Re-situating organizational knowledge: Violence,intersectionality and the privilege of partial perspective

Abstract

Scholars have called repeatedly for more nuanced understandings of power and organizational knowledge, but researchers have yet to integrate available critical frameworks that could link these concepts. Moreover, existing analyses of power in organizational knowledge tend to focus on role differences but do not yet consider how social differences – including gender, race and sexuality – shape knowledge. Working from a practice-based approach, I draw upon standpoint theory and intersectionality to show how whiteness, masculinity and heteronormativity are embedded in organizational knowledge. I construct this argument using a case study at a US university known for having some of the best systems for building organizational knowledge about sexual violence on campus. I argue that the university’s practices – specifically those related to interpretation and definition – mask heterogeneity in knowledge across the university. I also show how practices give the university’s knowledge the appearance of neutrality and, subsequently, can unintentionally defer important organizational actions.

Keywords

critical organizational studies intersectionality organizational knowledge power practice rape sexual violence situated knowledge standpoint theory Title IX

Organizational knowledge is sometimes discussed as if it is neutral and homogenous among social groups (Contu and Willmott, 2003; Kuhn and Jackson, 2008). Yet scholars consistently show that most organizational phenomena are neither neutral nor homogenous. Instead, they are patterned by gender, race and sexuality (e.g. Acker, 2006; Ashcraft and Allen, 2003; Brewis and Linstead, 2000; Fleming, 2007; Gherardi, 1995; McDonald, 2015; Nkomo, 1992; Wingfield, 2009). Researchers have yet to incorporate critical frameworks that could address how power and difference shape organizational knowledge, despite scholars’ repeated calls for this work (Lyon and Chesebro, 2011). In this article, I use a practice-based approach to demonstrate some of the inequalities embedded in organizational knowledge production. Additionally, I show how some interaction supports the assumption that knowledge is similar across organizational members. I argue that the seeming homogeneity of organizational knowledge can have unintended, negative consequences.

I elucidate these claims by examining United States universities’ organizational knowledge about sexual assault on their campuses. Studies of rates of sexual violence consistently show that one in five women and approximately half of students who identify as LGBTQ experience rape during their college career (Cantor et al., 2015; Fisher et al., 2010; Krebs et al., 2016), yet the numbers colleges report – as required by federal law – tend to be significantly lower than those in academic prevalence studies. Indeed, in 2014, 91% of approximately 11,000 US campuses reported zero rapes (Becker, 2015). I demonstrate that the mismatch in academic prevalence studies and official university accounts can be partially explained when I look at the practices through which universities develop the numbers in their reports. These practices are one of the ways in which universities generate organizational knowledge about sexual violence. Using a case study at a university considered to have some of the best policies and procedures for reporting sexual violence, I show how that university’s knowledge prioritizes whiteness, heteronormativity and masculinity in ways that lead to lower numbers of reports than actual incidents of sexual violence. To do so, I draw upon standpoint theory and intersectionality.

Standpoint theory and intersectionality

Feminist standpoint theories make the following claims (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 2004; Hartsock, 1998). First, knowledge comes from experience. Because groups are located differently in social structures, their experience, and thus their knowledge, differs. Second, all knowledge is partial. Third, some knowledge is less partial than other knowledge. Drawing on what Collins (1999) calls the ‘outsider within,’ standpoint theorists assume that historically marginalized groups must know about not only their own experience, but also the experiences and knowledge of groups with more power. Dominant groups shape the world, so to survive, marginalized groups must understand the dominant group. Because dominant groups do not similarly need to understand less powerful groups, they have a less complete view of the world. On the whole, standpoint theory tracks the ‘relations between power and knowledge’ (Collins, 2004: 255) and works to transform inequalities that are the outcomes of those relations.

