Managing Corporate Virtue: The Politics of DEI in New York and Paris
31 Jan 2025
12:30 -14:00
Times are shown in local time.
Open to: All
Room W2.02 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Strategy and International Business seminar
Speaker: Professor Laure Bereni, French National Centre for Scientific Research
About the seminar topic
For several decades now, corporate efforts towards a more diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace have been part of global managerial discourse and organisational landscape.
Drawing on a long-term study conducted in the business districts of the New York and Paris regions, ‘Managing Corporate Virtue’ examines workplace diversity practices from behind the scenes. Beyond rhetoric and controversies, the book immerses readers in the concrete work experience, aspirations and challenges of diversity managers, who are entrusted with implementing these programmes in large globalised workplaces.
How are corporate diversity initiatives shaped by the pressures of the legal, political, and social environment? What happens to the managerial mantra that diversity means business in the daily life of organisations? Tracing the troubled history of diversity practices, the book uncovers their organisational fragility – they have long been both legitimate and in constant search of legitimacy. The book also exposes 2 major contradictions inherent to the work of managing diversity: between enhancing and signalling corporate virtue, on the one hand. Between importing societal values and rejecting their unwelcome political connotations, on the other.
Ultimately, by placing the lens on corporate virtue workers and their work, the book exposes the frictions and dissonances that fissure the promise of contemporary neoliberal capitalism to align what’s good for business and what’s good for society.
Speaker bio
Laure Bereni is a Research Professor in sociology at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and a faculty member of the Centre Maurice Halbwachs at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris. Her field of research lies at the intersection of political sociology, the sociology of gender and race, and the sociology of work and organisations, in a comparative perspective (United States/France).
Her recent research focuses on workers and programmes of corporate virtue – from DEI to sustainability – as part of a critical reflection on responsible capitalism. Her latest book, ‘Managing Corporate Virtue. The Politics of Workplace Diversity in New York and Paris’, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2025.
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.