Marjolein Dennissen

43 Networking for equality? The conducted interviews took place at a location agreed with the interviewee, usually at the interviewees’ workplace. The interviews were conducted in Dutch, lasted between 45 minutes and two hours, were tape recorded and transcribed verbatim. The interviews were guided by a semi-structured interview guide (Appendix 2) with questions about how and why the networks were initiated, the networks’ structure, membership, goals and activities, and organizational support. In addition, I collected and analyzed the annual plans and newsletters of the diversity networks. These documents provided information about formal mission statements, objectives and activities, offering additional insight into how diversity network board members legitimize their networks to gain support and budget from the organization. The quotes in this chapter are translations of the original Dutch interview excerpts. I stayed as close as possible to the original expressions and idiom. To secure anonymity and confidentiality, I have anonymized the respondents using fictitious names. Data analysis My data analysis was an iterative process of going back and forth between the literature and the empirical material. I used the qualitative software package Atlas-ti to systemize and code my empirical material. I first coded the data in terms of content, using codes derived from the interview guide (Silverman, 2006) such as goals, activities, support and legitimation. This resulted in an overview of the goals, structure and activities of each network. In a second step, I compared these findings over the networks and reread the material searching for how interviewees talked about the value of their networks. In the findings section, I present a selection of excerpts, Appendix 3 provides additional data. To further analyze these excerpts, I used discourse analysis delving deeper into both what was said, how it was said, what was not said and the patterns of variation within the texts (Potter & Wetherell, 1994). Discourse analysis provided an entrance into the board members’ “dialogical struggle(s)” (Phillips & Hardy, 2002, p. 25) that represent a two-way process: diversity network board members can either shape or be shaped by organizational, or broader societal, discourses representing familiar combinations of arguments and characterizations about equality and diversity in the workplace. I question which discourses feature in board members’ constructions of the value of their networks and how interviewees’ discursive constructions relate to a broader set of discursive practices around diversity and equality. Comparing the discursive constructions of the value of diversity networks across the different networks sheds light on how equality and inequality can be challenged or reproduced.