To date, organizational communication scholars have employed standpoint theory to demonstrate how seemingly neutral concepts are infused with assumptions about dominant groups. For example, Allen (1996, 1998) detailed the raced and gendered specificities of organizational socialization. She argued that when race and gender go unmarked in scholarly discussions, processes designed for White males become the assumed-universal norm. Orbe (1998: 3) also showed how European American males’ organizational experiences are not universal by illustrating ‘common patterns of communication both across and within . . . different marginalized groups’ that challenge unmarked norms. Similarly, Dougherty (1999: 438) used standpoint theory to argue that men’s and women’s understandings of sexual harassment differ and that effective prevention policies must account for a ‘gender gap’ in understanding ‘what sexual harassment means’. Building from this work, I use standpoint theory to demonstrate how power attached to race, gender and sexuality operates in the production of organizational knowledge. Furthermore, I show how overlooking the power dynamics in organizational knowledge production can have negative outcomes. As I proceed, I also affirm the continued importance of standpoint theory for scholars who wish to address matters of difference and inequality in organizations.

In addition to standpoint theory, I also rely on intersectional theory. Standpoint theory and intersectionality are often used together. Indeed, Harding (2009: 194) said vehemently, ‘standpoint work must always be “intersectional”’. The term ‘intersectionality’ is attributed to Crenshaw (1991), who used it to describe the ways women of color experience marginalization on the basis of gender and race. Intersectionality is the ‘interaction between gender, race, and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power’ (Davis, 2008: 68). Some scholars have used intersectionality to show how organizational processes are shaped by interconnected systems of race, gender and sexuality (Acker, 2006; Scott, 1998; Ward, 2004). Drawing upon this work, Holvino (2010: 262) identified a need for more intersectional research on organizational processes that ‘seem normal at the same time that they produce and reproduce particular relations of inequality and privilege’. Furthermore, she called for work that shows how ‘beliefs and ways of engaging at the societal level produce and reproduce inequalities in organizations’ (p. 262). This project contributes to these needs by (a) detailing the intersectional dynamics involved in building organizational knowledge at WU, and (b) showing how practice makes problematic intersectional power dynamics hard to notice.

In this piece, intersectionality shows up most plainly in two ways, the first of which is in my definition of sexual violence. Though rape has often been described as if it is about gender alone, an intersectional approach asserts that sexual violence implicates interconnected systems of difference including but not limited to race, sexuality and gender (e.g. French, 2013). An intersectional approach pays attention to categories of difference and the discourses that shape them (Dill et al., 2007; Ferree, 2011; Flores, 2006). Accordingly, the term sexual violence references not only rape and other immediate forms of sexual assault, but also the histories and discourses of racism and homophobia that exceed any single moment of bodily violation (Harris and Hanchey, 2014). This approach to sexual violence is not only consistent with an intersectional tradition, but it also resonates with the history of the laws that govern US universities’ knowledge about sexual violence: they were developed in close relationship with civil rights acts that address racial discrimination and harassment (Valentin, 1997).

Intersectionality also guides a second area of this work, my analytic approach. Because they draw links between human identity categories (e.g. the race of people) and institutional processes (e.g. the racial dynamics of the U.S. legal system), intersectional scholars regularly blur perceived-to-be distinct levels of analysis (Cho et al., 2013; Winker and Degele, 2011). As Perry (2009: 230) noted, ‘Unlike other contemporary theories, theories of intersectionality are more fluid with regard to how they interpret the relationship between the social structure and individuals’. Given these aspects of intersectional work, in the analyses that follow, you will see me analyze individuals’ statements during interviews alongside institutionally-authored policies. For many intersectional scholars, the links among identities, interpersonal interaction and institutional processes show up in ‘social action and speech’ (Winker and Degele, 2011: 56). In other words, this intersectional approach prompts an analytic style that resonates with the practice-based approach to knowledge I detail in the following section.

