From Progress to Backlash: A Cyclical Process Theory of Organizational Diversity Initiatives

Abstract: Management research has often studied organizational diversity initiatives as managerial practices situated within individual organizations, removed from the sociopolitical-historical contexts that shape them. We reorient diversity initiatives as feedback-driven, politically generative practices that reflect and actively reshape broader sociopolitical climates. By integrating policy feedback theory—which examines how policies generate responses that reshape future policy iterations—with narrative analysis of historical episodes, we develop theory that explains how diversity initiatives evolve through recurring phases of expansion, contestation, and retrenchment, oscillating between centering and decentering marginalized workers. We propose that when diversity initiatives visibly reconfigure group positionality, they activate self-reinforcing and self-undermining feedback processes, as supporters mobilize to expand centering efforts while opponents mobilize to dismantle them. Tipping points catalyze mobilization efforts that function as legitimacy signals, compelling organizational recalibration. Our theory frames backlash not as design failure, but as a systematic outcome of initiative success and driver of future expansion.

Keywords: organizational diversity initiative; marginalization; legitimacy; theory/conceptual