Therefore, in this 
methodology part, I will explain these theories and then show how I use them as analytical 
methods in this thesis. How the combination of discourse and intersectionality creates synergy 
will be also discussed to show the effectiveness of my analytical methods.  
The materials I will analyze for critical discourse and intersectional analysis are 
interviews with D&I practitioners and official documents issued by the organizations they are 
working for (e.g., D&I section on the websites, annual reports and guidebooks created a part 
of D&I work), and employees’ respond to the survey in order to elaborate how these discourses 
influence the ways that employees see D&I and how it perpetuates power relations that create 
certain groups excluded. The reason for combining discourse and intersectional analysis is to 
shed light on norms and power relations that are behind institutional D&I work and present 
what is needed to consider for D&I work to be developed as a means of mitigating social 
inequality caused by differences in the workplace.  
As Ahonen et al. (2014) point out, even a critical study of diversity may contribute to 
reproducing norms when they are not attentive enough to the power dynamics behind diversity, 
inclusion, and its management. My motivation of this study is to offer suggestions for D&I 
work to improve the work life of those who feel excluded in the organization, not for the 
business profits like mainstream diversity research. Therefore, I found that there are needs to 
take a critical stance to norms and power within organizations throughout the analysis process. 
Here critical discourse analysis and intersectional analysis work as a chain: discourse analysis 
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claims to dissect D&I work in terms of power, norms and knowledges that (re)produce 
inequality in D&I work, while intersectionality sheds lights on the impact of these discourses 
on employees based on empirical materials. Combining critical discourse analysis and 
intersectional analysis of D&I discourse together with theoretical entries that mentioned in 
theoretical framework offer a critical analysis that address norms and power that are still 
embedded in D&I work. 
 
Critical Discourse Analysis 
Discourse analysis is a perspective that analyzes language-in-use (Gee, 2010, ix), such 
as how certain things is talked about and framed, and how people are doing it (Gee, 2010, p.42). 
In analyzing D&I policies and statements, discourse analysis enables researchers to analyze 
how different factors interplay in characterizing diversity practices (De los Reyes, 2000) and 
what is seen as a norm in current anti-discrimination measures (Oswick and Noon, 2014). Even 
though authors do not use the term discourse, “Deep Evaluation” introduced by Bacchi and 
Eveline (2010) also aims at analyzing norms and ideal subjects that the diversity and inclusion 
statements and programs create (Bacchi and Eveline, 2010, p.52).  
There are varied uses of discourse analysis in organizational diversity study, and in this 
study, I would like to conduct critical discourse analysis based on Fairclough (2010) as this 
approach enables me to tease out what norms and knowledge which is normalized 
organizational D&I work, and how they constitute the way D&I work is organized.  
Fairclough (2013) argues that an institution is an assemblage of different ideological-
discourse formations, which he means “inseparability of ‘ways of talking’ and ‘ways of seeing’” 
(Fairclough, 2013, p. 43), and each section has different dominant ideological-discourse 
formations which create institutional subjects. Dominant ideological-discourse formations are 
naturalized by being perceived as a form of background knowledge, such as institutional beliefs, 
values, and ideologies (Fairclough, 2013, p.40) which creates particular ways of talking and 
19 
 
seeing, and they are inseparably interconnected (Fairclough, 2013, p.42). Each background 
knowledge is different regarding the extent to which it is naturalized, such as whether it is 
knowledge shared only among D&I practitioners or shared within an organization or even 
within an industry. The critical aim of critical discourse analysis is, according to Fairclough, to 
denaturalize these dominant ideological-discourse formations which become norms of 
institutions itself when they are unchallenged and naturalized as “common sense” (Fairclough, 
2013, p.43).  
Critical discourse analysis here is the tool to uncover discourse that is reiterated in D&I 
and reproduces inequal power structure within the organization especially. Especially I see that 
the entanglement of neoliberal rationality and the nature of the institution is a ground that 
generates discourse and determines who (un)deserves D&I. I will employ critical discourse 
analysis in analyzing the materials, such as companies’ websites, annual reports, and interview 
data with D&I practitioners to find out what is seen as norms in both saying and doing D&I, 
and subjects that are encouraged in current D&I work. The theoretical entrances that I 
mentioned above—neoliberal rationality and institutional will/wall—are seen as powers that 
play significant roles in creating D&I discourse. 
 
Intersectional Analysis 
I use intersectionality as a method as I am convinced that I can take full advantage of 
intersectionality when it is used as a par with discourse analysis. The intersectional analysis 
here serves to complement the finding through critical discourse analysis. It sheds light on 
structural exclusion and oppression that are dismissed thereby being reproduced in current D&I 
discourses created by the entanglement of neoliberal rationality and the nature of institutions. 
I want to use intersectionality as an analytical lens that examines the effects of D&I discourse, 
therefore I use intersectionality as an analytical method rather than a theoretical framework in 
this thesis. Here I will briefly explain intersectionality and its validity as an analytical method 
20 
 
in this study by introducing works by Dean Spade (2005, 2013).  
The intersectional analysis offers a perspective on analyzing how intersectional power 
relations impose on individuals differently based on differences created by social variables 
(Cho et al., 2013). As Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” from the pitfall of single-
axis analysis and policies (Crenshaw, 1991; Spade, 2013), the intersectional analysis offers a 
critical lens in analyzing how norms and the ideal images of institutional subjects that are 
created on D&I discourse perpetuate subordinated positions of employees, especially those 
who are not heard or whose “differences” are merely dealt with as individual differences.  
The work of Dean Spade (2005, 2013) has been a great inspiration for thinking about 
how I can apply intersectionality analysis to my study without losing its strengths and purposes 
because this is important yet sometimes difficult to secure as we discussed during the previous 
course (Harris and Patton, 2019). Spade points out that law reform which appears seemingly 
as neutral is actually proceeded based on the needs of a particular group, and this single-axis 
approach often creates negative effects on people outside that group such as trans people, 
women and queers of color, immigrants, and poor (Spade, 2013). The narrative of 
(un)deservingness is used in human rights discourse which determines which bodies deserve 
better, which bodies underserve it thereby being excluded from the discussion. It does not 
change the power dynamics behind domination for those who are seen as underserving (Spade, 
2013, p.1039). The analysis through an intersectional lens enables paving a way to form 
activism that challenges the norm that keeps excluding some bodies from the discussion and 
reproduces deteriorating effects to them (Spade, 2013, p.1047).   
Spades suggests that the narrative of (un)deservingness is reproduced in equal- and 
right-seeking arguments; however, even in analyzing organizational D&I work, I have 
encountered the questions about “who is seen as deserving inclusion and equal treatment that 
D&I work aims for?” many times while reading the documents and listening to the interviewees. 
21 
 
This question will be explored in analysis part to illustrate the effects of these norms thereby 
aiming to offer suggestions that challenge the norm which is unchallenged and reproduced 
through current D&I work, which I mean the entanglement of institutionalism and neo-liberal 
rationality that determines who deserves D&I. Therefore, I think that the combination of these 
two methods can offer a critical analysis of D&I in depth: critical discourse analysis uncovers 
discourse that is created by the diffraction of D&I in the organization and intersectional analysis 
reveals what kinds of structural inequalities are reproduced via this neoliberal focus approach 
to D&I. This combination is important for this study to offer a suggestion that helps to improve 
D&I work as a social justice means in the workplace. 
 
  
22 
 
Data Collection and Research Ethics 
 This part will introduce the information regarding the data examined in the analysis 
part. As well as introducing the data collection, ethical considerations in dealing with data and 
positionality will be explored. To do so, I aim to offer sufficient information that will make it 
easier for readers to follow the discussion in the analysis part and to make transparency in this 
thesis project. 
 
Source Data 
 In this thesis, I will mainly discuss these three types of data: official documents on 
D&I issued by companies, interviews with D&I practitioners, and survey that are targeted at 
employees working at Swedish companies. Official documents are the manifestos in which 
organizations declare their commitments to D&I to the public, such as investors and job seekers, 
and often reflect how they want to appear in public. While the interview data in which 
practitioners explained what D&I meant to their organizations rather determines the flow of 
D&I within an organization. This section explains data collection process: how and where I 
found those source data. 
 