Organizational knowledge as a practice

Many scholars conceptualize organizational knowledge as a practice, and they locate knowing in human interaction (Brown and Duguid, 2001; Cook and Brown, 1999; Gherardi, 2006; Nicolini et al., 2003; Rennstam and Ashcraft, 2013). Instead of assuming that knowledge is an individual’s cognition, a practice-based approach posits knowledge as a social process. For instance, Heaton and Taylor (2002: 220) argue that ‘knowledge is generated collaboratively’, and Tsoukas and Vladimirou (2005: 122) claim that knowledge is generated through ‘sustained interactions’ within professional communities.¹ Furthermore, this practice-based approach disentangles knowledge from a single Truth; knowledge becomes the ‘active and ongoing accomplishment of problem solving’ (Kuhn and Jackson, 2008: 455) in organizations, not an arrival at certainty. From this perspective, organizational knowledge is never something final, fixed or stable. Instead, it is constantly created and negotiated.

This assumption – that knowledge is a context-specific accomplishment – resonates with critical analyses of power in organizations (Mumby, 2008). Indeed, many critical organizational scholars are united in their attention to the social production of organizational phenomena (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000). Despite these possible affinities, power remains under-theorized in studies of organizational knowledge (Fox, 2000). For example, Brown and Duguid’s (2001: 209) assertion that knowledge ‘draws upon [an organization’s] embeddedness in broader structures’ might invite consideration of social difference. Yet examinations of broader structures routinely focus on ‘professional associations’ (Heaton and Taylor, 2002: 212) and do not yet extend to matters of race, gender, sexuality and other axes of inequality. Similarly, Contu and Willmott (2003: 290) point out that discussions of ‘situated’ learning and knowledge usefully avoid universal claims, but often leave out ‘issues of history, language, and power’ so that ‘little consideration is given to . . . wider conditions – historical, cultural, and social’. Furthermore, though a practice-based view assumes knowledge is in constant flux, Kuhn and Jackson (2008: 454) identify ‘dubious assumptions about knowledge homogeneity within groups’ that pervade organizational scholarship, and, as I argue, may undermine potential for understanding inequalities embedded in knowledge processes. Given these tendencies in existing literature, scholars have repeatedly called for analyses of organizational knowledge that center power (Gherardi, 2006; Lave and Wenger, 1991). I use the assumptions from the practice-based approach to understand how power dynamics generate a mismatch between university reports of sexual violence and established rates of sexual violence.

Mandated reporting of sexual violence: Context, case and method

I draw empirical material from processes used for third-party reports of sexual violence at US universities, processes I refer to as ‘mandated reporting.’ At institutions that receive federal funding – most US schools – certain employees must document instances of discrimination, harassment and physical violence, including rape and other sexual assaults. They must do so anytime they hear about or witness one of these episodes, regardless of the wishes of the person who experiences that incident. People who directly experience violence are not required to report, but if those people speak about their experiences of violence, certain organizational members who listen to them must. Three federal laws shape these mandatory reporting policies at US universities: Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, the Clery Act, signed in 1990, and a 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Together, the laws set up a complex system of requirements for universities to provide training about sexual violence, offer prevention programming, annually publicize reported incidents of sexual assault, and take action in response to their knowledge about sexual violence (United States Department of Education, 2014; White House Task Force, n.d.). Mandated reporting is one way that most US universities meet some of these legal requirements and, importantly, generate their knowledge about sexual violence.

This piece is based on a larger case study of one US university I dub Western University (WU). At the time of the study, most US universities required only certain administrators to make third party reports of violence, but at WU, any ‘supervisor’ – a person who hired, punished, evaluated, or graded others – had to make reports. Unlike personnel at many other institutions, WU mandated reporters were required to make reports in all of their institutional roles. For example, because a graduate student grades undergraduates, she is a mandated reporter. If she hears from a friend about his experience of racialized violence at WU, the graduate student must file a report even though she does not grade her friend. At the time of the study, WU’s reporting obligations were arguably some of the most expansive among US universities, and since then, many other universities have adopted similar processes. Staff who oversee WU’s mandatory reporting trained and consulted with other universities around the country, and other institutions modeled their policies after WU’s. Because WU was perceived to have one of the most effective US mandated reporting systems, it is the site for this study.

