Cultural Workforce Diversity – How Do ‘We’ Report on It? - An Investigation of How Dutch Organizations Communicate Their Approach(es) to Cultural Workforce Diversity in Annual Reports -

Cultural workforce diversity has become a topic of growing interest in the management and corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature because of its potential to influence organizational outcomes, depending on how organizations tackle it. At the same time, organizations have begun to communicate their outlooks on diversity and their efforts in this area for various motives. Yet, little to no advancements have been made in terms of researching potential trends in diversity reporting and the factors that may shape the latter. Using a theoretical framework provided by Ely and Thomas (2001), this paper explores the trends in cultural workforce diversity communication across a series of fifty-five Dutch organizations over a time period ranging from 1997 to 2018. In investigating this largely underexplored field, the study also attempts to determine whether the sector a company operates in may influence the way the latter reports on diversity. In doing so, the paper employs automated quantitative content analysis as a research method and subsequently contributes towards bridging a methodological gap by developing and advancing a reliable and optimizable analysis Python-based software. While contributing to the underdeveloped literature on the topic by identifying and modelling the trends in organizational diversity reporting, due to data availability-driven limitations, the study incurs difficulties in establishing the potential factors that may influence the ways organizations choose to report on workforce diversity. Yet, the paper provides valuable insights into the topic, such as identifying the most widely reported as well as the fastest growing diversity perspective across time, as well as caveats and suggestions concerning how future research on the subject ought to move forward.