Unequal by structure: Exploring the structural embeddedness of organizational diversity

Abstract

This article applies classical concepts of organizational structure and extends them to contemporary challenges of diversity to explore why unequal opportunity structures persist in an organization despite its commitment to diversity and employing highly skilled ethnic minority employees. Based on a study of the team-based municipal center, CityBiz, the article inquires as to how inequality is embedded in two structural features: First, differentiation of roles accelerates in response to continuous change, which results in similar workers being attracted to collaborate with one another, which generates inequality. Second, inequality is sustained by inadequate integration methods that merge a formal-informal hierarchy, which results in peer competition and majority elites. The structural approach to organizational diversity developed in this article nuances current research on diversity predominantly concerned with employee experiences of inequality in an organizational structural landscape perceived as fixed and stable. This study offers a dynamic view of organizational structure based on how it is experienced, navigated and reshaped by employees of different ethnicities. Linking micro-interactions to structural triggers and outcomes point to situated caveats about inequalities ingrained in the organizational structural setup. Tapping into employees' sentiments and interactions furthermore gives the possibility to mobilize collective change in favor of equal opportunities.

Affective ethnography: reflections on the application of “useful” research on workplace diversity

“…However, changing conversations need not translate into substantial structural changes altering the organizational power landscape in favor of equal opportunities (Benschop et al, 2015;Holck and Muhr, 2017;Ortlieb and Sieben, 2014;Zanoni et al, 2017). In MunBiz, the lack of top-management support and the inadequate supportive structures (materialized in an opaque, informal system) both enabled and constrained change efforts, providing favorable possibilities for change, as no rigid rules or formal procedures blocked change efforts but did impose a waning ability to embark on substantial structural changes fundamentally altering task distribution and collaborative practices, as informality guided these routine organizational practices, perpetuating the status quo (Holck, 2017;Zanoni and Janssens, 2007).…”

Radicalizing diversity (research): Time to resume talking about class

“…While the crisis triggered a surge in research on the role of organizations in sustaining and exacerbating societal inequality (Amis, Mair, & Munir, 2020; Bapuji, Ertug, & Shaw, 2020; Dunne, Grady, & Weir, 2018) and postcapitalist, alternative organizing for social justice (Barin‐Cruz, Aquino Alves, & Delbridge, 2017; Zanoni, Contu, Healy, & Mir, 2017), it did not substantially affect critical diversity research. We still miss a conceptual vocabulary for setting up an emancipatory social justice agenda amidst and beyond capitalism (Holck, 2018a, 2018b; Janssens & Zanoni, forthcoming). Equipping critical diversity research with such a vocabulary is an important step in re‐engaging with class, giving voice to a radical research agenda to critique diversity as part of capitalism and to envision noncapitalist alternatives to it.…”

“…On the one hand, research on diversity management observes, each time anew, the overall incapacity of firms' diversity management practices to achieve substantial changes towards equality (Holck, 2018a, 2018b; Kalev, Dobbin, & Kelly, 2006; Romani et al., 2019). Resistance is limited to individuals' skillful bending, circumvention, and strategical appropriation that at best creates openings for their own social mobility (Holck, 2016; Ortlieb & Sieben, 2014; Van Laer & Janssens, 2017; Zanoni & Janssens, 2007), but leaves structural inequalities largely unaltered.…”

Learning the rules of the game: How is corporate masculinity learned and enacted by male professionals from nonprivileged backgrounds?

“…Over the past three decades, critical diversity research has revealed how organizations do not operate as neutral settings, providing equal opportunities to all, but rather are social systems imbued with gendered, racialized, ableist, ageist, and heterosexual social norms, which systemically exclude, marginalize, and discriminate against individuals belonging to historically subordinate groups on account of their “difference” (Acker, 2006; Ashcraft, 2013; Benschop & Doorewaard, 1998; Calás & Smircich, 2006; Holck, 2018). As Ahonen, Tienari, Meriläinen, and Pullen (2014) point out, an interesting question within critical research in diversity is which “diversity issues” and “minority subjects” are focused on, and which subjects have been neglected.…”