Consistent with long-established critical approaches to organizations (Deetz, 1982), I collected two types of data at WU: talk (speech) and text (written words) about mandated reporting of sexual violence. Talk and text are both instances of organizational knowledge practice, and they are forms of social interaction to which intersectional analysts pay attention. To access talk and text, I conducted 19 interviews – amounting to 341 single-spaced pages of transcription – with WU members responsible for mandated reporting. Fourteen of the interviewees were individuals obligated to make reports of violence on campus, and the remaining five were people whose job was to design, enforce or advise about the reporting processes. At one scheduled interview with this latter group, I arrived and learned that the interviewee had invited two other people to join her, so we recorded a conversation with the four of us.

Second, I used 70 single-spaced pages of field notes from my participant observation at public meetings at WU where violence was likely to be discussed. These meetings included training and educational sessions about sexual violence and mandated reporting for students, staff and faculty. They also included university forums where sexual violence was discussed. Third, I gathered 63 policy, law and media documents regarding mandated reporting at WU.

My analysis of these moments of talk and text proceeded through three phases. First, I conducted coding similar to that done in grounded theory and thematic analysis (Charmaz, 2004; Clarke, 2005). I noted explicit discussions of gender, race and sexuality in the data and grouped these notes into overarching themes. For each theme I developed a description, identified key exemplars and identified the theme’s relation to others. I then used this ‘codebook’ to work through the data a second time to refine my notes. Though I did not begin the larger project with a focus on organizational knowledge, it emerged as a central link between each of the themes during this first phase of analysis. This shift in focus is common for qualitative research, and the messiness of the process is often obscured in subsequent writing (Tracy, 2012).

In my second phase of analysis, I used critical scholarship as an analytic tool. This reading practice is akin to critical rhetorical analysis in which theory and method are intertwined (McKerrow, 1989). Because of this, the technique is rarely described in the way interpretive-qualitative methods are. One of the key purposes of this style of criticism is to read and write to ‘alter or shift public knowledge by illustrating how that knowledge has been constructed’ (Sloop, 2004: 18). I did this by collecting concepts and frameworks from two literatures – organization and feminist studies – that explained how organizations respond to and enact violence. I wrote about connections between each concept or framework and an emerging analytic claim. My application of standpoint theory began during this second phase of analysis. In the third phase of analysis, I repeated phases one and two to refine my explanation of the relations among standpoint theory and organizational knowing. This repetition led to two insights. First, a theme I identified in the first phase of analysis, ‘interpreting talk about violence,’ was commentary on intersectionality and second, ‘knowledge’ related to assumptions that language can offer a straightforward account of the world.

After completing a draft, I reviewed my analysis with eight of 11 participants who agreed to a follow-up interview. We developed my emic analysis in these member reflections, an opportunity for ‘reflexive elaboration’ (Tracy, 2010: 844). I also spent at least 40 hours sharing my findings with colleagues at other academic institutions who provided similar feedback, a qualitative methods practice called ‘peer debriefing’ (Spall, 1998).² Finally, after my analysis was complete, I authored a white paper based on the findings, and I had conversations about that document with WU members as well as Title IX groups across the US.

Each of the traditions I draw upon – practice-based approaches, standpoint theory and intersectionality – decenters the individual knower. Furthermore, in standpoint theory, claims to knowledge are strong when they are part of ‘a process of ongoing critical interpretation among “fields” of interpreters’ (Haraway, 1988: 590). Consequently, I highlight the social production of the claims in this piece. I include participants’ objections to the terms I used on the consent form, incorporate comments from peer debriefing, note differences between my own interpretations and those of organizational members, and mention how interviewees and I co-navigated the reporting requirements that guide knowledge at WU. I have written these interactions and others into the article to emphasize that knowledge is a collective and contingent practice. Moreover, these techniques are consistent with what MacBeth (2001) called ‘textual reflexivity,’ disruptions of the sense that a text is separate from a phenomenon and can offer a sole, definitive account. These techniques do not completely escape pervasive assumptions about the singular authority of a researcher (Alvesson et al., 2008). They do, however, resist the illusion of autonomous knowledge claims, and in turn, write against ‘a recurrent tendency to reduce the notion of standpoint to the social location of individuals’ (Wylie, 2003: 29). In the analyses that follow, I show that many knowledge claims at WU – including the ones I have made – are contested. These struggles over which knowledge should guide WU – and the consequences of those struggles – constitute the practice I seek to illustrate.

