Objectives for managing diversity in organizations include reducing lawsuits, responding to changing employee demographics, enhancing image, attracting and retaining a variety of talent, reaching new customer bases, and improving group effectiveness. Diversity management also emphasizes strategies to help retain and promote minority members once they have been hired. One of these ways is through employee network groups. This research adopts a case approach to describing and comparing a Black and a Hispanic employee network group at a United States affiliate of the Fortune Global 100 energy corporation, Summit International. This study applies bona fide group theory and dialectics to examine the complex intergroup relationships that employee network groups have in their organizations. The study offers three key contributions to communication theory. In connection with dialectics, bona fide group theory helped to reveal the multiple units from which group tensions emerge and the complex decisions that group members must make in managing them. The application of bona fide group theory also revealed an unexpected finding: that the network groups were engaged in concertive control with each other through interdependence with the organizational context. The bona fide group theory uncovered these processes because it revealed the norms and expectations that groups formed based on the corporate values regarding diversity.

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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / "In an increasingly abrasive and polarized American society, a greater commitment to social justice can play a construcive role in helping people develop a more sophisticated understanding of diversity and social group interaction, more critically evaluate oppressive social patterns and institutions, and work more democratically with diverse others to create just and inclusive practices and social structures." The importance of social justice is to "help people identify and analyze dehumanizing sociopolitical processes, reflect on their own positions in relation to these processes so as to consider the consequences of oppressive socialization intheir loives, and think proactively about alternate actions given this analysis. The goal of social justice education is to enable people to develop critical analytical tools necessary to understand oppression and their own socialization within oppressive systems, and to develop a sense of agency and capacity to interrupt and chnge oppressive patterns and behaviors in themselves and in the institutions and communitites of which they are a part" (Adams, Bell and Griffin, 1997). Utilizing bona fide group perspective during an ethnographic study of a student group, this study examines how an individual's perception of their self-constructed and group identity(ies) are manifested through social justice behavior - as memebers of a group whose purpose is to engage in social justice.