Framing diversity in corporate digital contexts: A multimodal approach to discursive recontextualizations of social practices

Diversity has become a buzzword and a “must-have” corporate practice for contemporary organizations. This article aims to determine how discursive strategies employed by organizations to frame diversity are constructed in digital contexts. Drawing on the literature related to diversity in organizations and its framing in external digital contexts, this study adopts a critical perspective on the discourse analysis of corporate multimodal communication. This methodological approach allows us, first, to map the discursive strategies used to frame diversity in digital contexts through several semiotic modes; and second, to unravel in detail how this discursive construction is realized in terms of social actors, social actions, space, and time. This approach is empirically applied to the case of a leading global organization, Google. The study takes current research on diversity-related framing in corporate digital communication forward and shifts the focus to multimodal discursive strategies. Researchers can use this methodological approach to capture and analyze in detail the ongoing processes of discursive representations, and to produce longitudinal studies. Practitioners can become more aware of the multimodal character of contemporary communication and build on this study to ensure that their diversity-related framing is characterized by consistency across different digital platforms.