Practice generates partial knowledge

I argue that two notable processes shape organizational knowledge of violence at WU: (a) WU members’ uneven recognition of talk about incidents of sexual violence as such and (b) social interactions in which whiteness and heteronormativity shape WU’s definition of sexual violence. Participants noted that WU mandated reporters who are members of underrepresented groups are more likely than others to notice reportable incidents. As I explain below, this theme resonates with tenets of standpoint theory. Further, as WU members interact through talk and text, the term ‘sexual violence’ circulates in ways that marginalize queerness and color. Through these practices, the organization’s knowledge of sexual violence – like all knowledge – becomes incomplete. Problematically, that official knowledge gets used to defer or decline improved responses to sexual violence and related discriminatory systems at WU.

Uneven recognition of sexual violence generates partial knowledge

Participants repeatedly asserted, and my analysis of field notes corroborated, that WU mandated reporters do not always recognize sexual violence as such. Participants suggested that social power dynamics make it hard for some WU members to discern when a person’s account of an event fits in the category sexual violence. To identify a person’s description of rape, harassment or assault as such, WU reporters must interpret talk about incidents of sexual violence in ways that run counter to dominant perspectives. Furthermore, participants uphold that organizational members at the intersections of femininity, queerness and color are more likely than the majority university population to identify reportable events accurately. This uneven recognition of sexual violence buffers the university from more complete knowledge.

Participant Vin, who advocates for underrepresented WU students and identified himself as a man of color, made comments representative of this theme:

Our underrepresented groups will report out against their . . . White counterparts. So they’ll report out consistently like, ‘Hey, girl, that’s not right . . .’ And it’s a White student and the White student’s like, ‘How come that’s not right?’ So our underrepresented students have to explain a lot.

In this excerpt, Vin links identity and knowledge: whiteness confers privilege upon WU members who are able not to recognize violence. Notably, Vin describes a White student who does not understand what she is witnessing. Vin suggests that underrepresented students are more likely to identify reportable incidents. Further, because privilege protects other students from the same understanding, underrepresented students – many of whom are mandated reporters – perform extra labor to explain why something is reportable. Vin continues:

It seems like with the White counterparts – White students – it’s a normal thing . . . not to report . . . ‘Oh yeah, he did this and this. That’s just what they do.’ You know, versus where a student of color has said, ‘They’ve done this and this.’ Almost pretty much the same type of action or behavior, and they report that out. Maybe that’s a cultural difference or a class difference. I don’t know. It’s interesting to see the same action or behavior and one group of folks, specifically our students of color, report that out versus our White counterparts where it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s just normal.’ See, that’s not right . . . Even with our GLBT students who say, ‘Oh, this fraternity – this student called me out because I was identified as GLBT and they said this and that.’ And they, our GLBT students who are underrepresented on this campus, they report it out too. But they are also White students as well. So it’s just different . . . It feels like the White students are just thinking it’s a normal behavior and it’s not.

Vin suggests that, for privileged students associated with whiteness, many reportable instances seem ordinary and not worthy of note. Throughout this passage, Vin suggests that different group memberships impact university members’ ability to recognize and respond to the ‘same action or behavior.’ Though two individuals may hear about exactly the same incident of sexual violence, he suggests that those people most associated with privilege – whiteness, heterosexuality, wealth – are least likely to recognize sexual violence as such and thus least likely to make the required third-party report. He articulates an intersectional approach to understanding these differences: those WU members at the intersections of underrepresented social groups – including race, sexuality, class and gender categories – are more likely to understand some behavior as problematic.

