SANCIONES Y MULTAS

Critical scholars problematization of business-centric understandings of ‘diversity’

has not only countered the managerial logic and language of ‘mainstream’ diversity field, but also opened-up possibilities for (re)imagining the very study of OS, whom the field is for and its role in the creation of more emancipative, socially just and radical organizational realities against and beyond the logics of capital. At the same time, these approaches have also been limited in two major ways. Firstly, diverse subjects’ agency is somewhat lost amidst the totalizing logics of capital. Indeed, in conceptualizing organizational power in terms of ‘domination’, critical scholars have largely ignored the multiple ways in which contemporary organizational power seems to operate by enjoining workers to “develop self-images and work orientations that are deemed congruent with managerially defined objectives” (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002, p619), which, paradoxically, reconstitutes employees’ agency as a form of (self-)management and opens up spaces of resistance and micro-emancipation (Alvesson &

Willmott, 2002; Zanoni & Janssens, 2007).

Secondly, it also seems that in seeking to oppose the instrumentalism which permeates discussions of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ in organizations, critical scholars have not

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problematized ‘diversity’, running the risk of stabilizing differences as ontological facts to be ‘rescued’ from profit-making mechanisms (Ahonen et al., 2014; Prasad, 2012; Zanoni et al., 2010). Whilst positing gender/sexuality as an “interchangeable cog in the profit-making mechanism” (Litvin, 2006, p87) is surely a powerful metaphor around which to construct a challenge to managerial readings of ‘diversity’, this seems to miss the specific ways in which gender/sexuality is currently becoming incorporated and enveloped in processes of capital accumulation (for example, see:

Preciado, 2008; Preciado, 2013).

A poststructuralist approach to gender/sexuality seems to offer one way to redress these limitations. Indeed, poststructuralist and discursive approaches, whilst still critical of the ways in which the business case trumps questions of social justice, have reconciled the two discourses and reconstituted (diverse) workers’ strategic agency in the process (Ahmed, 2007; Brewis, 2018; Tomlinson & Schwabenland, 2010; Zanoni

& Janssens, 2004, 2007; Zanoni, Janssens, Benschop & Nkomo, 2010).

Poststructuralist approaches have also redressed the second limitation by placing emphasis on ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ as organizational discourses rather than realities- intended and/or attained (Ahonen et al., 2014; Jones & Stablein, 2006; Tyler, 2018; Zanoni & Janssens, 2004, 2007; Zanoni et al., 2010). These have thus pointed to “the problems deriving from a positivistic ontology of identity” (Zanoni et al., 2010, p12), in particular the ways in which identities “are conceptualized as ready- made, fixed, clear-cut, easily measurable categories” (Ibid). These interventions have also deconstructed the very concept of ‘diversity’ and argued that this reproduces

“white, heterosexual, western, middle/upper class, abled men as the term of reference”

(Ibid). Thus, reflecting third-wave interests in gender/sexuality and organization, poststructuralist scholars call for more attention to the paid to social constructed-ness of categories of diversity and the manifold ways in which “focusing academic and philosophical inquiry on the study of analytical categories of difference scholars overlook the discursive processes that produce these differences and, thus, fail to holistically appreciate the [a]etiology of cultural disenfranchisement” (Prasad, 2012, p569). A limited but emerging body of scholarship within poststructuralist approaches is that of queer OS. In the thesis, I adopt a poststructuralist approach, and a queer perspective in particular, in order to maintain a critical perspective without denying

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agency to the subjects of diversity and inclusion nor foregoing nuance in an exploration of the specific ways in which gender/sexuality becomes incorporated in capitalist regimes.

2. 3 Queer OS: queering gender/sexuality, diversity and inclusion, and ‘the LGBT-friendly organization’

Whilst queer theory does not contest that some people do in fact experience their identity in coherent and stable ways, it also recognizes that an understanding of

“virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of the homo/heterosexual binary” (Sedgwick, 1990, p1). Queer theory thus seeks to explore “the dynamic character of identities” (Bendl et al., 2008, p384) and expose “the mechanisms of exclusion implicit in a heterosexual/homosexual, male/female opposition” (Ibid). In utilizing queer theory, scholars of organizations have not only troubled gender/sexual categories but also “the central categories and meanings associated with organizations and organizing” (Pullen et al., 2016b, p84).

Queer approaches to OS have indeed been deployed to challenge organizational concepts, questioning dominant understandings of ‘leadership’, ’management’,

‘accounting’ (Bendl et al., 2008; Harding, Lee, Ford & Learmonth, 2011; Lee, Learmonth & Harding, 2008; Parker, 2001, 2002, 2016; Rumens, 2017; Tyler &

Cohen, 2008). In relation to ‘diversity’ (management) and ‘inclusion’, queer scholars have showed how these discourses work to produce gender/sexuality as stable, neat, de-politicized, contained, manageable, and marketable (Bendl et al., 2008; Morrish &

O’Mara, 2011; Rumens, 2018). Whilst studies applying queer theory and concepts to diversity (management) discourses are still limited, it seems that a queer emphasis on the deconstruction of categories “is especially well suited for unpacking ‘diversity management’s’ implicit assumptions about identity constructions” (Bendl &

Hofmann, 2015, p383).

Indeed, crucial to a queer sensitivity is an understanding and appreciation of gender/sexuality less as a fixed property of individuals, and the categories we use to

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define it less as means through which to “discover the ‘roots’ or ‘authentic’ content of one’s identity” (Lorbiecki & Jack, 2000, p26), and more as performatively (and messily) constituted and in a constant process of becoming. Queer approaches are highly indebted to Foucault’s poststructuralist framework and re-conceptualization of gender/sexuality as a culturally and historically specific category of knowledge, which opens up a space to reconcile it as irremediably part of the realm of (Western) power (Foucault, 1978, 1981)²². A queer perspective thus allows us to decentre the “picture of stable identity that is intrinsic to the modern [liberal] subject” (Bendl et al., 2008, p385). From this perspective, identity categories can thus be read as “…instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression” (Butler, 1993, p308). Ambivalence here is key, for identity is both the site of one’s empowerment and oppression, resistance and control. Such an understanding politicizes agency, whereby whilst resistance is not possible outside of discourse, there is always possibility for what Butler (1993, 1999) calls ‘resignification’ or ‘subversive citation’. Central to this understanding of identity and agency is the concept of performativity, which foregrounds the way in which “…being gay or lesbian is not a truth to be discovered, it is a performance, which is enacted” (Ward & Winstanley, 2005, p452), and thus open to change and transformation.