Virtue management: corporate diversity in New York and Paris

This third session of the seminar organised by GRETS, ‘Le management de la vertu: la diversité en entreprise à New-York et à Paris’, will be attended by Laure Bereni - Centre Maurice Halbwachs, CNRS. The session will be introduced by Catherine Grandclement - EDF R&D - GRETS.

Originating in the United States, diversity and inclusion programmes, which place the values of equity, justice and valuing differences at the heart of management policies, have become institutionalised in most multinational companies. Like other so-called ‘responsible’ management policies, these programmes are based on the presupposition that virtue and profit are aligned: diversity means business is a formula regularly used by company directors and major consultancies.

Laure Bereni's talk will be based on her latest book, Le management de la vertu : la diversité en entreprise à New York et à Paris - winner of the Prix du Livre RH 2024 (Syntec/CELSA/Les Echos/ANDRH). It reports on a long-term survey carried out in France and the United States in the 2010s among a hundred or so diversity managers - the executives who implement diversity programmes in companies - and paints a picture that is often far removed from institutional discourse. This research reveals the uncertain managerial value of these programmes and brings to light the ambivalence that runs through the managerial appropriation of equality standards. On the one hand, diversity managers are given the dual mandate of making their organisation more virtuous and showcasing its virtue. On the other hand, these professionals are subject to the dual injunction of signalling the company's openness to progressive visions emanating from the law, public policies and social movements, and pushing their conflicting and critical meanings outside the company. In the United States and France, these efforts to depoliticise diversity management take distinct forms, aligned with national legal-political frameworks and approaches to equality and difference. Ultimately, this research offers an unprecedented critical look at the growing aspiration of productive organisations to combine profit and the common good.

Laure Bereni is a sociologist, director of research at the CNRS and a member of the Maurice Halbwachs Centre in Paris. She specialises in the sociology of gender, discrimination, organisations and equality policies. Her recent research focuses on corporate social responsibility from a comparative perspective (France/United States).

• Bereni, L., 2023. Le management de la vertu : la diversité en entreprise à New York et à Paris. Presses de Sciences Po.
• Bereni, L., 2017. Le plafond de verre et l’Etat: la construction des inégalités de genre dans la fonction publique. Armand Colin (avec Catherine Marry, Alban Jacquemart, Sophie Pochic et Anne Revillard).
• Bereni, L., 2015. La bataille de la parité. Economica.