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This analysis draws on interviews with 19 self-identified US diversity consultants and 94 diversity statements posted on corporate websites. The findings challenge existing literature that characterizes the business case for diversity as monolithic and wholly problematic for the way it constructs understandings of human difference. The authors accomplish this using metaphor analysis to demonstrate how business case arguments incorporate three metaphorical systems for thinking and speaking about human differences – as asset, as liability and as possibility. Given this diversity of metaphors, the business case does not construct human difference in a monolithic way, but in a variety of ways that both challenge and sustain problematic treatments of difference. The authors argue scholars and practitioners should attend to these nuanced difference within the discourse of the business case, and more carefully consider how these metaphorical systems both enable and constrain the design and execution of diversity work in organizations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The analysis draws on two data sets: initial interviews with 19 self-identified US diversity consultants analyzed using metaphor analysis. To triangulate findings, the metaphorical framework was applied to 94 diversity statements posted on corporate websites.

Business case arguments operate according to three root metaphors of human difference: human difference as asset, human difference as liability and human difference as possibility. This challenges existing literature that treats the business case as a monolithic discourse.

This analysis offers the three metaphorical system and highlights the “constrained capacity” of each. This framework offers an analytical and practical tool for scholars and practitioners, enabling them to more thoroughly understand and respond to their unique organizational and socio-historical context. It also provides a way to analyze how concepts of difference are mobilized across social and historical contexts.

The findings offer the “constrained capacity” that is, the strategic limitations and possibilities for practitioners who use the business case in their diversity work. This enables more skilled and ethically informed diversity initiatives.

The findings offer insight into the subtle ways that hierarchies of human difference embedded in US history are subtly reinforced and made present through language. This enables social justice workers to better challenge problematic constructions of human difference and create new understandings when needed.

This piece makes two significant original contributions to existing literature. It offers more nuance to both critical and uncritical analyses of the business case by showing the diversity of business case assumptions about human difference as demonstrated in three different metaphorical systems and highlighting the constrained capacity of three different metaphorical systems. It offers unique analysis grounded in contemporary discourses, but correlated to historical systems of thought. This enables empirical identification of how certain types of thinking about human difference move across socio-historical contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how resistance to change might be a consequence of differences in professional discourse of professional groups working together in a change program.

The paper uses discourse analysis and rubrics to study the implementation of a new ICT system for an airline. Data for this case study were collected in semi‐structured interviews, desk research, participant observations and a diagnostic workshop.

The data suggest that the non‐aligned interaction between different professional discourses can be a source of resistance to change, in addition to other well‐known sources of resistance to change in the change management literature. Future research regarding change management should incorporate linguistics and discourse analysis. Investigating resistance to change could be done comprehensively, paying attention to differences in professional cultures in cross‐functional (project) teams. A managerial implication of the study is that making differences in professional discourses explicit is a constant point of attention in (project) teams.

The authors' choices with regard to the sample size and methods limit the generalisability of the results. However, these choices were instrumental in reaching a rich set of data, which enabled the authors to get an understanding of the conversational dynamics in the case.

The paper argues that change programs contain subjective, informal and linguistic dimensions which might give reasons for understanding resistance to change in new ways. The theoretical contribution of the paper is that it integrates change management literature with linguistic literature about professional discourse.

“Managing diversity” has emerged as a new and contested vocabulary for addressing issues of difference in organisations. This paper uses a New Zealand case study to exemplify a feminist post‐structuralist reading of managing diversity. The paper argues that a feminist post‐structuralist approach not only addresses feminist theoretical debates about identity, equality and difference, but also opens up new opportunities for practitioners in managing diversity and equal employment opportunities (EEO) to reflect on their own organisational change practice. The paper presents three readings of managing diversity: a discourse of exploitation which provides oppositional readings of managing diversity as a form of human resource management; a discourse of difference, drawing on refusals of managing diversity in accounts from minority group perspectives; and a discourse of equality where EEO practitioners have questioned managing diversity in the context of EEO.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how women in senior management draw on discourses of merit and special contribution in making sense of the contradictions and tensions they experience in their working lives. It has a particular focus on how women explain possible experiences of disadvantage and the extent to which they see such experiences as gendered.

The research is based on an Australian study of women leaders in the private and tertiary sectors. Data are drawn from in‐depth interviews with 14 women.

Findings suggest that women draw on discourses of meritocracy and of “special contribution” in discussing their experiences at work. Inconsistencies between these competing discourses are mediated through notions of choice.

The research has implications for the understanding of how women at senior levels make sense of their experiences in organizations. A wider sample may give further corroboration to these results.

The paper highlights the significance of the discourse of choice in aligning discourses of “special contribution” with the reality of their lives whilst keeping intact the concepts of equality and meritocracy to which they strongly adhere.

The purpose of this research is to suggest a framework based on the discourse approach to analyze intercultural communication problems in multinational organizations. The paper also aims to suggest solutions to these problems by designing support in computer‐mediated communication.

The paper uses qualitative methodology to discover communication problems and strategies as they are used by employees in a multinational organization.