1) Official Documents 
Documents examined are the websites, annual sustainable reports and guidelines 
written on D&I. Websites are the sections in the companies’ websites that are dedicated to 
D&I. I found these pages via companies’ websites menu or by searching “[company name] 
diversity inclusion” on Google search engine. Annual sustainable reports are also used in 
examining especially “Saying D&I” part, those are retrieved under the section “Investor 
relation” or “Investors” on their websites. Some companies publish guidelines regarding 
their D&I work and they are also the materials I dealt with in the analysis part. Due to 
confidentiality, as not many companies are publishing this type of guidelines on the 
23 
 
website, the names of the guidelines are omitted. For all the reports and websites, names 
and links to websites are omitted since these are information that could lead to identifying 
the company. However, I also acknowledge that this action could make it challenging or 
even impossible to prove accuracy of the information (Swedish Research Council, 2017, 
p.41).  
 
2) Interviews 
For the interview data, I have conducted five people working at four different 
organizations. The industries of these companies vary, such as IT, engineering, 
manufacturing, and apparel. Most of the interviewees are working as D&I practitioners, 
while an interviewee is involved in D&I work outside of her work. Questions I asked 
during the interview were such as what D&I means to their companies and D&I 
practitioners themselves, how they approached D&I at their companies, and challenges in 
doing D&I work. I will write more information about them in the next section. In this 
section, I will clarify how I found the interviewees.  
How I found interviewees is different in each case. For making it clear I will call 
interviewees 1-5 in this section, but I will not use those numbers in other parts of the thesis 
and this number does not follow chronological order. I have known Interviewees 1 and 2 
before starting this master thesis project. I encountered them on LinkedIn when I looked 
for some career advice regarding how to get a D&I-related position. When I decided on 
the topic of this master's thesis project, I emailed them rather informally to ask if they are 
interested in joining the study. Once I have decided on the direction of the research and 
written the consent form, I get back to them with detailed information about the study and 
ask if they are still interested in participating. After they agreed on their participation in 
the project, I set up a meeting with each of them. I conducted an online interview for one 
of them, an in-person interview with the other. Interviewee 3 contacted me as she heard 
24 
 
about the project from Interviewee 1 and she e-mailed me showing an interest in joining 
the study. We decided on conducting the interview via Zoom as I had trouble recording on 
Microsoft Teams in previous interviews. Interviewee 4 was one of the respondents to the 
survey. She left her contact in the survey and I contacted her for the follow-up questions. 
After some conversations via E-mail, we agreed on meeting for the interview. I got to 
know Interviewee 5 via a person who works in the same organization. She connected me 
to her colleague as she was out of the country when I contacted the research participants. 
This person connected me to Interviewee 5. Then we discussed E-mails and agreed on 
setting the interview on Microsoft Teams. 
 
3) Survey 
The survey is spread in two ways: via an interviewee and LinkedIn. One of the 
interviewees who agreed to share the contacts of colleagues with underrepresented 
backgrounds and is willing to answer the survey within her organizations, which was an 
enormous help in conducting this research. I planned to spread the survey only among 
employees within the organizations that the D&I practitioners I interviewed are working 
for. However, this plan did not go as good as I expected, so I changed the plan to spread the 
survey on LinkedIn and some people I am connected with on this social media platform 
helped me spread it by reposting and reacting to my post. As a result, I could gather 24 
responses to the survey, some of them are working for the companies that I had interviews 
with, but I could receive the answer outside those organizations too. Readers can look at 
the questions on the survey in Appendix 2 where I inserted the screenshot of the empty 
form. People answered the survey anonymously and only people who agreed left their 
contact information in the answer to the final question. I contacted a few of them for the 
follow-up questions and received answers from two respondents. 
 
25 
 
Ethical Considerations  
For confidentiality, all the information regarding participants and their organizations 
is anonymized and their affiliation (e.g., interviewee A is working at company X which is in 
the manufacturing industry) is also not mentioned throughout the thesis. This is because the 
D&I practitioners network in Sweden is not big so I want to minimize the hints leading to 
identifying interviewees. However, I add some information about companies as it helps 
readers to understand the context. This information in the later section is shared with 
practitioners and I asked them to inform me if they wanted me to change. Yet, things that can 
lead to identifying companies such as links to websites and the official documents issued by 
these organizations are omitted from the reference list.  
Before conducting the interviews, I made informed consent to all the interviewees. 
Readers can see the original consent form in Appendix 1. Interviewees were given chances to 
ask questions regarding this research and I made sure to tell them that they have the right to 
cease participation in the study at any point as the participation in the study is voluntary.  
 
Companies and People that Participated in the Study 
For confidential reasons, I will not share the information about the name of 
organizations that participated in the study. However, I will share some background 
information about each organization for readers to be able to understand the context. In the 
analysis part, I will mention companies as Company A to D when I quote the statements from 
their annual reports and other official comments.  
Yet, when it comes to practitioners’ words, I do not create a connection between 
companies and practitioners for two reasons. First, even though practitioners are in charge of 
D&I work in their organizations, their words do not always represent their organizations. 
Second, some interviewees were willing to share views that are critical of their organizations. 
I found that showing the linkage between interviewees and organizations might lead to 
26 
 
putting interviewees into vulnerable positions. Therefore, when I quote from the script, I will 
not say like “An interviewee working at Company B said XX.” I considered other options 
about how to introduce interviewees in the analysis part, but I wanted to minimize the 
possibility of revealing interviewees therefore interviewees’ comments will be mentioned 
such as “an interviewee suggested XX.” The information below is about the organizations 
and practitioners that participated in this study. Those are checked and approved by 
practitioners working at the organizations.  
Company A is a manufacturing company operating for over 95 years. They have a 
global headquarter in Gothenburg and over 40,000 employees all over the world. They are 
selling their products in more than 100 countries. The practitioner I talked to is working with 
D&I topics in this organization for more than three years. For the first two years, she had 
been working D&I in Sweden. Now, together with her colleague, she is in charge of D&I 
work on a global scale, such as setting up global standards and helping different regions for 
setting up local goals that suit national laws and challenges in the areas. 
Company B is a consulting firm specializing in engineering and has its headquarter in 
Stockholm, Sweden. They have been operating for over 100 years in Sweden. Today, they 
have over 19,000 employees and operations in over 50 countries. The practitioner I 
interviewed has been working with D&I in the organization for about five years. Together 
with her colleagues, she is organizing workshops, trainings, and annual events and creating 
D&I content for E-learning for the organization. 
Company C is a manufacturing company, operating for more than 60 years. They have 
a headquarter in Gothenburg, Sweden. They are a part of the large group which has 100,000 
employees and 190 sales market. I talked to two people working for this organization. A 
person has been in charge of D&I work in this organization for around four years. Her work 
ranges from setting D&I goals to giving seminars to organizing network activities. The other 
27 
 
person has been working for this organization for more than ten years and is a core member 
of one of the networks in this organization. She is working with D&I issues alongside her 
full-time job. 
Company D is an apparel company and operating for about 70 years. Their 
headquarter is located in Gothenburg, Sweden. They have 440 stores mainly in Europe with 
over 4000 employees. They started actively working with D&I topics about a year ago. The 
practitioner I interviewed is the one who created the foundation of this. Her work spans from 
setting up strategies to creating content for awareness training.  
 
Positionality 
Knowledge production that I am intending to do through this thesis is informed by the 
positionality of the knowledge producer, I as the author of this thesis. In Situated Knowledge 
(1988), Donna Haraway rejects the dichotomy of subject/object and sees knowledge 
production is specific to and situated in how knowledge producers see things. My 
positionality as a student in Gender Studies, an international in Sweden, and a jobseeker in 
the Swedish labor market enable yet limits my analysis of D&I work. In this section, I reflect 
on my positionality as a ground that forms an academic claim in this thesis project.  
Reasons why I picked theories and methods that aim to uncover norms and power 
relations that are perpetuated in D&I work is probably because I have learned how to analyze 
and question things behind the taken-for-granted knowledge and narratives that create 
inequality. As I mentioned briefly in the introduction, my experiences in the Swedish labor 
market also affect the fact that I became skeptical of narratives that Sweden is an immigrant-
friendly and liberal country, so-called Swedish exceptionalism (Habel, 2011). Those 
experiences allow me to see things from norm-critical perspectives. However, as a person 
who is afraid of my unstable status and future in my life in Sweden, it is also true that I feel 
conflicted when I criticize discourses reiterated in statements and interviews among 
28 
 
practitioners because a part of me is afraid of the consequences of this thesis project, thinking 
“Does this project negatively affect my job hunting if I criticize what these people?” 
Therefore, I guess I intended to finish this thesis in a positive tone by offering suggestions to 
practitioners even though those are not well thought out and quite unrealistic to achieve. I 
keep on telling myself that it is important to uncover and criticize norms that exclude certain 
people from D&I and the main purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the field of gender 
studies, not to help me getting a job after the study.  
 
