Abstract: During the past decade, in neoliberal economies, many corporations have launched ‘Diversity & Inclusion’ campaigns to advertise their diverse make-up of employees with different races, genders, sexuality, or disability. These campaigns contributed to the production and circulation of corporation discourses of diversity. These discourses were usually presented on the official websites of these companies, of which Apple can be viewed as an archetype. Since 2015, Apple annually publishes its diversity report combining videos, pictures and written texts. These discourses are noteworthy data which can afford insights into the production of diversity discourses in the context of neoliberalism. Therefore, employing Silverstein and Urban’s (1996:1) entextualization theory, this study performed a critical analysis of Apple’s diversity discourses. The results reveal that production of diversity discourses is a process of decontextualizing diversity and subsequent recontextualization. Apple disconnected diversity from its original contexts of production where diversity exists as human experiences closely associated with inequality and other traumatic historical trajectories. Diversity was simplified as individuals representing race, gender, age, sexuality, and disability. Subsequently, diversity was recontextualized in new sites of corporation discourses, to generate a preferred neoliberal interpretation of diversity as objects with ‘added value’ and to serve corporate interests.
Besides the production of diversity discourses, globalization as a vital feature of the current world system also requires us to explore the circulation of diversity discourses across societal boundaries. Thus, this study explored how diversity discourses and ‘Inclusion and Diversity’ as a social action were decontextualized from their original context of the US and recontextualized in a new site of discourse – China. This study finds that orders of indexicality (Blommaert, 2005) in different societies mediated the circulation and consumption of diversity discourses. To achieve the desired function of its diversity discourses, Apple strategically recontextualised diversity by orienting to the locally prevailing orders of indexicality in China. A striking strategy Apple employed was highlighting female employees and disabled employees as the major representation of diversity while LGBT groups, as a vital part of diversity, was completely left out in its Chinese diversity discourses.
This study also explored possible social effects of the circulation of such diversity discourses in popular culture. This study argues that in neoliberal economies, investment into diversity discourses can be viewed as neoliberal efforts in corporation discourses to naturalize and legitimize the neoliberal take on diversity as individuals with marketable assets. In addition, it allows corporations to gain symbolic capital, attract talents from diversity groups, thereby serving corporate interests. However, such uneven public exposure of diversity in popular culture may aggravate diversity-relevant inequality, as production of such diversity discourses normally strategically hide painful aspects of diversity through skillful decontextualization and recontextualization. Lastly, such beautified diversity discourses may also divert public attention from existing diversity-relevant inequalities and from struggles for actual cultural and material equality.
Key Words: entextualization, diversity, discursive production, equality, neoliberalism, globalization
References
Blommaert, J. (2005). Discourse: a critical introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Urciuoli, B. (2016). ‘The compromised pragmatics of diversity’. Langauge & Communication, 51, pp. 30-39.