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

Abstract

In this editorial, we plea for radicalizing diversity research by re‐engaging with the notion of class. We argue that theories of class, which are today seldom used in critical diversity research, have the potential to conceptualize the relationship between difference and power in ways that go beyond the current focus on equality within capitalist organizations. Theories of class radicalize diversity research by providing a conceptual vocabulary to ground the critique of diversity in the critique of capitalism. To highlight this potential, we first reconstruct the ideological historical context of the 1980s in which diversity research emerged, re‐embedding it in a broader political project to restructure the economy, work and society as a whole. We then present four main uses of the concept of class in management and organization studies and the theoretical traditions that underpin them. We go on to introduce the four contributions to this Special Section, illustrating how class, variously understood, can inform critical understandings of diversity. We conclude by leveraging class within four strategies for more radical diversity scholarship: classing workers, occupations, and workplaces; classing diversity; classing meritocracy; and classing struggles for social justice.

Making Diversity Research Matter for Social Change: New Conversations Beyond the Firm

“…Coherent with an understanding of diversity as wedded to capitalism is a view of social change as necessarily entailing struggles to better protect workers from precarious and particularly exploitative working conditions, which constitutively define them as 'diverse' and thus less deserving (Romani et al, 2020). From this view, fostering social change requires the appreciation of how one's recognition as a working subject, whose labour bears value, should be translated into modalities of organizing that can advance claims to its redistribution.…”

“…This trajectory towards social change is however fraught with peril. Scholars have not only put forward many boundary conditions that need to be fulfilled for the diversity-performance relationship to hold in practice (Joshi & Roh, 2009;Van Dijk et al, 2012), but have also documented that firms do not function as meritocracies (Amis, Mair, & Munir, 2020;Castilla & Benard, 2010;Romani, Zanoni & Holck, 2020). More fundamentally, critics have emphasized how the highly instrumental understanding of diversity promoted by the business case makes equal treatment conditional upon minority employees' ability to prove their superior economic value for the company.…”

Organizing solidarity in difference: Challenges, achievements, and emerging imaginaries

“…Diversity in business, with its focus on unleashing and utilizing sociodemographic differences, is thus an approach compatible with neoliberal capitalism in contrast to the preceding social justice notions of equal opportunities and affirmative action promoted by the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s (Romani et al, 2021). When recast as diversity, difference becomes a potential source of economic value for companies to tap into (Özbilgin and Tatli, 2011)-and it is further removed from any meaningful notion of solidarity, whether as a cause or an effect.…”

Repoliticizing diversity work? Exploring the performative potentials of norm‐critical activism

“…Critical diversity scholars link the deadlock of diversity management to the depoliticization of diversity issues (Lombardo et al., 2010; Lui, 2018; Perriton, 2009; Romani et al., 2020; Squires, 2005; Swan & Fox, 2010), leading to “rhetorical entrapment”: “once accepted as a norm that resonates with dominant policy frame, mainstreaming will be adopted as a technocratic tool in policy making, depoliticizing the issue of gender inequality in itself” (Squires, 2005, p. 374). Here, the discursive invocation of diversity renders diversity work non‐performative, as Ahmed (2012) shows in her study of Anglo‐Saxon universities.…”

“…Consequently, formal organizational efforts of HRM or CSR initiatives to deal with diversity issues easily shy away from more political concerns of discriminating and exclusionary norms of gender, race, class, and other structural differences, shifting the problem from the structural level to an individual or “natural” matter of differences between specific minority groups and the majority (for critical accounts of this move, see Longman & De Graeve, 2014; Muhr & Plotnikof, 2018; Romani et al., 2020). While HRM and CSR initiatives in this vein may indeed improve the working lives of some employees and the bottom lines of their organizations, they often rely on discourses that categorize members of minority groups as being in need of “help” or “qualification.” Such discourses normalize and legitimize the continued marginalization of minorities who are positioned as “under‐qualified,” “needy,” and demanding “positive discrimination.” Therefore, the depoliticization of diversity management has produced a deadlock; the very strategies applied to include more women (particularly in management positions) and other under‐represented groups in organizational life may indeed serve to uphold their exclusion (Benschop et al., 2015; Ghorashi & Sabelis, 2013; Ortlieb & Sieben, 2014).…”