Alternative forms of organizing: Shifting organizational power and diversity relations?

Description

In light of recent studies that suggest that diversity management in hierarchical organizations does not produce the effects that it names and that discrimination within organizations can only be tackled if power is redistributed beyond managerial approaches to diversity, the aim of this paper is to bring together conceptualizations of alternative organizations with a critical diversity discourse. In an explorative case study we analyse the websites of alternative organizations with regard to processes of inclusion and exclusion from a (critical) diversity perspective. Our interest in such a diversity-oriented analysis of alternative organizations stems from the assumption that organizations that proclaim values like participation, solidarity and connection as well as equality/equity aim at redistributing power and therefore might also challenge existing diversity relations. Our results show, however, that even the small scale aims at redistributing power we could identify are not related to diversity issues at all. We conclude by suggesting that claims for participation and solidarity must take existing inequalities based on socially established categories of inclusion and exclusion, such as gender, age, 'race', ethnicity, (dis)ability, sexual orientation or class, into account.

Period	7 Jul 2016 → 9 Jul 2016
Event title	32nd EGOS Colloquium, Sub-Theme 60: Shadowing diversity issues to exploit power dynamics and innovation processes in organization
Event type	Unknown
Degree of Recognition	International