Researchers have explored in depth how social movement actors strive to pass laws to change organizations exogenously or to demand that they make commitments or policy changes. But ensuring that organizations implement such commitments or policies is challenging. Insider activists may be influential for implementation processes, and I explore how they can increase that influence. I contend that insider activists influence such processes by offering their organizations implementation resources, such as free and ready-to-use content and model programs that reflect changes the activists want to see. To develop this argument, I explore how, starting in the mid-2000s, LGBT activists developed resources to ensure that diversity policies were increasingly relevant for sexual minorities in France. Many diversity policies at the time expressed commitment to “gender, disability, age . . .” Activists contended that nothing was done for the minorities who were not named—those left in the ellipsis (. . .) of diversity. Using web archives and interviews, I show that LGBT rights activists increased their influence on French organizations by developing implementation resources that corporations could readily use to flesh out their diversity commitments and implement diversity programs to promote the inclusion of LGBT employees. I demonstrate how insider activists used these implementation resources to denounce organizations’ superficial commitments or employees’ homophobic practices, thereby compelling organizations to change.

No abstract

Research at the intersection of social movements and categories has stressed how movements initiate and transform categories that influence the emergence, downfall, and restructuring of markets and industries. Yet this literature tends to underestimate how social movement organizations are under pressure to align with powerful regulatory categories. This pressure is emplaced, depending on ideology and laws, and can be avoided by adopting reformist strategies and engaging in category work in free spaces. I discuss how Rainbow, a non-profit organization, while seemingly aligned with the state-imposed categories of “underprivileged neighborhoods” and “diversity,” sought in practice to reform the meanings of these categories to address racism and islamophobia. Through ethnography, interviews, and textual analysis, I demonstrate how social movements facing pressure to comply with regulatory categories can engage in category reform, challenging the substance of these categories in free spaces and altering their meanings, while buffering oppositions through reformist strategies.

Scholars pointed out that antidiscrimination laws do not fully undermine workplace discrimination and that affirmative action policies mostly benefit overqualified or advantaged individuals within minorities. To elucidate this paradox, this case study analyzes how some companies adopted specific selection and assessment processes for job seekers after the reinforcement of a quota for workers with disabilities in France. I observed the creation of alternative recruitment channels, the hiring of disability experts for recruitment, the refusal of resume sorting as a prescreening tool, and an emphasis on face-to-face interviews. While these changes circumvented practices that could have excluded people with disabilities (resume screening as a preselection tool, inaccessible venues for recruitment), they changed these practices only in limited spaces within the organizations. Additionally, while they did help more people get hired, they also compelled more personal disclosure that led to a more emotional assessment of job seekers and enabled “refined statistical discrimination” within pools of job seekers with disabilities. This research therefore reveals recruitment practices that may increase the number of individuals with disabilities hired but that, at the same time, may facilitate overselectivity and trigger significant risks associated with emotional recruitment of individuals with disabilities.

Law, public policy, and economic activity are intimately tied to each other. State policies and the legal system have often worked in favor of private economic interests. For instance, core features of the United States (US) legal system of the 19 th century were designed to protect the interests of the capitalist class (Horwitz 1992). Nowadays, narrow definitions of responsibility and privileged access to formal legal institutions still help the "haves" to "come out ahead" (Galanter 1974;Sutton 2001). Conversely, law has also been used (successfully or not) to coerce economic interests. Due to rules governing industrial relations and giving workers more power vis-à-vis their employers, corporations have become "legalized" settings (Selznick, 1969), where labor unions have gained leverage to shape workers' rights and accommodations (