Vin’s comments exemplify a theme that appeared across the data for this study. Every interview participant but one alluded to the possibility that reporters may not recognize when another WU member is talking about a reportable incident of sexual violence. For example, they suggest that if a student at WU says, ‘I was out last night and said no but she kept going with sex anyway,’ many WU mandated reporters do not interpret that statement as a description of rape. In each of the mandatory reporting training sessions I observed, the trainer mentioned that people who speak about their experiences of rape, sexual assault, harassment or discrimination are unlikely to label them explicitly. In these meetings, WU officials acknowledged that mandated reporters must first hear about an incident and then interpret and categorize what they heard as reportable. Absent, however, from policy documentation, training sessions and my interviews with five enforcers of mandatory reporting is the notion that group membership affects interpretation of talk about incidents of violence so much that privileged WU members may notice nothing abnormal.

Yet participants Adam, Cam, Deb, Don, Emily, Melanie, Meg, Pat, Rachel, Sam, Sarah and Vin all highlight links between interpretation, group membership and knowledge. Every one of these participants is a mandated reporter. Furthermore, during the course of the interview, every one of these participants identified themselves – without my prompting – with at least one if not more of the following non-dominant groups: LGBTQ communities, people of color, women, feminists, first generation college students. Participants volunteered these self-identifications as they explained how they understand and recognize sexual violence. Several of these individuals cited prior experiences – with sexual education, with policing, with queer groups – as the reason why they see sexual violence differently and more often than other university members. Importantly, these participants note that the experiences that shape their interpretations occurred prior to their involvement with WU and outside of professional training. In these explanations, Vin and others implicitly draw upon standpoint epistemology. They know the world differently than their more privileged counterparts. For those who belong to dominant groups, sexual violence goes unrecognized because it does not stand out as anything unacceptable. As a consequence, a system designed to produce comprehensive third-party reports of sexual violence ends up prompting third-party reports primarily from members of the groups most marginalized at WU. Those WU members in majority groups end up making fewer reports not because people do not hear about incidents of sexual violence, but because they do not recognize descriptions of sexual violence. This theme particularly resonated with my peers who are mandated reporters at institutions other than WU. As I demonstrate in the next section, other kinds of social interaction complicate the uneven dynamics these participants identify in WU’s knowledge practice. Namely, the definitions central to the policies – ones sustained through talk and text – align with dominant group knowledge.

Definitional processes for sexual violence generate partial knowledge

At WU, the definitions of reportable events prioritize whiteness, heteronormativity and masculinity. Following assumptions I detailed in my earlier discussion of organizational knowledge as practice, I do not assume these definitions are static. Rather, the power dynamics embedded in definitions are continuously produced in texts (e.g. WU policy documents) and talk (e.g. statements during trainings and interviews). In these interactions, contests over the categories that shape WU knowledge take place and, as I argue, reinforce knowledge associated with dominant understandings of sexual violence.

Some of these dynamics are evident in a conversation I had with one enforcer of mandated reporting. In this excerpt, Ashley and I discuss my study’s informed consent form, and we debate how the definition of sexual violence I used on it – which included discrimination – connects to WU policy.

Ashley:

So, just in terms of some of the language . . . it sounds like your primary focus is on sexual violence, sexual harassment . . . Is that accurate?

Kate:

Yes.

Ashley:

So really your focus then is really on the sexual harassment policy. Even more than the discrimination and harassment policy . . .

Kate:

It’s certainly focused more on that although I see that that’s not completely disconnected from the other areas of the policy.

Ashley:

It’s not because that falls under the umbrella of gender discrimination . . .