Limitations of the Study 
I have to admit that the data sampling of the survey is inclined to certain groups (e.g., 
20 respondents out of 24 were women). This could be partially because women are more 
interested in D&I topics than men according to an interviewee. I also have to admit that there 
is a possibility that I could not reach out to people who are in vulnerable positions within 
organizations because people I am connected with on LinkedIn (the social media platform I 
used for spreading the survey) tend to have established careers already. Considering this fact, 
I wondered how I can interpret these data. For example, to question 6 “Do you feel that your 
voice and experiences are included in D&I work at your company? (e.g., the coverage of 
inclusive seminar and policies, and network group that suits your needs),” eighteen 
respondents out of twenty-four answered positively including “yes,” “A bit” and “I don’t 
know” which I interpreted that the respondents did not even need to consider the environment 
surrounding them as they already feel included (Ahmed, 2021, p.140). While it was only six 
people showed critical views toward their companies’ D&I work. Since this is not a 
quantitative study, I will not conclude that most organizations succeed in creating D&I work 
that includes different individuals' needs, rather I will further analyze what brought this 
result. This will be further examined in the analysis part. 
29 
 
Since I do not have a formal agreement or official collaboration in doing this research, 
it has been hard to keep in touch with interviewees. An interviewee suggested I should have 
made an official agreement with the organization, so if a prospective student wishes to write a 
master's thesis on organizations like this study, I recommend that they should contact the 
organizations in mind as early as possible to ask if they can collaborate with those 
organizations. By so doing, a student can secure access to more data and information about 
an organization, and people at the organization can also adjust their workload to help the 
student's thesis.  
  
30 
 
Analysis Part: Diffracting Diversity and Inclusion 
This part explores the diffraction of diversity and inclusion in D&I work in Swedish 
organizations by analyzing the discourse that is reiterated in how different organizations 
interpret and promote and examining risks of discourses through an intersectional analysis that 
sheds light on exclusion being reproduced in D&I work. I will illuminate that D&I discourse 
is characterized by institutional wills and dissemination of neoliberalism to institutional 
practices and subjects, therefore D&I work diffracts from what diversity and inclusion mean to 
do. 
This analysis part is divided into two parts: Saying and Doing D&I. Firstly, I will 
examine what kind of discourses are reiterated in how different organizations interpret 
definitions and premises of D&I. By doing so, I aim to explore what kind of background 
knowledge is embedded in promoting D&I work, how different knowledge interact each other 
and create the distinct form of D&I discourse. How D&I discourse that is constructed via 
institutional will and neo-liberal rationality creates subjects who are seen as (un)deserving of 
inclusion is also explored in this part. These questions will be explored through theoretical 
frameworks from Ahmed (2012) and Brown (2005) to see how the word “D&I” is associated 
with, motivated by, and reasoned by neo-liberal rationality, and how it is seen as “common 
sense.” Secondly, I will analyze discourses prevalent in Saying D&I are reiterated in doing 
D&I. This part will focus on how D&I discourse that I find is disseminated for D&I work to 
be institutionalized and how it deflects D&I work. In conclusion, I will summarize the finding 
through the diffraction perspective—how is D&I discourse constructed by being a part of an 
institutional practice that aims at capital enhancement? How does it deflect D&I work and 
create (un)deserving subjects? 
 
31 
 
Analysis of Saying D&I 
The aim of this part is to dissect the language of D&I, especially on what ground 
definitions and premises of D&I are formed in both statements and words from practitioners. I 
will discuss how D&I and related concept, difference, is interpreted and expressed in congruent 
with “what institution wants” which enables neoliberal rationale to occupy in both definitions 
and premises of D&I work thereby forming a ground to decide who are worth the inclusion.  
Through analyzing these materials, I have found that D&I work seems to address 
substantive needs of diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Yet the premises of D&I is 
subsumed to business benefits and D&I loses the capacity to problematize the structure that 
maintains exclusion which makes the status of D&I work ambiguous. Neo-liberal rationality 
becomes a driving force of D&I. It thus determines the way that organizations see diversity and 
inclusion, and individual ability to contribute to the business profits determines who gets to be 
included.  
 
D&I as a premise to success and loss of social justice 
When diversity and inclusion become management tools, D&I, those words lose active 
aspects that address inequality and exclusion caused by systematic oppression. For example, 
the dictionary definition of diversity is not only about the condition of having differences but 
also about the action to embrace and include them. Griffin (2017) defines diversity as “the 
recognition and acceptance of individuals in all their particularities and in their singularity” (A 
Dictionary of Gender Studies, 2017, diversity entry, emphasis added). Diversity is defined in 
Oxford English Dictionary as “The fact, condition, or practice of including or involving people 
from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds, and (more recently) of different 
genders, sexual orientations, etc.” (Oxford English Dictionary, diversity entry) Yet, when 
organizations define “diversity,” it loses this practical aspect of diversity and focuses on a 
descriptive use of diversity (Ahmed, 2012, pp.51-2), such as “mix of people with different 
32 
 
visible and invisible traits” (Company D2, 2023, p.70) and “the importance of our company 
reflecting the world in that sense” (Company B, website).  
Inclusion, even though it still maintains its meaning as actions to ensure that diversities 
among people are appreciated and people are included regardless of their differences, becomes 
actions to “invite everyone” and the existence of barriers that hamper the participation of 
marginalized groups of people are dismissed and not addressed. UN human rights define 
inclusion is to dismantle discrimination, suggesting “[I]nclusion is not only about including 
those who are traditionally excluded but must also be about dismantling the many forms of 
discrimination that contribute to the persistent marginalization of groups on the basis of 
arbitrary distinctions, such as their age, their gender or the color of their skin” (United Nation 
Human Rights Office of High Commission, 2015, p.4). However, when inclusion becomes a 
part of institutional routines it loses its function as a means of dismantling discrimination and 
barriers, it rather focuses on “individuals.” Company B defines inclusion as “making active 
choices every day to ensure that everyone feels welcome, safe, and valued. Inclusion is 
achieved when your organisation and culture are truly inviting to all so that everyone is able to 
participate fully in the decision-making processes and development opportunities” (Company 
B, website). Company D defines inclusion as “Making the mix of people work by having an 
environment with a culture, behaviour and mindset that embraces all people and where 
everyone feels welcome” (Company D, 2023, p.70, emphasis added). This company does not 
specify what they mean by “Making mix of people work,” I think it can mean two things. 
Firstly, it means creating an environment where there is no discrimination caused by differences. 
It is similar United Nations’ definitions even though attempts to address causes of issues fade 
in this definition. Secondly, it means that inclusion is an action to make use of diversity to its 
 
