This paper investigates how members of marginalised, minoritised and migrant communities construct intersecting identities as they narrate personal and vicarious experiences of inequality, exclusion and inclusion in the workplace. Our dataset consists of narratives from 140 participants in professional services workplaces in the UK, collected during 2023 via in-depth interviews and free-text survey responses. Many of these organisations have recognised the need to bring social change to their workplace cultures, including the need to reflect the multi-ethnic, multilingual communities they serve, as well as attracting and retaining employees from diverse backgrounds.

Our research gives voice to people from non-traditional professional services backgrounds as they relate narratives, anecdotes and short stories of their experiences of workplace inequalities, prejudice and discrimination. The narratives focus on everyday lived experiences, drawing on a number of intersecting identity categories including sex, gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, nationality, disability and social class. Through these narrative identity constructions, participants give powerful testimony on how they have experienced pejorative attitudes, damaging stereotypes and bias. This includes negative evaluation due to the use of non-standard accent and dialect, and the articulation of sociolinguistic stereotypes that are gendered, raced and classed, alongside cases of harassment and discrimination. We also examine positive cases where diversity and inclusion have been successfully achieved, and position these as exemplars of good language practice.

We illuminate how participants orientate towards workplace hierarchies and communities of practice as they negotiate their often precarious identity positions within professional services cultures. We also discuss the challenges and benefits of practically applying sociolinguistic narrative analysis within industry collaborations to attempt to bring about innovative socio-cultural change. Overall, our research is aimed at improving the lived experiences of non-traditional groups working within professional services industries, including the promotion of inclusive language practices in workplaces in future.