"Nothing to Do with the Law"? How Diversity Management Relates to Antidiscrimination Regulations in France and in the US

Drawing on a series of indepth interviews with diversity officers in large private corporations based in France and in the US (n=60, 2013-2014), this paper explores the ways in which legal norms of antidiscrimination play out in corporate diversity discourse, practices and organizational arrangements, bringing a fresh, comparative light on the process of “managerialization” of antidiscrimination law (Edelman et al., 2001). While in both countries, diversity programs have developed as a byproduct of converging antidiscrimination regulations, the study shows that both French and US diversity officers tend to present their initiatives as a voluntary, rather than as a response to a legal constraint. Yet, diversity professionals from the two countries substantially differ in the ways they perceive antidiscrimination law and connect the latter to their professional practices and values. In the US, since the 1990s, diversity initiatives have been increasingly defined and designed against the law, as having “nothing to do with the law”. Antidiscrimination regulations have been more and more perceived as strong, sharp rules that still matter but should be dealt with outside the realm of diversity management. By contrast, French diversity professional have tended to consider antidiscrimination legal norms as relatively easy to handle and merely constraining. They typically define diversity initiatives as doing “more than the law”, thus framing their practices and visions in continuity with the legal framework.