No abstract

This article addresses recent debates in critical management studies (CMS) on the impact of research beyond academia and critical performativity—in other words, it addresses the need for researchers to engage with and intervene in organizational practices while remaining critical of these practices. GenderLAB has been developed to address this need by organizing academic activism and drawing critical insights from studies in gender equality and diversity in a way that can impact organizations. By combining the reflexive process of norm critique with action-oriented design thinking, GenderLAB contributes a methodology that holds potential for overcoming the current critical/constructive impasse in CMS literature.

Applying a conceptual framework of hyphenation, understood as the organization of racialized subjects, this paper investigates rhetorical strategies for working existing hyphens as practiced within an Action Aid Denmark initiative to train young people to become public opinion leaders in anti-discrimination matters. We identify three such rhetorical strategies: (1) Silencing: Racialized subjects are organized by majority voices that speak of/for ‘the Other’; the training explicitly seeks to change the organization of public debate by working this hyphen. (2) Positioning: The main strategy for working the hyphen, as taught in the course, is to speak from a minority position, but in a manner that is recognizable to the majority. Thus, non-white participants are trained to speak with white voice; they become exceptions to the rule, tokens or role models when telling their stories in a scripted manner. And (3) Representing: In telling their own stories, the aspiring opinion leaders come to speak for racialized subjects as a group. Thus, the course (unwittingly) reproduces the current racialized organization of public space in the form of ‘benign discrimination’. On the basis of this analysis, the article advances postcolonial organization studies by demonstrating that hyphenation cannot be overcome, but must be engaged in a continuous process of re-working the hyphen. Thus, the task of researchers and practitioners alike is to show the constraints of current hyphenations and find strategies for organizing subjects in more equal and open relations.

This paper conceptualises organisational diversity as constituted by psychoanalytic lack.Empirically, we show how diversity as Lacanian lack is understood as nothing in or of itself, but as an empty signifier with no signified. The lack of diversity becomes a catalyst for desiring particular ideas of diversity that, however, constantly change due to the empty form of diversity. Anxiety manifests itself in the obsession of unobtainable idealised forms of diversity as well as in the uncertainty associated with the traumatic experience of always falling short of what is desired in an object -the experience of failed diversity. Conclusively, we discuss the productive potential of the power of lack. The impossibility of diversity is what, at once, conditions the possibility of diversity. We therefore suggest that the symptomatic anxiety provoked by the lack should be enjoyed in order to engage with new meaningful desires and fantasies of organisational diversity.

No abstract