Because It’s Worth It? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Diversity: The Case of L’Oréal

Francois Goxe and Michaël Viegas Pires ()
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Michaël Viegas Pires: University of Versailles

Chapter 6 in Responsible Organizations in the Global Context, 2019, pp 97-116 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This chapter builds on a critical discourse analysis of L’Oréal’s diversity-related corporate communication to address two research questions: (1) What is the underlying definition of diversity in a multinational company like L’Oréal? (2) How does the firm mobilize this concept to try to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the stakeholders? Our results first illustrate how the social construction of diversity operates, by using a few sociodemographic traits to build broad, homogeneous, categories of people. Our analysis also results in the identification of different types of discourse, discursive frameworks through which diversity issues are addressed in L’Oréal’s corporate communication: (1) rationalistic, (2) societal, and (3) appropriative discourse. The three types of discourse are interlocked and, considered globally, picture diversity as a very plastic concept that can as such be mobilized differently in order to create various forms of legitimacy for various stakeholders.

Keywords: Critical perspectives; Discourse; Diversity; Legitimacy; Critical discourse analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-11458-9_6

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-11458-9_6

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