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Minority Employees Engaging with (Diversity) Management: An Analysis of Control, Agency, and Micro‐Emancipation*
Author(s) -
Zai Patrizia,
Janssens Maddy
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
journal of management studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.398
H-Index - 184
eISSN - 1467-6486
pISSN - 0022-2380
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6486.2007.00700.x
Subject(s) - emancipation , bureaucracy , agency (philosophy) , diversity (politics) , identity (music) , diversity management , control (management) , sociology , constellation , public relations , qualitative research , gender studies , political science , management , social science , law , aesthetics , politics , economics , philosophy , physics , astronomy , anthropology
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.