2 Here I mostly mention Company B and D in analyzing definitions. That is not because they only 
have definitions that exemplify loss of social justice in D&I. Rather, only those companies that 
explicitly state their definitions and understanding of D&I in their official documents or websites.  
33 
 
end. Its end, that means to increase the profits of organizations, in which diversity is believed 
to be a ground that creates more productivity and profit that lead to companies’ success, while 
inclusion is an action to make sure that diversity can unleash its full potential. 
 The definitions of diversity and inclusion are set according to the premises of D&I 
that aim to create more business profits. This is corresponding to Brown’s claim that the 
dissemination of neoliberal rationality jeopardizes democratic values by being subsumed to 
“capital enhancement” (Brown, 2015, p.22), D&I work has become an institutional practice to 
envision it. Words such as success, innovation, high performance, and profitability become 
reasons why organizations are making efforts to enhance D&I work. For example, Company A 
states “We value differences and all aspects of diversity to innovate and create the best solutions” 
(Company A, p.36). Company C states in their annual report:“[Company C] considers D&I as 
critical to its ability to perform in current operations and transform into a long-term sustainable 
business (…) There is a conviction that continuous efforts to create a highly inclusive work 
culture, can unleash the full potential of the diverse population of people. [Emphasis added] 
(Company C, 2023, p.164). In these examples, diversity is seen as a ground that enables 
innovation and better service delivery. The second example regards inclusive work culture as 
a driver that leverages the full potential of a diverse workforce.  
Some organizations’ statements show that they think D&I is directly connected to a 
business benefit. Company B states “[Company B] strives to increase diversity and the gender 
balance to get the best people, secure long-term growth and profitability, and to create a good 
working environment and high-performance teams.” (Company B, 2022, p.132) The premises 
of D&I in this sentence can be divided into two parts: “to get the best people, secure long-term 
growth and profitability” and “to create a good working environment and high-performance 
teams.” In the first part, D&I is understood as a way to attain talented people that contribute to 
the success of the company. They regard diverse recruitment means approaching a wider pool 
34 
 
of talent that has been missed previously, and it will result in securing growth and being able 
to correspond to diverse customers’ needs (Romani et al., 2017, p.274). In other words, a 
recruitment process that favors a homogenous group of people is seen as “wasteful of human 
resources” (de los Reyes, 2001, p.181). While the second part, creating a good work 
environment, which I suppose is what they aim to create via inclusion work, is directly linked 
to the higher performances team. As a business case diversity study (Frost, 2018) describes 
“diverse organizations perform better” as conventional wisdom, such attitudes can be observed 
in companies’ D&I statements. Company B states “For us, it is self-evident that all people have 
the same value and the right to enjoy the same opportunities. An inclusive and diverse 
workplace is also commercially and financially advantageous: it is quite simply more profitable” 
(Company B, website). Company D states: “ Diverse teams are smarter, and they solve 
problems more effectively than less-diverse teams. Diverse organizations perform better 
financially (...) Beyond the business benefits highlighted above, we believe that being included 
and accepted for who you are is a basic human right, and that advancing diversity, equity and 
inclusion is a moral imperative.” (Company D, 2023, p.70) In this example, the business value 
is not only stated as common sense, but these values even come before the value of diversity, 
equity, and inclusion as basic human rights. The human rights value of diversity and inclusion 
becomes an addition to the business value. That represents that business values of diversity, 
equity, and inclusion matter to a company more than the human rights of employees.  
In the official statements, diversity and inclusion are seen as institutional practice that 
contributes to companies’ business profits. For practitioners, their definitions of D&I are more 
related to human rights sense compared to the definitions of D&I stated in official documents; 
however, D&I work is not only understood as anti-discrimination work but it also has to be an 
action to leverage the positive effects of diversity for the company’s success. This shows the 
ambiguous status of D&I work: The aim of D&I work is to enhance recognition and value of a 
35 
 
diverse workforce by creating an environment where employees can feel included as who they 
are yet substantial needs of diversity and inclusion are subsumed to create business profits. 
Most interviewees described diversity as employees’ rights to be included regardless of their 
diversities in backgrounds, sexual orientations, gender, and ability, among others. Yet, “to be 
included” in this context means to be a part of in company’s success or make employees more 
engaged. An interviewee said, “diversity is what makes people unique, while inclusion is an 
action to make people feel a part of the company, make people feel want to contribute to the 
organizations.” An interviewee described inclusion as the question of how the company can 
utilize the diversity that they have. Yet, another interviewee shared contradicting meanings of 
D&I work: 
“For me personally, it is about many people feel comfortable and they can be the whole self. 
But, the business case is also that if people need to really focus and a lot of energy on how to 
get to work, or where should I sit, uh can I sit here or… then how can we expect them to perform 
100%? So that’s kind of the business case, I guess that we do want to be forefront and want to 
deliver all of our services, then we also need to have people that are comfortable and can be 
themselves that they can put all of the energy into our delivering. But again, it’s also at least for 
me, it’s something more than that. Because it’s also what kind of change do you want to 
contribute to and what kind of society in world? I mean, we do want people to feel that I’m, 
I’m perfect the way I am.” 
These two different rather conflicting explanations about the importance of D&I work—whether 
enhancing D&I itself is important or its potential effects on business makes D&I important—complicate 
D&I work and this can be also observed in the responses to the survey. For example, for the former 
view, respondent 1 states “D&I is not a point on the checklist that needs to be satisfied; it is about 
respecting different cultures and welcoming ideas for a great cohesive world. I believe my company 
thinks the same.” Respondent 4 states “It is important since I believe in a workplace where everyone 
36 
 
feels included, and shall not be afraid of being who they are without feeling scared of being harassed or 
bullied.” As examples of business values of D&I, respondent 3 answers “It is important to get a safe 
environment where people are efficient” (emphasis added). Respondent 11 answers “Diversity & 
inclusion is key for the success for our company, as for other organisations. An inclusive and 
diverse organization/culture has positive impact on eg employee engagement, innovation, 
collaboration, mental health for employees etc.” Respondent 23 states “Really important. I work 
for a global company with lots of nationalities which means working with diversity and inclusion is key. 
Attracting talents all over the world is also crucial to meet future competence shortage.”  
These claims in the official documents, practitioners, and workers’ comments reveal 
that D&I discourse has an ambivalent nature. On one hand, it seemingly addresses exclusion 
and discrimination in the workplace by creating an environment that values differences in 
backgrounds and abilities among employees and that encourages individuals to be themselves 
without being exposed to discrimination. On the other hand, it is following the former, yet its 
foremost purpose is submitted to the benefits for business. In this case, D&I work promotes 
“diversity commodification” introduced by Munn and Okuwobi (2020) which transforms 
social values related to minority groups into material resources (p. 21997). In the materials that 
I have gathered, diversity is seen as a ground in which companies can achieve success and 
correspond to diversified needs in the global market and it thereby converts diversity into issues 
of profitability (de los Reyes, 2000; 2001). As some practitioners described above, inclusion is 
an action to capitalize the effects of diversity. Therefore, as Prasad, Pringle, and Konrad (2009) 
suggest, D&I work also implies its associations with anti-discrimination, affirmative actions, 
and employment equity; yet, unlike anti-discrimination initiatives, it is not what organizations 
must abide by. Rather, diversity management initially appears as “ voluntary cooperate 
initiatives”(Prasad, Pringle & Konrad, 2009, p.2). This voluntariness enables organizations to 
adjust their D&I strategies to fit what they want, and which subjects they want to include. It 
37 
 
causes the deflection of D&I work. 
From an intersectional perspective, the discourse of D&I work can address people with 
different gender, backgrounds, and ability; however, it is limited to only those who have skills 
that organizations want. Knights and Omanović (2016) suggest that profit-centered approaches 
to D&I work contain a risk of being abandoned when D&I initiatives cannot create a business 
outcome that companies expected (p.6). Therefore, this fear creates a deflection: the program 
that aims to enhance D&I at the organizations ends up looking for only elites of minority groups 
who can bring what organizations want. An organization3 has a program that aims to increase 
diversity by hiring engineers with foreign origins, especially those who fled from war or 
conflicts in their home countries. In the brochure about this program, a D&I practitioner who 
was in charge of launching this program expresses pressures to prove the program is profitable 
for the company before it helped people who fled from war:  
“I rushed to prove to myself, to the managers, and to the company that the project was profitable 
and that it would benefit society, the company, and the individual.” (Company name/other 
information is omitted due to confidentiality) 
In this statement the project being profitable comes first, other values such as helping people 
who suffered in the deteriorating situation settle in a new environment. This pressure represents 
what his employer wanted from him as a D&I practitioner and that became what he wanted in 
this program to prove himself. As making profits is a prior concern, who gets to be hired is 
depending on competence as the brochure suggests “It is also important to know that it is the 
competence that must be the main focus” and target groups have become foreign-born people 
with prestigious backgrounds, such as foreign engineers who newly arrived in Sweden or want 
to work in Sweden, and exchange students (p.5). This is contradicting the purpose of this 
 
