Working theory below, shorthand version: 
Civil Rights Law produces ambiguous, difficult to enact requirements for firms. This leads to the rapid rise in HR departments, compliance offices, etc. Much of this traced out by Caldwell...
These offices, in concert with managerial consultants, legal pros, and regulatory bodies, continually inflate the threat of liability to justify their positions and continued services...
These regulatory agents also assign themselves the job of interpreting these ambiguous laws and their implementations. They want to do this in a way that is most rhetorically favorable to the firm...
…Thus the invention of the “diversity” rhetoric that seeks to assure these firms that adopting policies and norms ostensibly to comply with Civil Rights Law is market optimal. Hence, "diversity is strength."
But these policies and norms of course cannot be static, less the managerial consultants be out of a job. So these managerial practices have to also be constantly altered to fit changing social, economic, cultural circumstances...
Warrants for these ever-changing strategies are “produced” out of the social and discursive events. For example, George Floyd and our time of “Racial Reckoning.” This creates needs for new managerial policies, new norms, and new rhetoric...
And because the underlying laws were ambiguous to begin with, these new policies and norms, as interpreted into managerial practice, substantiate new applications of the law, which starts a new cycle, each one more “diversified” than the last.
There is of course a tension between what is good for the firm and what is good for the cosultant class and the HR departments—on net compliance with each new iteration is a loss for the firm, However...
This loss is off-set by the fact that ever more complicated compliance regimes make it more difficult and costly for startup firms to challenge those that are already in place, so on balance it is good for established firms to hasten these cycles (even at some loss).
That’s all I got for now.
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