‘Your focus on race is narrow and exclusive:’ the derailment of anti-racist work through discourses of intersectionality and diversity

Rodriguez, Jason; Freeman, Kendralin J.

doi:10.1080/23793406.2016.1162193

Cited by 17 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…They explained that white men apply principles of liberalism, such as meritocracy, to oppose affirmative action and diversity initiatives (Berry and Bonilla-Silva, 2008; Nkomo and Al Ariss, 2014). They also showed that white men tend to employ individualized definitions of discrimination and locate experiences with racism as circumstantial, rather than systemic, and hence in doing so, they imagine themselves as subjects of racism (Cabrera, 2014a, 2014b; Rodriguez and Freeman, 2016). These responses to affirmative action can be read as an effect of mainstream understandings of intersectionality, which detach identity formation from historical and material conditions (Liu, 2018).…”

Section: The Strategic Inclusion Of White Menmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selling diversity to white men: How disentangling economics from morality is a racial and gendered performance

Arciniega

2020

Organization

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Diversity professionals include business scholars, management consultants, diversity officers, and human resource professionals, who claim that the business case is about economics, not about morality or social justice. Drawing on 2 years of ethnographic research, this paper finds that diversity professionals sell diversity to white men—literally to obtain new clients and, metaphorically, to gain supporters for their practices—by performing economic rationality. In examining the intersection of economics and morality through the business case, this article argues that economic rationality itself is a racial and gendered performance. Moreover, insofar as diversity is a managerial discourse that employs ideas and models of the economy to design organizational techniques that improve business, it claims that through the business case, diversity professionals perform the economy itself. Thus, this research unsettles pervasive scholarly and popular assumptions that capitalism is intrinsically amoral. Finally, it characterizes organizational practices wherein diversity professionals perform economics as amoral and unracial as white economics. White economics, in other words, reproduces the everyday operation of neoliberal organizations as purportedly amoral, and hence, unracial and ungendered.

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Section: The Strategic Inclusion Of White Menmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selling diversity to white men: How disentangling economics from morality is a racial and gendered performance

Arciniega

2020

Organization

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“…Diversity research also provides insights into how significant workplace inequalities are concealed or neutralised in organisational discourses of diversity. For example, Rodriguez and Freeman (2016) show how diversity discourses often soften and smooth over racism in higher education by presenting it as an experience that is common to both whites and people of colour. Bell and Hartmann (2007) highlight how the ‘happy talk’ of diversity can downplay many problems related to race and avoid addressing persistent structural inequalities in work settings (see also Ahmed, 2012).…”

Section: Diversity Management: the Story So Farmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenging the cross-national transfer of diversity management in MNCs: Exploring the ‘identity effects’ of diversity discourses

Fernando

2020

Human Relations

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I develop a critique of the cross-national transfer of diversity management in multinational companies. Adopting a critical approach to diversity management, and considering diversity as a discourse, I examine how and why employees in an overseas subsidiary challenged the diversity practices transferred by their foreign parent company. Drawing on a case study of a Sri Lankan knowledge work firm that was in the process of implementing its Western parent company’s Diversity Management agenda, which they had had little input in shaping, I highlight how challenge is triggered by a desire to reject unfavourable subject positions attributed to individuals in transferred discourses of diversity and to reposition the self more favourably. My contribution involves showing how dynamic power relations between parents and subsidiaries shape the global transfer of diversity across MNCs, depicting subsidiary employees as agentic subjects as opposed to passive recipients.

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“…Specifically, Rodriguez and Freeman (2016) examine the actions taken in the aftermath of racist events on a small liberal arts university campus. These scholars point out that diversity efforts to instill anti-racist pedagogy displaced considerations of structural inequity in favor of conversations on the individualized experiences of racism.…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender, race and power: an intersectional reading of “opting out”

Meléndez

Özkazanç‐Pan

2020

QROM

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PurposeThis paper considers the phenomenon of “opting out” from an intersectional lens, bringing in hitherto undertheorized dimensions of gender, race and power into the conversation related to why and how some women of color may make the “choice” to leave an organization.Design/methodology/approachThrough a single case study approach, our research elucidates how identity-connected experiences unconnected to work/life balance constraints and tensions caused one immigrant woman of color to leave the workplace. We expand upon the current use of intersectionality in management and organization studies by applying it as a lens to bring into consideration power relations in organizations and structural inequality as the context for understanding why and how some women of color may leave their places of employment.FindingsBased on our in-depth case study, we demonstrate that microaggressions, power relations, and structural inequities contribute to some women of color opting out.Originality/valueThis paper is of value to scholars interested in intersectionality framework applications.

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‘Your focus on race is narrow and exclusive:’ the derailment of anti-racist work through discourses of intersectionality and diversity

Cited by 17 publications

References 24 publications

Selling diversity to white men: How disentangling economics from morality is a racial and gendered performance

Selling diversity to white men: How disentangling economics from morality is a racial and gendered performance

Challenging the cross-national transfer of diversity management in MNCs: Exploring the ‘identity effects’ of diversity discourses

Gender, race and power: an intersectional reading of “opting out”

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