3 This information has a possibility to identify one of the organizations that joined this study, 
therefore information regarding the name of program as well as reference to the brochure are omitted 
in this thesis. 
38 
 
program mentioned in the preface, which is “to recruit and integrate refugees who have come 
to Sweden” (p.2). This statement gives the impression that this program is organized to address 
social issues rather than to make a profit out of it. Yet, “the refugees” that this company is hiring 
through the program are the ones that have the competence that they are looking for and they 
can create profit out of it. Furthermore, the target groups mentioned above do not even include 
either refugees or people who fled from their home countries because of humanitarian reasons. 
It represents that competence becomes a power that forms a ground to decide who is seen as 
worth the support and the life in Sweden (Butler, 2016, p.163) in which individuals are selected 
based on their capital values (Brown, 2015, p.22). Therefore, the program recedes from the 
initial purpose of “recruiting refugees” into hiring foreign-origin elites. This deflection of the 
D&I program put people who are really struggling to settle in a new host country even though 
it seems to help them.  
 As I have stated, on the statement and practitioners’ understanding, the premises of 
D&I are still for companies to create more profit and continue ongoing success. There are of 
course different nuances among companies. However, either way, D&I work is still focusing 
on the business profits that diversity and inclusion potentially make. It deflects the purposes 
of D&I work from employees’ needs to considering how D&I can contribute to the success of 
the company. Subjects who are aimed to include in D&I work are those who have ability to 
create economic benefits for the company. An example in the previous paragraph shows that 
cost-benefit calculus that centers on D&I work transformed the program aiming to support 
refugees to hiring the competences that companies need. Thus, D&I still reproduces the 
weakness of diversity management pointed out by scholars. Similar to diversity management, 
promoting D&I that focuses on business profit does not address norms that cause inequality 
within an organization and make minority group more invisible (de los Reyes, 2001, p.185; 
Romani et al., 2017, p.269).  
39 
 
 
Generalized Us vs. Othered Them 
Before moving onto exploring how D&I discourse is reiterated and limits the way 
practitioners can address issues, I would like to discuss issues of differences—who are seen as 
different and what makes them worth to be included. As D&I often deals with differences, how 
they see and treat differences becomes the central part of D&I work. de los Reyes (2016) 
suggests that “Diversity discourses are closely connected to an understanding that celebrates 
difference at the same time as inequality is silenced and racism is played down” (de los Reyes, 
2016, p.37). I agree with de los Reyes that understanding that celebrates differences can 
obscure structural issues behind what makes people seen as different. In addition, how 
companies and practitioners decide on differences that are celebrated is also an important 
question to explore in examining who is seen as (un)deserving in D&I work. Similar to violence, 
recognizing people as different is also “a saturated site of intersectional power relations” (Hill 
Collins, 2017, p.1461) and differences also justify inequality and exclusion at work. As Bacchi 
and Eveline (2010), “differences” emerges from the relation to others and investing power 
relation that creates certain subjects different can scrutinize factors that reproduce inequality 
(p.51). In this section, I will examine how organizations see differences and what and when 
differences can be “celebrated,” thereby D&I discourse creates institutional subjects and fails 
to scrutinize the power structure that makes people different.  
In this part, I have found two different narratives in defining differences and diversity—
diversity and differences as who we are and as who they are. Both views essentialize differences 
and they become an axiom that does not require confirmation (de los Reyes, 2001, p.188). The 
former discourse normalizes differences as how it works thereby overlooks what structural 
issues make some people seen as “different” (Bacchi & Eveline, 2010, p.52). While the latter 
is othering differences and whether these othered individuals are included or not relying on 
their abilities as “entrepreneurial actors” (Brown, 2005, p.42). In this narrative, “we” as 
40 
 
employers become willing to include them when they can offer what we want.  
Practitioners who work for companies that have been working for D&I for relatively a 
long time see diversity as who we are and it generalizes differences and overlooks how different 
differences matter to a different extent. In explaining the recent shift from diversity to inclusion 
(this will be examined in depth later), an interviewee told me “We have understood that we are 
by default diverse. Independently of what the element is. if it is your background, if it is your 
gender, or if it is whatever…We are diverse that is the fact.” Understanding that differences as 
what everyone has created blindness towards differences that have made some groups of people 
disadvantaged (Lorbiecki and Jack, 2000) and that matter differently because it views all 
differences as the same (Oseen, 1997). Another interviewee mentioned that inclusion is 
accommodating different needs that people have and raised the work environment as one of 
the challenges in doing her work. 
“It’s also about we are different. Some people really want… So, it’s coming back to inclusion 
and diversity part that we are different. Some people can feel that, we have the open spaces, a 
lot of open spaces. If you for example are a bit introvert and you want to sit in kind of alone. 
Or if you have, um if you are on the neurodivergent spectra, perhaps you would like to sit in 
the corner and have peace and calm around you. And that having people running around and 
noise can be quite difficult to find (peace and calm). (D&I is about) How do we make sure that 
those people feel that they are at home and that they belong” [words in () added] 
Listening diverse needs of people is the first step to including people, especially those who she 
has talked to probably have felt unfit in the workplace. However, this quote also reveals how 
office structure is decided based on certain groups’ interests: voices of people who do not like 
working in an open and socializing environment are not included in creating this open work 
environment structure, and that is how previous diversity work has been focused on certain 
types of diversity, such as backgrounds and gender, diversity in ability and personality has 
41 
 
overlooked. Seeing it merely as “differences” or “we are different” obscures and naturalize this 
power relation that made the work environment unequal. It thereby justifies inequality at work 
because “we are different.” D&I work that aims to leverage full potential of a diverse workforce 
cannot address these issues as structural barriers that create inequality as it focuses on how 
each individual can perform their best.  
The other prevalent narratives on diversity and differences is othering. For them, 
diversity and being diverse is to have people different from us that tend to connotate negative 
images. In enhancing D&I, the focus is placed on what others can give us and it is used to 
mitigate the exclusion and bias against them (Ghorashi and Sabelis, 2013, p.80). This mode of 
D&I work involves changing the emotion attached to those differentiated bodies: channeling 
from something negative to something that we want. Ahmed (2013) explains that emotion 
surfaces both collective and individual bodies. A feeling of hate is distributed to others by 
embodying “the threat of loss” that we as victims have had (Ahmed, 2013, p.44). It is not about 
those bodies themselves; it is more about how people (we in this case) read those othered bodies. 
In this transformation of emotion attached to diverse bodies, neoliberal rationale plays an 
important role in deciding which of others is welcome. An interviewee sees diversity as having 
different groups of people on board, who are different than us. During the interview, this 
interviewee used we mostly for the company and Swedish people, and having diversity is often 
associated with people from outside Sweden and men who are seen as a minority in the 
company. In explaining how diverse perspectives are needed for their business to be appealing 
to customers in the global market, an interviewee stated:  
“[N]ow all the sudden the company start going global. Then now it is like, we want to sell to 
China, India and Spain etc. We do a Swedish way to push it out but hmm Chinese are not like 
Swedes, Spanish neither… they buy in a different way. They think in a different way when they 
purchase things. So, we want to sell differently and if we are supposed to be the company that 
42 
 
survives then we need people with different mindset than ours on board. And that’s not 
threatening and that’s actually globe’s mindset.”  
This part shows that increasing diversity means in the business sense that having more people 
from outside Sweden who have different mindsets and this increase of workers with foreign 
backgrounds entails feeling threatened for those who are already a part of the organization. As 
a part of D&I work, she suggested the importance of channeling this feeling of threatened to a 
global mindset that is something positive and we want as a company to succeed in the global 
market. In other words, to include people with different backgrounds in this context becomes 
subsumed to “rational entrepreneurial actions” (Brown, 2005, p.40). This approach to D&I 
seemingly encourages the inclusion of formerly excluded groups; however, bias and hatred to 
others that are roots of exclusion still remain. D&I merely functions as an institutional practice 
to maximize profits. Instead of tackling discrimination and bias, it creates the condition on 
which others are accepted. The interviewee described diversity itself as something tough but 
needed for the prosperity of the organization. For different parts of the interview, the 
interviewee also stated:  
“Having differences in a team, that’s tough, it is not just a smooth ride, it is more smooth to be 
homogeneous group. But when it comes to at least business world, we do not create dynamic 
and creative ideas that you need in a global environment.” 
The interviewee stated that “things happening when people feel that this is something that I 
feel I am gaining from.” So, feeling “gaining” from differentiated groups is a driving force that 
enables a company to move forward in creating a diverse and inclusive culture in the workplace. 
However, in this situation whether those who are excluded are included or not is relying on if 
people (in this context, people in power or already a part of the company) feel worth including 
them. Values that attach to essentialized differences them is a calculus of benefits in the global 
market (Brown, 2005, p. 40). Inclusion of others is conditional and bias against others still 
43 
 