As we talk, Ashley indicates that sexual violence and sexual harassment are best categorized under the university’s sexual harassment policy rather than the discrimination policy. I object in an effort to connect sexual violence with multiple categories of difference, though I do not voice the reasons for my objection. When Ashley suggests that my focus is ‘really on the sexual harassment policy,’ I hear her comments as a way to distance sexual violence from ‘discrimination,’ the institutional policy space that acknowledges race and sexual orientation. To stave off this erasure, I acknowledge the relationship between my study and the sexual harassment policy but also say, ‘I see that that’s not completely disconnected from other areas of the policy.’ Ashley agrees that a connection exists, but contrary to my own thinking, she suggests a connection via gender, rather than race and sexual orientation. Indeed, race and sexuality go entirely unmentioned in this interaction, even though I have included commentary about these categories in my narrative of my thinking about the interaction. A host of critical scholars have identified a tendency among many groups to explicitly name gender but not race or sexuality. They claim that when ‘gender’ is discussed by itself, it comes to mean ‘White heterosexual women,’ and this erasure, repeated over time, marginalizes women of color, queer women, and queer women of color (e.g. Brown, 1992; Carillo Rowe, 2000). By subsuming ‘sexual violence’ under ‘gender,’ in this interaction, Ashley and I participate in a practice that makes sexual violence about whiteness and heterosexuality.

Similarly, the Clery Act’s explanation of reportable sex offenses relies on a heteronormative framework for sexual violence. One of the foremost national experts on the Clery Act discussed reportable offenses – forcible rape, forcible sodomy and sexual assault with an object – during a WU training session. According to a handout:

Forcible rape is:

the Carnal knowledge of a person, which is defined by Black’s Law Dictionary (and the [US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s] Handbook) as ‘the act of a man having sexual bodily connections with a woman; sexual intercourse.’ Include: the slightest penetration of the vagina by a penis. NOTE: A male could be a victim if a female forced him to have vaginal intercourse with her.

Forcible Sodomy is:

forcible oral or anal sexual intercourse with another person.

Sexual Assault with an object is:

the use of an object or instrument to unlawfully penetrate, however slightly, the genital or anal opening of the body of another person. (Stafford, 2012: 11)

In my analysis, this definition of rape indicates that both men and women can experience rape, but men cannot rape men, and women cannot rape women. Although an incident in which a man rapes another man could potentially be reported as forcible sodomy, the definitions of forcible rape and forcible sodomy exclude women who rape women. In other training materials, an ‘object’ is defined as anything ‘other than the offender’s genitalia such as finger, bottle, handgun, stick.’ Given that anything other than genitalia is considered an ‘object,’ intercourse seems to require a phallus. Not only does this mean that women cannot have intercourse with other women, women’s violence against other women is rendered barely intelligible in these definitions. Further, the focus on penetration is especially problematic: if a person of any sex shoved a penis into a bottle opening, the act would not fit any of these three definitions of reportable offenses. These lacunae betray the heteronormative discourse that shapes mandated reports and, ultimately, what the university knows about violence.

The consequences of a heteronormative and gender-primary understanding of sexual violence play out in ‘Party Again,’ one of the orientation sessions for first-year students. A campus theater troupe performs a skit involving acquaintance rape. The story includes four characters: a male perpetrator, a female victim, the perpetrator’s male friend and the victim’s female friend. Using techniques from Boal’s (1993) forum theater, the actors perform the skit once. Then they repeat it several times, and a facilitator invites students in the audience to shout ‘Stop!’ when they see an opportunity to change the course of events. The action pauses, the student who shouted joins the actors on stage, and the skit resumes. The student – now an actor in the scene – tries to prevent the rape from happening, and the original actors improvise in response to that student’s actions. Participant Adam and I discussed these sessions:

Adam:

I think it’s interesting, too, in that scene, that it is always a White male [perpetrator] and a White female [victim] and then different friends, [laughs] right? . . . I mean sexuality is never marked and that was something I said, like, ‘If nothing else have his friend be gay. Like make his friend gay. Like why not?’ You know, or incorporate some differences in ways that break down this – not only notion of like who’s having sex, right, or who has the ability or the potential to, right, have sex, and who’s desirable in this scene. But also again it’s like who does the [mandated reporting] policy exist for? Right? It’s like so the policy exists for White people. [laughs] And if I’m a friend who’s different, I have a responsibility to protect my White friends.

