This study examines how corporations engage in rhetorical reason-giving through image restoration strategies when responding to public pushback against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Grounded in Image Repair Theory (IRT), the study analyzes publicly observable official statements issued by 40 large global companies between 2023 and 2025, a period marked by intensified political, legal, and stakeholder contestation surrounding corporate DEI commitments. Using content analysis, we examine how organizations justified decisions to maintain, recalibrate, or reverse prior DEI initiatives across three phases punctuated by key sociopolitical events. The findings indicate that firms employed image restoration strategies to manage competing attributions of responsibility and offensiveness across polarized publics. Bolstering emerged as the most frequently used strategy across all response types, while corrective action and denial appeared more often among organizations that scaled back or terminated DEI initiatives under external pressure. Importantly, the analysis shows that DEI-related decisions were not treated as routine policy adjustments but as legitimacy judgments that required public justification. Overall, the study demonstrates how corporate responses to DEI pushback are constrained by the need to reconcile conflicting standards of legitimacy and elucidates the central role of rhetorical reason-giving in managing reputational threats in polarized sociopolitical environments.
Publication: Public Relations Review
Co-authors: Joon Soo Lim (Syracuse University), Christine Eunseol Park (Syracuse University)