remains which keeps positions of others subordinated to the majority group. It raises questions: 
What would happen if differences of others cannot create profits that we expected? Is it still 
worth increasing diversity within our organization? 
From an intersectional perspective, both views represent the problems of 
understanding differences as inherent in individuals and fail to address the roots of making 
people seen as different. The first example, the difference as who we are, naturalized the 
structure that makes some people different. Seeing difference as individual overlooks and 
reproduces power relations that makes some people seen as “deviant” in the work environment 
such as the exclusion of those voices in a decision-making process. Saying “we are different” 
obscures the structural issues behind it. The second example represents the othering of 
differences. The practitioner’s strategy that changing the feeling attached to others by 
emphasizing the business benefits of having them does not lead to eradicating bias towards 
others itself. Rather, it creates the exception of who we are willing to include among others 
thereby perpetuating the hierarchical relationship between “us” and “them.” Even though 
people including practitioners think they are helping others and they do not mean to have 
prejudice against other people, they actually perpetuate unequal structures via "benevolence 
discrimination" (Romani et al., 2019). The positions of those who are seen as different is 
reproduced as subordinated to the mainstream group. Besides, whether they are included is on 
their effort: whether they can offer what their employers want. Thus, not addressing differences 
as relational keep reproducing the structure that makes some people deviant and disadvantages.  
 
 
Analysis of Doing D&I  
The practical aspect of D&I work consists of different types of work: setting the goals, 
key performance indicators (KPI), writing the guideline, conducting seminars, and organizing 
network activities. To seed a culture of inclusion in everyday life, all the practitioners conduct 
44 
 
a seminar on D&I topics such as inclusive leadership, inclusive behavior seminars, and 
awareness training. This type of activities works as a place where practitioners educate other 
employees and leaders on D&I topics. For a practitioner, creating the governing structure seems 
really important to do D&I as it allows practitioners to get support from executives and workers 
in different sections. Many practitioners mentioned surveys and networks to know what 
employees need from D&I work. Similar to seminars, surveys are conducted under different 
names, such as engagement, health, and employees surveys are mentioned. Some organizations 
see network activities as an important tool in promoting D&I in the organizations. Practitioners 
mentioned different types of networks such as LGBTQ+, Women, Young professionals and 
diverse abilities that organize socializing events or seminars. These activities are for those who 
are in the target groups as well as people who want to support or know more about the issues 
related to those groups. 
As Ahmed (2012) says diversity work is “to institutionalize diversity” (p.22), D&I is 
not just doing activities that enhance awareness and acceptance of diversity and inclusion, it 
entails making diversity and inclusion a part of institutional activities, routines, and behaviors. 
Furthermore, Making D&I a part of institutional routines requires being congruent with 
institutional will for D&I to be continued as well as getting through “the institutional wall” that 
impedes D&I work (Ahmed, 2012, pp.128-9, 174-5). As I have discussed in the analysis of 
saying D&I, D&I work has become institutional practices that aim to contribute to the business 
benefits of organizations. Economic calculus has occupied the goals of D&I strategies thereby 
determining who (un)deserves to be included. In so doing, D&I becomes a governmental tool 
that disciplines individual behaviors in accordance with this aim. In this part of analyzing doing 
D&I, I will explore, among these different activities of D&I work, how the D&I discourse I 
uncovered in the previous part occupies the focus area in D&I work, what makes practitioners 
change their approach to D&I, and how it deflects D&I work from what diversity and inclusion 
45 
 
are supposed to do.  
 
The shift from Diversity to Inclusion: Progress or Regression?  
As Oswick and Noon (2014, p.26) find that there is an implication that inclusion is more 
important than diversity in practitioner literature even though inclusion is seen as a tool to 
complement to diversity. Many practitioners that I talked to also showed that they put more 
effort into the inclusion aspect of D&I work. They recognized the importance of the 
interdependency of both concepts, yet recent approaches put more emphasis on the inclusion 
part. This can be seen in the name of practitioners’ positions. For example, an interviewee’s 
position at her organization is Inclusion and Diversity manager. The interviewee suggested that 
inclusion is seen as more important than diversity therefore they placed inclusion before 
diversity. An interviewee told that her organization was more focused on enhancing diversity 
via recruitment and employers’ branding a long time ago, but recently it has been more focused 
on inclusion via conducting inclusive training which aims to create an inclusive culture in the 
workplace and networking activities where people encourage each other and increase the 
awareness. Another interviewee also states: 
“What I see in [the name of the organization] is that it (D&I) has been always in the 
agenda so that for the top management. What I see the shift in it is more from a diversity. 
Some years ago, it was more about how to get diversity into the teams, but now it is 
more focused on inclusion (…) So the focus has been shifted. I wouldn’t say that the 
attention has increased, but the focus has changed. From first diversity and now more 
inclusion. How do we utilize this diversity we have?” 
In some cases, this shift to inclusion also represents the effort to get through the institutional 
wall that hampered diversity work. An interviewee said that diversity is even removed from 
the name of her team. This transition is rooted from “diversity fatigue” as well as the conviction 
that inclusion is more important than a diversity-centered approach. 
46 
 
“It is also something that happened last year. We moved from diversity to inclusion. So, we 
even took away diversity (…) Because we…we felt that within a company, sort 
of…um...diversity fatigue. Because people were “this only gender…” (…) That’s why we 
changed it to inclusion because it is not about… how much… It’s not about measuring, now we 
have that many numbers of people coming from this country, or numbers of males, females and 
non-binary. It is about how you feel. That has been the big focus area for us.” 
Diversity fatigue means “majority groups’ feeling of weariness toward diversity efforts” (Smith, 
McPartlan, Poe & Thoman 2021, p.659). Authors point out that diversity fatigue is “a form of 
power” by showing its correlation to bias and system-justifying beliefs, which support 
systematic inequality such as “people in higher status deserve it” and “good things happen to 
good people” (p.660), as well as the influence of individual status, lived experiences and 
privilege (Smith et al., 2021).  
Organizing D&I work that avoids feeling fatigued may enable D&I practitioners to 
break through the stoppage in D&I work; however, in return, it recedes the sense of challenging 
power structure in the institution. Ahmed (2011) states that practitioners use diversity as a 
solution to “equality fatigue” as it can support existing organizational ideals or pride (p.235). 
This is also resonated with other scholars’ claims that diversity loses the radical emancipatory 
agenda that questions norms that cause inequality and exclusion (de los Reyes, 2000, 2001, 
2016; Romani et al., 2017). In the quote mentioned above, the practitioner expresses the 
conviction that the shift to inclusion focuses more on the substantive needs of employees, but 
at the same time, it is also a result of changing the term that is less threatening to the institutional 
structure. “Emotion” can erase the connections to racism, homophobia, sexism, ableism, and 
other forms of discrimination even though reasons why people feel excluded are closely 
connected to them. If diversity is a deradicalized version of equity, inclusion is even more de-
radicalized and detached from the social justice context as the issues they are dealing with are 
47 
 
seen as individual feelings. It should be easier for people to digest compared to other anti-
discrimination terms and that fact may make it easier for practitioners to receive support from 
many people in the organization. Yet, it instead loses to problematize the power structure of the 
work environment that makes an employee feel excluded. 
Another interviewee told me how past D&I initiatives did not work. In this part, what 
stopped D&I work is also about majorities’ resistance and suspicions toward the effect of 
increasing the number of female employees who are the minority in this organization. 
“I was thinking about why it [Diversity an Inclusion Network] didn’t work and I think very 
much all the conversation we had in the few events was that (…) why should we focus on 
bringing on women in a recruitment process. If they do not apply to my recruitment ad, what 
can I do? What will be the difference if I recruit a woman? And…or… if I only recruit a woman 
in the coming years, what could be the difference? So, the dialogue was very cons…very 
defensive and very focused on what will be the difference, if we go from 15, 17 % of women 
employees to 20%? What will be the difference? We will be having the same problem in 
equality with brabrabra. So, I think the reason why it did not work as we expected was because 
we were not clear enough to set the focus for the, applying diversity and inclusive perspective 
to day-to-day worries and concerns of managers and team members. We started from a very 
very institutional and cooperate way, kind of [company’s name] has the target of this percentage 
for women employees and that’s why we need to. Then we lost the connection with reality if 
you put it like that.” 
This excerpt also vividly describes how majority groups’ resistance to changing the 
demographic structure of the institution and a program that aims at the change. As the 
interviewee described male employees’ attitudes as “defensive,” they seem to not only distrust 
in diversity enhancement but also are afraid of losing what they have. She lists typical 
comments she received at the events and most of them concern differences that increasing 
48 
 
