Changing roles of Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) practitioners in Australia: Challenges, opportunities and a potential paradigm shift

Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) practitioners are an important element in advancing the Australian D&I cause in employment. While there is significant scholarly focus on the circumstances of marginalised and disadvantaged groups in employment, prevailing research on the role/s of the D&I practitioner is dated and incomplete. This study examines whether the current D&I role configuration and practitioner orientation (perceptions, personal background, experiences, skills, and demographics) can effectively contribute to advancing the D&I cause within Australian organisations. The D&I practitioners occupy a unique place in organisations as they try to balance organisational imperatives with social justice considerations. While there are several scholarly conceptualisations of this unique role, they lack relevance to Australia. This study revisits some of these D&I roles and practitioner conceptualisations while proposing an Australia-specific conception of the role. 

A Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT) approach was employed for this research, which included interviews with 22 Australian D&I practitioners. The findings indicate that practitioners saw the D&I role as detrimental to their careers, however the majority of interviewees resolved to remain in the role due to its intrinsic rewards. Most practitioners had entered the roles accidentally, and there seemed to be a lack of a clear entry route to the profession. Limited awareness about D&I jobs and lack of access to such roles unless otherwise exposed to them at the current workplace may restrict those who are passionate about social justice entering the profession. This said, the practitioners interviewed for this study had fully embraced the business case for D&I. They perceived D&I as a non-businesscritical role and saw organisations supporting D&I functions for mainly (but not exclusively) reputational reasons. Respondents understood the importance of D&I to corporate image and used the rhetorical value of D&I to draw senior management commitment and resources. However, the thesis argues that by embracing the business case, the D&I role has lost its unique position as a function. Being answerable to the organisation’s commercial imperatives or public sector mandates in the case of government organisations rather than subscribing to a greater societal cause has rendered it similar to any other job roles within organisations. 

The findings reveal certain risks facing the D&I role including: encroachment from other functions such as sustainability, ESG (Environment, Sustainability and Governance) agendas of organisations, and being relegated to operational arms of HRM functions that increasingly view Sustainable HRM as the future. The research also identifies opportunities for the D&I function and role to be strengthened by consolidating the fragmented practitioner community, leading it away from HRM, expanding the role to include extraorganisational actions, and reconfiguring the function and role to incorporate the organisation's social sustainability initiatives which are grounded in the D&I cause. The thesis proposes a novel configuration that widens the D&I function's scope and brings the social justice case back into the Australia's D&I practitioner role definition.