Communication problems and strategies were associated with differences between communicators at three levels of discourse: different assumptions about communication; different ways of structuring information and differences in style.

The implementation of the suggested tools introduces potential sensitivities that need to be considered.

The paper highlights how to apply the discourse approach to the analysis of intercultural communication problems and suggests several implementations of computer‐mediated communication mechanisms and techniques that can effectively mitigate communication problems in multinational organizations.

In this paper the authors seek to compare lay (consumer) and professional (physician) discourse structures in answers to diabetes‐related questions in a public consumer health information website.

Ten consumer and ten physician question threads were aligned. They generated 26 consumer and ten physician answers, constituting a total dataset of 717 discourse units (in sentences or sentence fragments). The authors depart from previous LIS health information behaviour research by utilizing a computational linguistics‐based theoretical framework of rhetorical structure theory, which enables research at the pragmatics level of linguistics in terms of the goals and effects of human communication.

The authors reveal differences in discourse organization by identifying prevalent rhetorical relations in each type of discourse. Consumer answers included predominately (66 per cent) presentational rhetorical structure relations, those intended to motivate or otherwise help a user do something (e.g. motivation, concession, and enablement). Physician answers included mainly subject matter relations (64 per cent), intended to inform, or simply transfer information to a user (e.g. elaboration, condition, and interpretation).

The findings suggest different communicative goals expressed in lay and professional health information sharing. Consumers appear to be more motivating, or activating, and more polite (linguistically) than physicians in how they share information with consumers online in similar topics in diabetes management. The authors consider whether one source of information encourages adherence to healthy behaviour more effectively than another.

Analysing discourse structure – using rhetorical structure theory – is a novel and promising approach in information behaviour research, and one that traverses the lexico‐semantic level of linguistic analysis towards pragmatics of language use.

This paper seeks to analyze strategies used to communicate CSR to public audiences via the internet in Maersk and WalMart in order to examine the influence of national culture from the headquarters of each of these global corporations. The purpose of the paper is to further understanding about how CSR is framed and developed within the cultural bounds of a given nation.

The paper extends Donaldson and Preston's model of interaction between the corporation and its stakeholders through a cultural systems approach. The notion of cultural systems is combined with three of Roome's CSR agendas – diversity, sustainable environment, and community involvement/corporate philanthropy – to examine presentations of corporate social responsibility on Maersk and Walmart corporate web sites.

The consequences in corporate web site discourse about CSR in Maersk and WalMart are strikingly different. With respect to all three CSR agendas, the WalMart site includes a more detailed explanation of its efforts, rooted in local communities in the USA. In contrast, the Maersk site CSR section includes less detail, and a focus on efforts mainly in communities outside of Denmark. These differences in discourse imply different expectations from the public emerging from cultural system differences in the USA and Denmark. Thus, even though WalMart is not necessarily more involved with CSR efforts than Maersk, it has a greater need to express its CSR activities in detail due to the differences in expectations rooted in the US and Danish cultural systems.

Introducing an approach for understanding corporation‐stakeholder interactions and the expression of corporate social responsibility to the public via corporate web sites as situated in cultural systems.

The purpose of this paper is to respond to Urquhart and Urquhart’s critique of the previous work entitled “Discourse structure differences in lay and professional health communication”, published in this journal in 2012 (Vol. 68 No. 6, pp. 826-851, doi: 10.1108/00220411211277064).

The authors examine Urquhart and Urquhart’s critique and provide responses to their concerns and cautionary remarks against cross-disciplinary contributions. The authors reiterate the central claim.

The authors argue that Mann and Thompson’s (1987, 1988) Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) offers valuable insights into computer-mediated health communication and deserves further discussion of its methodological strength and weaknesses for application in library and information science.

While the authors agree that some methodological limitations pointed out by Urquhart and Urquhart are valid, the authors take this opportunity to correct certain misunderstandings and misstatements.

The authors argue for continued use of innovative techniques borrowed from neighbouring disciplines, in spite of objections from the researchers accustomed to a familiar strand of literature. The authors encourage researchers to consider RST and other computational linguistics-based discourse analysis annotation frameworks that could provide the basis for integrated research, and eventual applications in information behaviour and information retrieval.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the analytical productiveness of a discursive power perspective in understanding interdisciplinary teams' inefficient decision processes, and to discuss the ethical consequences of such an approach.

Based on a case study of an interdisciplinary team in a Danish hospital, the paper analyzes the team's decision practices as a result of discursive power operations that privilege and marginalize groups and persons.

The paper shows that a discourse of equality dominates the team's decision practices. This produces a tendency among members to word observations as reflections whereas expert assessments are rendered unlikely and unwelcome. The paper demonstrates that this analysis is productive in understanding why interdisciplinary teams struggle to develop efficient decision processes. Furthermore, the paper suggests that managers should respond ethically to these discursive power operations with political interventions.

A variety of theoretical models have been proposed to understand interdisciplinary teams' problematic decision processes. This paper makes an original contribution to this field by shoving how a discursive framework provides a productive analytical strategy. Moreover, the paper's proposition of political intervention as an ethical way of securing social sustainability is unprecedented.