gender diversity can bring to the organization which, I interpret, points to the changes that can 
benefit the company and also the majority group. Smith et al. (2021) point out by referring to 
previous research on diversity that diversity work often focuses on benefits to majority groups 
(p.671). It is also connected to why organizations’ D&I goals aim at increasing profits and 
productivity as discussed in the previous part. The interviewee explains that losing connection 
to reality was the reason for the failure, but it also seems to me that the past approach was 
directed at changing the structure of this organization and less attention is paid to explaining 
how the company can utilize diversity in order to bring what they premise in companies’ D&I 
statements into effects. Inclusion in this context functions to bridge a gap between diversity 
itself and what organizations want from diversity. 
As we have seen, the shift from a diversity-focused approach to an inclusion-focused 
approach in D&I discourse can entail regression when it comes to its ambition to challenge the 
structural issues at the organization. Inclusion can address issues that diversity initiatives are 
expected but rejected by an institutional wall. However, in so doing, D&I work is organized in 
a less threatening and beneficial way to the organizations. This shift may create progress in 
getting diversity and inclusion into the institutional practices; yet, this shift can even more 
obscure power that creates issues. To question 6 asking if respondent feels they are included in 
D&I work, Respondent 23 answered “Yes and no. A lot of things are ongoing, inclusion talks, 
policies and networks but there is still a lot of old culture still being in place: old gender norms, 
racism etc to work with.”   
 
Change in the institutional will 
What I have been surprised about in listening to practitioners’ stories was that they did 
not mention how the nature of institutions stop them in their current D&I work even though 
they expressed the struggle in previous work. The situation surrounding D&I work seemed 
different from what Ahmed (2012) describes how diversity practitioners often faced an 
49 
 
institutional wall in doing diversity work. Rather, stories that interviewees told me unfolded 
how supportive management teams are in doing D&I work. However, it does not always seem 
to represent the improvement of diversity and inclusion in the workplace. It is more related to 
the change in surrounding situations, and it makes D&I an important thing to do to be able to 
continue their business.  
Support from people in higher positions was expressed in many interviews. For 
example, an interviewee expressed that VP and CEO were excited to see what she was going 
to do next, and it even surprises this practitioner.  
“Then also you know the people were “Okay, now we want to do activity workshop. We have 
done awareness now we want an activity that we can do and we wanna get started now.” And 
we have so many ideas and it is coming to me. Like Wow! It’s all the sudden a movement 
creating and then it’s more like you can share with people and pick which one should we start 
with? And ah… you know like I said maybe we can do Jobsprånget4, and it was like “Yeah let’s 
try it. Which manager could do it?” Wow, okay, you know there was an acceptance and 
movements and I think that’s really cool (…) and when you know when management asks, or 
vice president or CEO, she said “by the end of the year, I want to see the activity list. I want to 
know what are we doing.” Like yeah okay, that’s really good.” 
As she described the culture of her organization later in the interview as “when we decide 
something we do it,” D&I here is seen as an institutional will and people in higher positions in 
the organization are described as the ones who are interested in and want to see the progress in 
this field which even surprises the practitioner.  
The priority of D&I has been recently lifted within organizations. That is also shared 
among different organizations. An interviewee told me that she joined the current organization 
 
4 Jobsprånget is an initiative that offer internship opportunities for foreign academics or newcomers 
in Sweden. https://jobbspranget.se/ 
50 
 
to start D&I work and it was because her manager had seen opportunities and needs in 
increasing D&I internally, such as addressing a wider pool of talent to get different perspectives. 
She joined the organization last year so she could not tell the long-term trajectory of D&I work 
in the organization, but other interviewees said that the attitudes of managers towards D&I 
have changed. An interviewee explained that previously D&I related issues tended to be pushed 
back when the company experienced recession; however, recently D&I is understood as one of 
the top priority areas among executives and senior managers.  
Those interviewees did not specify why employers have become more interested in 
D&I-related issues, some interviewees shared the turning points. They revealed that change in 
the surrounding environment made D&I more important for the organizations. An interviewee 
mentioned the merger that changed the organization from a Swedish to a global company and 
the covid-19 pandemic as the turning points that made her organization realize that they need 
to change to be more diverse and inclusive. It is also stated in the annual report: during the 
covid-19 when people work remotely, inclusion was one of the focus points to “create 
engagement and secure productivity” (Company’s name omitted for confidentiality, p.30). Here 
inclusion is used as a governmental tool to nurture engaged workers that can generate 
productivity even when people work individually from home. Another interviewee guessed that 
increased reporting and regulation on D&I-related topics have enhanced the priority of D&I 
work at her organization. 
I think it is much more on the agenda now, which is good. Ah…I don’t know. If I am being a 
bit more cynical, I don’t know if it is because investors are so much more interested in this 
now…And also, we have a lot of different reporting that we have to do. Within the annual report, 
you have to talk about it. EU is also having a lot of reporting and assessment on this, which 
makes it [D&I] important to do to do business. And somehow I think, okay, I don’t really care 
why it’s in… but as long as people think it important and all the sudden they will get to come 
51 
 
over to our side when that is important for a… (both talk at the same time) Yes, that’s for the 
good reason. It’s not just because that’s the business case. But yes, it has gotten a lot more 
attention in media, and (…) if you look at the development of sustainability, at first it was 
something like “ugh…it’s nice to have sustainability, but who really cares about climate and so 
on…” and then little by little, sustainability became kind of, sneaked a way up on the agenda. 
So, now everybody, of course we have sustainability teams, more sustainability managers, or 
ah officers or. Of course, that’s something you are working on. I think we are on the same path. 
Like the beginning, it was like, let’s have someone doing something so that we can just tick the 
box. Now, all the sudden, it became like “what can we do more? Let’s talk about this more.” 
So, I think the future is bright. But it’s also a lot of work (both laughing).   
In this part, she explains many possible reasons for increased awareness of D&I in the company, 
such as investors’ interests and different reports including the ones required by the EU. This 
view is only mentioned by this practitioner, but all organizations that I have interviewed 
recognize that D&I is one of stakeholders’ interests according to their annual reports (Company 
A, 2023, p.150; Company B, 2022, p.122; Company C, 2023, p.71; Company D, 2023, p.74) 
This shift changed the attitudes of executives who just “ticked the box” when they appointed 
someone to work with D&I issues. The presence of D&I practitioners becomes the indicator 
that the institution is working on D&I even though the institution as a whole does not (Ahmed, 
2012, p.136). It seemed good that the organization is putting more effort into D&I work and it 
enables practitioners to receive more support and do more work to promote diversity and 
inclusion; however, the reason why the executives are interested in D&I still is because it is a 
business imperative. This notion challenges the neoliberal rationality in which the values of 
diversity are reduced to values for the companies because D&I along with other sustainable 
development goals become imperatives in doing business. However, even though D&I work 
has gotten a higher status because of these changes, it does not always mean that people, 
52 
 
especially those who are in higher positions, care what D&I means to employees who really 
need it. 
As a result, it creates a gap between how employers talk about D&I and how they 
actually do or commit themselves to D&I. Even though not many respondents are critical of 
D&I work in their workplace as mentioned in the limitation of the study, some respondents 
point out that value in diversity and inclusion is not shared among all the people in the 
organizations and D&I working groups are not addressing some population in the companies. 
“I know networks within my company working with LGBTQ+ questions, however, the problem 
is that they don't reach out to the people who should really need to hear more about the subject.” 
(Respondent 4) [Emphasis added] 
“To me it’s very important. To my organisation, it’s important to seem like they do care, but the 
incentives and reality are different. They do try, but the people in positions of power do not 
reflect their stated value of diversity… mostly because truly inclusive spaces are not created.” 
(Respondent 6) [Emphasis added] 
I was not able to receive answers to follow-up questions so could not specify who the first 
respondent meant “the people who should really need to hear,” but I argue that not reflecting 
the value of diversity and inclusion itself can make D&I work non-performative: there is a 
statement and activities that aim to promote diversity and inclusion in the organization, yet 
those cannot generate effects to achieve what they state in the document (Ahmed, 2021, p.30). 
It represents the contradiction: even though people in higher positions are the ones who are 
keen on the development of D&I work in their organizations and take all the compulsory 
seminars, values on diversity and inclusion are still not resonated with the way they behave 
daily.  
 
