Resistance to diversity, equity and inclusion: an exploratory study with Brazilian professionals
Carregando...
Arquivos
Data
2026-02-04
Autores
Orientador(res)
Story, Joana Sabrina Pereira
Métricas
Título da Revista
ISSN da Revista
Título de Volume
Resumo
Organizational diversity initiatives often encounter resistance that slows, redirects, or weakens their effects. Scholarly debate explains resistance to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) through individual attitudes or lack of leadership commitment. However, most research continues to give limited consideration to DEI resistance as a multilevel and dynamic phenomenon within organizations. The thesis addresses this gap by analysing how resistance to DEI takes shape across contexts, circulates through relationships and oscillates over time, with three interconnected aims: (1) to identify the organizational and societal conditions that enable resistance to DEI initiatives; (2) to examine how resistance to DEI is expressed in organizational interactions and decisions; and (3) to trace temporal oscillations in its meanings and manifestations in organizations. Anchored in a pragmatist epistemology and reflexive thematic analysis, this study draws on 55 in-depth interviews with individuals who work with or around diversity initiatives in Brazil, a country characterised by high demographic diversity and persistent inequality. The analysis treats participants’ accounts and the researcher’s interpretation as coconstructed meaning-making about resistance and its implications within organizations. The results are organised into three interrelated themes: contextual, relational and temporal. The contextual theme explains how resistance is structured within broader social and organizational environments, where polarized public debates, narratives about meritocracy, historical legacies and business priorities influence responses to diversity initiatives. Within this contextual layer, political polarization emerged as a recurrent interpretive frame through which DEI was read as legitimate, risky, ideological, or strategically avoidable. The relational theme highlights how resistance circulates through roles, relationships, identities and hierarchies, with emphasis on leadership levels, informal networks and patterns of voice and silence. A recurring pattern within this relational layer concerns middle managers as a practical interface between formal commitments and everyday implementation, where discretion over pace, scope and visibility shaped how resistance became consequential. The temporal theme traces how resistance oscillates over time between explicit opposition and subtle forms, such as symbolic compliance, the narrowing of diversity language and cycles of institutional prioritization and interruption. Across the themes, the thesis maps forms of resistance by visibility and by intentionality and it shows how resistance can become capillary through routines, local interpretations and recurring implementation patterns. Conceptually, the ,, 10 thesis portrays resistance as a multilevel phenomenon and offers an integrative architecture that links contextual conditions, relational dynamics and time oscillations as interdependent dimensions of resistance to DEI. Empirically, it provides a Brazil-based account that offers a way to interpret assumptions prevalent in Global North scholarship and may resonate in other settings marked by contested diversity agendas. Methodologically, it illustrates how a pragmatist and reflexive approach can connect practitioners’ accounts with broader theoretical debates while keeping attention on the practical applicability. In sum, the thesis conceptualizes resistance to DEI as one of the ways through which organizations negotiate tensions, protect established arrangements and regulate the pace and direction of change. The research opens avenues for future studies to examine diversity initiatives and resistance as evolving, multilevel and interdependent processes that co-shape organizational change over time.