Minority Employees Engaging with (Diversity) Management: An Analysis of Control, Agency, and Micro‐Emancipation*

Abstract

This study analyses how minority employees engage with control in organizations. Differently from most critical studies of diversity management, which focus on how minority employees are discursively controlled, we approach (diversity) management as a constellation of both identity-regulating discourses and bureaucratic controls. We assume that minority employees are agents who actively resist and/or comply with the constellation of controls they are subject to. Based on qualitative data collected in a technical drawing company and a hospital, the specific constellation of controls in each organization is first reconstructed. Four interviews with minority employees are then analysed in depth, showing how their engagement with material and discursive controls creates both constraints and possibilities of micro-emancipation.

Discrimination of Second-Generation Professionals in Leadership Positions

“…People reflect on their circumstances, weighing their ability for successful action, as power not only constrains, but also enables actions (Fleming & Spicer, 2014, p. 280;Scott, 2008, p. 38). These actions may vary, but their commonality is that when employees decide to act, they are likely to do this by complying with company rules that cannot be bent, while acting as change-agents whenever they see possibilities to do so (Foldy, 2002, p. 97;Zanoni & Janssens, 2007, p. 1389. This agency can be understood as deliberate action or deliberate inactivity, and it points to employees' ability to "function as…definers, interpreters, and appliers of institutional elements" (Scott, 2008, p. 223).…”

The Normality and Materiality of the Dominant Discourse: Voluntary Work Inside a Dutch Asylum Seeker Center

“…The kind of agency that is noticeable here is shaped through small movements. Zanoni andJanssens (2007, p. 1377) refer to this kind of agency as microemancipation, which is less grandiose, but rather "partial, temporal movements breaking away from diverse forms of oppression, rather than successive moves towards a predetermined state of liberation" (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992, p. 447).…”

“…Space for agency is created when these taken for granted discursive positions are unraveled through reflexivity. In line with Zanoni andJanssens (2007, p. 1376), we define agency as the "capacity [of individuals] to be reflexive about their situation-their 'discursive consciousness'-and to act upon it to 'make a difference'" (see also Ghorashi & Sabelis, 2013).…”

“…For example, Guhan and Liebling-Kalifani (2011) report on the compassion satisfaction and vicarious resilience of frontline staff working with asylum seekers and refugees (see also Robinson, 2014). Zanoni and Janssens (2007) elaborate on the ways that employees' engagement with discursive and material structures of their organizations enables them to generate positive outcomes in spite of the limitations they face. In what they refer to as microemancipations, individuals find ways to unsettle material and normalized structures, which potentially could lead to a number of specific changes (2007, p. 1395).…”

Work innovations: transformation, micro-emancipations, or discursive shift?

“…From this perspective, emancipation is not to be equated with, or reduced to, piecemeal social engineering directed by a somewhat benevolent management." [Alvesson and Willmott, (1992), p.434] Through an engagement with identity-regulating managerial discourses, spaces may open for resistance of control, and opportunities for micro-emancipation (Zanoni and Jansenns, 2007). These moments of individually-defined micro-emancipation are seen as a less totalitarian conceptualisation of the critical emancipatory project.…”