 
53 
 
Leadership and Career Development as Means of Including Those Who are 
Excluded? 
D&I practitioners expressed that mainstream culture often creates excluding situations 
and has become one of the difficult things to address. Those are addressed in unconscious 
training or other D&I seminars. Practitioners mentioned different types of culture, such as 
male-dominated culture, engineering culture, manufacturing culture, tech culture, and female 
culture. However, these cultures share hatred towards someone new and fear of losing the 
power and status that one has built. Besides those seminars, employees’ networks are seen as 
an important tool to foster inclusion by offering a place where employees learn from and coach 
each other. 
 In the beginning of this research, I thought there would be potential in network 
activities to improve diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Scholars point out the benefits 
of networks of minority groups in the workplace: increasing visibility, offering different venues 
to raise voices (Colgan & Mckearney, 2012), and enhancing inclusion and increased career 
development opportunities through socializing (Beaver, 2022). I thought it could be a platform 
where employees with underrepresented backgrounds or who want to support and learn about 
the topics can exchange opinions and build “flexible solidarity” (Hill Collins, 2017) to 
dismantle systematic oppression as many practitioners mentioned networks as safe places 
where people speak any topics and practitioners listen to different needs of employees. A 
practitioner mentioned that the network started from an employee who saw the need of having 
a platform where female employees can share their experiences, coach each other and get the 
views from the other parts of the company to see how they can support each other as “a 
minority.” Currently, these networks are built based on employees’ gender, sexual orientation, 
ability, and age. Yet, I thought that expanding to different groups and having a shared struggle 
across groups, such as how norms affect your life at work, would enable raising awareness of 
the experience of exclusion and seeing the structural issues from different perspectives. 
54 
 
However, how the focus of these networks does not seem to tackle systematic 
oppression, rather it becomes about the career development opportunities for minority groups 
where issues are addressed to encourage member employees to be subjects that employers want. 
Romani et al. (2017) suggest that individualization of differences is seen as a way to solve the 
tension between the value of differences and willingness to achieve equality, mentorship 
programs or network activities targeted at minority groups are favored as it does not require 
changing the established routines for organizations. In that way, those activities do not work as 
platforms to raise awareness; instead, it creates subjects that organizations want (Romani et al., 
2017).  
How networks serve as a place to construct institutional subjects can be also observed 
in the interviews and an answer to the survey. In explaining how her organization deals with a 
culture that creates bias and exclusion, a practitioner mentions unconscious bias training is one 
way to tackle this type of bias (in that case she was talking about misogyny) but she thinks it 
is important for women to expand their network as it is also about “who you (female 
employees) know.” Another interviewee described the network as “a platform to know and to 
listen to each other, what would you see? You are here because you see there are needs and 
values. How do you see we can make value out of us here?” Creating values out of us becomes 
a main goal of network activities and addressing structural issues has become a sub-goal to 
achieve the main one. I had an opportunity to join a networking event organized by one of the 
companies that joined this study. I did only attend the presentation part in which an employee 
talked about how she managed to develop new products that were granted a patent. I did not 
see what kind of conversation was made during the mingling part. In my fieldwork note I wrote 
down “Is this meeting about sharing knowledge to be successful?” What I learned from this 
opportunity was that the network serves as a career development opportunity where those who 
belong to the minority group learn from successful employees in the same group. Therefore, 
55 
 
an organization can help employees with minority groups to feel a part of the community, but 
at the same time, they can also create benefits out of them. This is corresponding to what a 
respondent answers to a question about the role of network activities in their work life: 
“I think of them as leadership development, where I act as a role model to others by using my 
action and voice to reflect what’s important for the company.” (Respondent 6) 
Creating networks and participating in the development program helps minority groups to find 
the support and advice that they need. There have been fewer networks and mentorship 
programs for female employees compared to male counterparts have been barriers for women 
to develop in their careers (Linehan and Scullion, 2008). However, again, instead of 
problematizing the power structure that creates the exclusion of minority groups, it still 
maintains the notion that those are the ones to be able to cope with and be able to grow even in 
such an environment.  
Of course, the network is not only used as a career development, an interviewee said 
that it offers a safe place where a practitioner hear what employees need, a platform for people 
to connect and exchange opinions, such as people in underrepresented groups (e.g., LGBTQ+ 
and diverse abilities), allies, and people who have kids who are in these groups and want to 
talk to someone who experienced similar struggles. Many respondents shared positive views 
on network activities, for example, Respondent 2 answered “It is nice to come in contact with 
other employees "like me" across the company that I probably shouldn't have met otherwise. 
Just the fact that the networks exist is comforting in a way.” However, if they deal with those 
struggles as individuals and try to solve them by inspiring and educating the excluded to get 
what the majority group has, D&I work does not change the structural issues that create 
exclusion and unequal access. It becomes another discursive practice that disciplines an 
individual to be a subject that contributes to the company’s success. 
 
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Diffraction of Diversity and Inclusion: Conclusion and Suggestions for Future 
D&I Work 
As we have seen, diversity and inclusion diffract as they are part of an institution and 
as they avoid institutional resistance. In this process, the diffraction of diversity and inclusion 
is caused by the entanglement of dissemination of neoliberal rationality (Brown, 2005, 2015) 
and the nature of institutional will/ wall (Ahmed, 2012). Innovation, capital enhancement, and 
cost efficiency have become what institution wants. Thus, enhancing diversity and inclusion is 
believed to be a business strategy that increases companies’ profits and enables sustainable 
success. Even though practitioners and employees believe diversity and inclusion as basic 
human rights, D&I work is organized in order to envision this institutional will. Thus D&I 
activities transform to be a management strategy to nurture as well as acquire individuals with 
minority backgrounds yet have the competence that can contribute to the company’s success 
and fail to conceptualize and problematize power relations that make some people different 
and creates discrimination and exclusion.  
Economic calculus occupies in the ways companies talk about diversity and inclusion, 
the ways they see differences, and the ways they address D&I related issues. Throughout the 
analysis part, I have tried to uncover neoliberal rational discourse that constitutes D&I work 
through critical discourse analysis and illustrate how it limits and deflects D&I work from what 
diversity and inclusion are supposed to mean and do through analyzing discourse from an 
intersectional lens. Diversity and inclusion have become a business imperative nowadays due 
to the increased awareness of sustainability. However, if one does not scrutinize what diversity 
and inclusion mean for companies, what subjects they are encouraging and how they are 
addressing issues of exclusions and discrimination, the power structure that creates issues 
remains unproblematized. There should be a shift from addressing differences of individuals 
to relation that makes some people different and excluded.  
 
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Further Remarks 
My study could offer discourse in this new measure in the organization and pointed 
out what is kept on being dismissed in the current dominant approach to D&I work in a broad 
sense. The usage of diffraction as a theoretical framework that conceptualize this deflection 
of D&I work allows me to explore how and why D&I work develops as a business 
management tool rather than as a means of enhancing human rights in the workplace.  
However, D&I work ranges from writing documents to organizing seminar to network 
activities. Further research on how each activities promotes certain types of subjects are 
needed. Focusing on one of the activities in D&I work enables future research to elaborate 
the findings of this thesis by offering analysis of D&I discourse and dialectical process in 
which subjects are constructed.  
 
  
58 
 
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Official Documents Published by Companies 
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Company B, Inclusion and Diversity. (URL is omitted due to confidentiality) 
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Reference information regarding materials on p.7, p.11 are omitted from this list of references 
as I found that this will lead to identifying one of the practitioners and companies that joined 
this study.  
 
  
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Appendix 1: Consent Form 
 
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Appendix 2: Survey “D&I work in Your Workplace” 
 
 
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