Racial Diversity in Organizations: A Framework and Future Research Agenda

Published: 10 April 2026| Version 1 | DOI: 10.17632/skj226gy7w.1
Contributors:
Humberto Reis Santos-Souza,
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This study conducts an integrative literature review utilizing mixed methods to explore the concept of racial diversity within organizations. To ensure methodological rigor, transparency, and replicability, data collection was exclusively performed using the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection, selected for its stringent indexing standards and minimization of predatory publications. The search, conducted on March 6, 2024, employed the keywords “racial diversity,” “racial equality,” “racial inclusion,” and “racial equity.” The inclusion criteria were restricted to documents classified as Articles or Early Access within the Management or Business categories, spanning the publication years from 1945 to 2024. This initial search yielded 161 documents. Following a preliminary skim-reading, 27 articles were excluded because they did not address racial diversity as a unit-level compositional construct or a strategic managerial resource. Consequently, a final corpus of 134 articles was established for subsequent analysis, which was structured into two primary methodological phases. The first phase focused on mapping academic production and its underlying thematic structures. This involved a productivity analysis to trace the evolution of the literature across prominent journals, alongside a correspondence analysis executed via RStudio to visualize thematic clusters within a two-dimensional space. Among the selected sample, 118 articles were successfully categorized by their primary topics through an assessment of their abstracts, introductions, and concluding remarks. Furthermore, these publications were classified according to their WoS impact factor quartiles (Q1 through Q4) to evaluate the scholarly rigor and international visibility of the encompassing journals. To support this thematic categorization, categorical content analysis, following Bardin's framework, was conducted utilizing the Atlas.ti software. The second phase employed advanced science mapping techniques and was divided into three analytical steps. The first step utilized VOSviewer to conduct a co-citation analysis, aiming to identify the foundational theoretical frameworks of the field. By establishing a threshold of at least thirty co-citations, nineteen core studies were isolated and subjected to categorical content analysis to extract their theoretical approaches and key findings. The second step entailed a citation analysis grounded in the Pareto Principle and Bradford's Law of Scattering to pinpoint the most influential publications. A total of twenty articles were analyzed for their methodologies, sample characteristics, central findings, and directions for future research. Finally, the third step involved a co-authorship network analysis using the Bibliometrix package in R. The central cluster of this network, consisting of eleven highly connected articles, was qualitatively assessed using categorical content analysis.

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