Change agency as performance and embeddedness: Exploring the possibilities and limits of Butler and Bourdieu

In this paper, we explore the dual role of human agency in maintaining the status quo and generating change. Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu offer differing conceptions of change agency in relation to organization and transformation of gender relations. Focusing on how those approaches would work, we analyse an empirical case study on a particular change process: getting women the right to vote in the Swiss cantons of Appenzell. We contribute to the current use of Butler's and Bourdieu's theories in organization studies in three main ways. First, we explore stability and change from the lenses of these two scholars. Second, we illustrate how change agency looks from these two distinct perspectives. Finally, we offer an empirical analysis that identifies the main elements of change agency in the two frameworks and discuss the possibilities and limitations of bringing these two approaches together to better understand change agency.     

A Multi‐layered Exploration of the Diversity Management Field: Diversity Discourses,Practices and Practitioners in the UK

This paper presents a multi‐layered exploration of the diversity management field in the UK. In doing so, it aims to address two problematic tendencies in the current diversity research: the focus on single‐level explorations, and the polarization between critical and mainstream approaches. Using Bourdieu's concept of field, I develop a theoretical framework that conceptualizes the field of diversity management in three constituents: diversity discourse, diversity practice and diversity practitioners. The framework is used to analyse empirical evidence generated through semi‐structured interviews with 19 diversity managers of large private‐sector companies. This study reveals the presence of a gap between the diversity discourse and practice, and the absence of any standard set of qualifications and skills requirement for practitioners. The findings demonstrate the twofold role of discourse in drawing the boundaries of the diversity management field. First, it is instrumental in constructing diversity management as distinct from equal opportunities. Second, the use discourse functions as a mechanism to control the entry of practitioners into this field, which otherwise has low entry barriers. The paper offers a contribution to management research in general and equality and diversity research in particular through its original use of Bourdieuan sociology in an empirical study.     

Work–Life,Diversity and Intersectionality: A Critical Review and Research Agenda

Work–life issues have important implications at both organizational and individual levels. This paper provides a critical review of the work–life literature from 1990 onwards through the lens of diversity, with a particular focus on disparities of power induced by methodological and conceptual framings of work and life. The review seeks to answer the following questions: What are the gaps and omissions in the work–life research? How may they be overcome? To answer these questions, the review scrutinizes blind spots in the treatment of life, diversity and power in work–life research in both positivist and critical scholarship. In order to transcend the blind spots in positivist and critical work–life research, the review argues the case for an intersectional approach which captures the changing realities of family and workforce through the lens of diversity and intersectionality. The theoretical contribution is threefold: first, the review demonstrates that contemporary framing of life in the work–life literature should be expanded to cover aspects of life beyond domestic life. Second, the review explains why and how other strands of diversity than gender also manifest as salient causes of difference in experiences of the work–life interface. Third, the review reveals that social and historical context has more explanatory power in work–life dynamics than the micro‐individual level of explanations. Work–life literature should capture the dynamism in these contexts. The paper also provides a set of useful recommendations to capture and operationalize methodological and theoretical changes required in the work–life literature.     

In the steps of Joan Acker: A journey in researching inequality regimes and intersectional inequalities

Inspired by two of Acker's interconnected concepts, inequality regimes and intersectionality, the authors revisit their intersectional research. By exploring their various studies on inequality regimes and intersectionality, the authors propose some novel insights that have emerged from an aggregate appraisal of some 17 empirically researched papers, all shaped by Joan Acker's sociology. While Acker's work on gender and organizations has provided crucial insights into much of this work, this article concentrates on the overarching concept of inequality regimes and then focuses in on less‐developed aspects of intersectionality in Acker's work. In doing so, it reconsiders the value of inequality regimes in pushing the boundaries of intersectional insights.     

On the Power and Poverty of Critical (Self) Reflection in Critical Management Studies: A Comment on Ford,Harding and Learmonth

Ford, Harding and Learmonth in their paper in the March 2010 special issue of the British Journal of Management ask ‘who is it that would make business schools more critical?’ Commenting on their paper, I argue that although they raise a very important question they do not deliver rigorous answers because their critical reflexive gaze fails to fall upon the mechanisms of hierarchy and exclusion that operate within the critical management studies (CMS) community. First the reflexivity debate in CMS and Ford, Harding and Learmonth's contribution to this debate is explored. Next institutionalized orthodoxies in CMS, such as the tendency to close ranks for those with different perspectives and the lack of demographic diversity, are problematized, and Ford, Harding and Learmonth's contribution is situated across these orthodoxies. Finally, the commentary offers some alternatives and solutions for CMS to take the step further from verbalism to critical praxis. It is suggested that the solution lies in exercising critical self‐reflection which acknowledges the embeddedness of CMS in structures and relations of power and hegemony and recognizes the role of CMS scholars in sustaining and reproducing these structures in their own institutions and communities.     

A separability result for gmm estimation,with applications to gls prediction and conditional moment tests

Generalized method of moments estimates are unaffected by the addition of equal numbers of moment conditions and extra parameters. We prove thisresult and give examples of its use.     

Close Encounters: Minority and Majority Perceptions of Discrimination and Intergroup Relations in Antwerp,Belgium

Increasing numbers of second‐generation Muslims are highly qualified and locally embedded in today's European cities. This does not protect them, however, from experiencing discrimination in intergroup encounters in school, at work, or in the street. Taking an approach from local intergroup relations between ethnic minorities and the majority society, we draw on the TIES (The Integration of the European Second Generation) surveys to compare Turkish and Moroccan minorities and majority Belgians in Antwerp, Belgium. Our research aims (1) to establish minority and majority perspectives on (reverse) personal discrimination (2) in different life domains, and (3) to differentiate internally between gender, socioeconomic attainments, and local climates. Structural equation models show minority and majority group perspectives on discrimination as gendered and situated intergroup encounters in socioeconomic and civic domains of life.     

‘If a leaf falls,they blame the tree’: scattered notes on Gezi resistances,contention, and space

On 31 May 2013, violent police intervention against the activists at Gezi Park, Istanbul, resisting against the unlawful demolition of trees at the park, led to a popular uprising throughout Turkey. It was unexpected and unprecedented. The resistances were, and still are, multifaceted and multilayered. Taken as an episode of contention, it is hard to argue that this has come to an end, and the falling leaf can hardly be blamed on the tree. This paper is an attempt to understand this episode, borrowing from the DOC (dynamics of contention) program, emphasizing the importance of space in the Lefebvrian sense, with respect to the changing socio-spatial order of the cities.     

A separability result for gmm estimation, with applications to gls prediction and conditional moment tests

Generalized method of moments estimates are unaffected by the addition of equal numbers of moment conditions and extra parameters. We prove thisresult and give examples of its use.