Analysing human resource managers' discourse on diversity: A study in some Italian small and medium enterprises

The main aim of this paper was to investigate how diversity management was discursively constructed in the words of 10 human resource (HR) managers of Small and Medium Enterprises located in Apulia, South of Italy. Following a discursive approach to organizations and a critical and rhetorical methodological perspective, the study has taken into account how HR managers defined diversity, how their diversity discourses reflected existing managerial practices and underlying power relations, and how they reaffirmed or challenged those managerial practices and power relations. Specifically, diatextual analysis has been used to read the discursive data, as to catch the strict link between discourse, identity and context of talk. Results showed that most of the SMEs involved in the study were quite unfamiliar with diversity management and showed a rather theoretical approach to the topic. The discursive data collected highlighted an evident gap between the positive construction of workforce heterogeneity and the passive attitude showed in terms of HR management practices