Creating inclusivity through boundary work? Zooming in on low-wage service sector work

Abstract

Workers in the low-wage service sector represent a sociodemographically heterogeneous and particularly vulnerable group in terms of job security, job quality and health implications. However, organizational inclusion research has largely neglected this group. In contrast, this article builds on a qualitative study of a Dutch aircraft cleaning company in order to assess the ‘inclusivity of inclusion approaches’ for less privileged groups of employees. By reconstructing how managers and cleaners draw/rework boundaries, we identify certain configurations of inclusion and exclusion that can unfold more or less ‘inclusive’ consequences for historically disadvantaged group members, and more or less exclusionary repercussions for particularly privileged and/or majority group members. We stress the need to say goodbye to a linear narrative of organizations becoming ‘inclusive as such’. Furthermore, we argue that the presence of decent working and employment conditions and the absence of steep differences in those conditions between groups represent the ‘silent foundation’ of creating inclusivity. Consequently, we ask: does inclusion research reach its ‘natural limits’ by tiptoeing around the topic of equality?

Doing inclusion as counter-conduct: Navigating the paradoxes of organizing for refugee and migrant inclusion

“…By theorizing power as both “enabling and constraining limits” (Simons, 2013: 307), the perspective that we propose also sheds light on the ambivalent and mutually constitutive relationship between inclusion practices and the exclusionary practices they oppose (Adamson et al, 2021; Bendl et al, 2022; Dobusch et al, 2021). We complement the line of research that highlights how exclusion (Van Eck et al, forthcoming) and exclusionary hierarchies and conditions (Ortlieb et al, 2021; Ponzoni et al, 2017) are co-constituted in the practices of inclusion, resulting in specific inclusion/exclusion configurations. Responding to the calls for diversity and inclusion scholars to scrutinize how and which boundaries of inclusion/exclusion are drawn (Dobusch et al, 2021), the perspective we propose draws attention to how this boundary-making is shaped by the workings of pastoral power.…”