The Politics of Multiculturalism

The uneasy alliance of organisational culture and equal opportunities for ethnic minority groups: A British example

“…Thus, postcolonial theories provide insights into how the ethnocentric and orientalist assumptions that underpin popular conceptions of culture are designed to facilitate hegemony and control such that those of non-Western origin have a greater struggle to establish their credibility and legitimacy (see Cooke, 2003;Frenkel & Shenhav, 2006;Prasad, 2003). This can be understood alongside the discrimination in the external organisational context, where recent discourses in Britain and other parts of Europe and North America have contributed to the reinvigoration of wider societal processes of othering in ways that have pernicious consequences for EM groups (e.g., Bernhardt, 2015;Bobo, 2017;DeGenova, 2010;Pitcher, 2009;Virdee & McGeever, 2017).…”

“…For example, culture is commonly theorised as shared values and assumptions (e.g., Schein, 1985) that define a known group and that distinguish this group from other groups. These values and assumptions are typically derived from the wider society (see Smircich, 1983), where EM groups are already disadvantaged through prejudice and discrimination (e.g., Pitcher, 2009) and where the historical experiences of colonisation and imperialism are such that EM groups play little or no role in articulating these values (see Frenkel & Shenhav, 2006). Similarly, the implementation of the culture construct in organisations provides the setting for the specific idiosyncrasies of the organisational context to generate disadvantages, especially where managers seek to harness culture for competitive purposes.…”

The lines of descent of the present crisis

“…The riots in the Northern English mill towns during the summer of 2001 combined with the rapidly changing geopolitical environment in the aftermath of 9/11 and the war in Iraq were formative moments in the consolidation of a new racialised enemy within -'the Muslim' (Kundnani, 2007). These developments were instrumental in facilitating Labour's turn away from multiculturalism, and towards an increasingly muscular assimilatory nationalism (Back et al, 2002;Pitcher, 2009). As a result, on the eve of the 2007 financial crash, the process of fragmentation had deepened, further pushing Britain towards a critical tipping point.…”

Belonging to a Different Landscape: Repurposing Nationalist Affects

“…Rather than deny or refuse the experience of these sensual connections with rural landscape on the grounds that they reinforce racialized nationalism, it will be my suggestion that it is possible to displace nationalism's hold over material landscapes by considering alternative modalities of landscape belonging that build on precisely the same bodily experiences. By taking these feelings seriously without conceding them to nationalism, I want to avoid two conceptual manoeuvres: first, those that leave nationalism essentially untouched by rewriting national belonging in multicultural terms (see Fortier 2008; Pitcher 2009); second, positions that, by counterposing as an alternative to the nation more expansive pluralistic forms of global or transnational identification, effectively reinforce nationalism's legitimate purview over specific landscapes (see Cheah et al 1998; Calhoun 2008). Rather than leaving nationalism's jurisdictional claims uncontested and investing our critical energies in less territorially fixed configurations of belonging, I will suggest that it is through embodied connections to landscape that the ‘entrenched cartographies of the nation’ (Whatmore 2002: 146) can be pulled apart and reworked.…”