In this excerpt, Adam marks the heteronormative frame through which violence and desirability are figured. Upon reviewing my initial analysis, Adam suggested that I note his identity as a gay man, and he asked, ‘Where am I in this [mandated reporting] policy?’ Adam’s question is not only about identity, but also about a discourse that evacuates sexual agency from queerness. Adam argues that the skit positions White heterosexuality as an object worthy of protection, despite the presence of a White heterosexual perpetrator. In this space where students learn how to recognize and respond to rape, the social interactions focus on violence against White heterosexual women. Furthermore, ‘different’ people are expected to intervene on her behalf.

My analysis of other data underscores Adam’s claim that queerness and color are responsible for intervening in violence. In a session of ‘Party Again’ that I observed, a male audience member stopped the action just before the rape occurred. When the skit restarted, that student stepped between the lead characters and said to the perpetrator, ‘Maybe we should hang out, man.’ Although I detected no sexual overtones in the intervention, the 400-person audience roared in derision as if there were. Discussing that incident with several other participants, all noted the homophobic undertones of the audience reaction: an invitation for closeness between two men was read as first, gay, and second, laughable. The laughter reinforced heteronormativity by marking this kind of interaction as out of bounds. In a second performance before a different audience, a male student performed a very similar intervention. This time, the student’s sexual innuendo was explicit: ‘Heya, so how you doin’?’ The audience celebrated. When asked later to explain the intervention, the student said, ‘I figured I’d go gay on him. Sometimes it works.’ The audience applauded as if the student had just delivered a cutting insult and seemed to interpret the student’s come-on as an attempt to humiliate the would-be perpetrator. Such humiliation works only under conditions of heterosexism and homophobia.

The difference between the audience’s reaction to these two interventions is important. The first man was ridiculed; perhaps he was not suitably masculine. The second man was lauded for his exaggerated flirtation; he made it clear that he was not ‘actually’ gay. His joke, ‘sometimes it works’ to ‘go gay,’ performed two functions. First, his sarcasm indicated that the ‘gay’ intervention could not succeed (because the straight perpetrator would not respond). Second, the joke illustrated not only his fluency with hetero-masculine discourse, but also his ability to wield that discourse to humiliate another man. These scenes cast the queer as deplorable. In short, they reinforce a conquest version of masculinity that depends upon homophobia for its bravado. This practice masks the violence the university could know about.

The observations and interview excerpts in this section represent recurring themes throughout the data for this study. In each of the examples, the talk and text produce partial knowledge. Understandings of who can be violent, who can experience violence, and who can intervene reflect troubling social, political and historical contexts in which the privileges of White heterosexuality depend on color and queerness. Heterosexuality becomes the rubric through which sexual violence is understood, and heterosexuality and whiteness often become synonymous. As I explain in the next section, challenges to these aspects of WU’s knowledge practice are met with resistance. In effect, that resistance ensures that the organization’s knowledge of sexual violence continues to prioritize privileged perspectives.

Practice reinforces privileged perspectives

I have thus far demonstrated some of the specific ways in which WU’s knowledge of violence becomes partial. First, I argued that group-based standpoints influence how reporters recognize talk about incidents of violence. Then, I traced the circulation of the category ‘sexual violence’ in proximity to whiteness and heteronormativity. In this section, I show how specific practices protect the organization from accounting for non-dominant groups’ knowledge about sexual violence. As I argue, WU’s assumption that reports merely transmit information reinforces the dominant groups’ perspectives. Consequently, the university does not have to respond to many requests for action from those who experience sexual violence and other outcomes of systemic oppression at WU.

WU makes a subtle distinction about reports, and the distinction is one practice that insulates the university’s partial knowledge. Enforcers of mandated reporting say that reportable instances of violence, discrimination and harassment must include names of specific perpetrators. One of these people, Emma, says this:

If someone is going so far as to name somebody else as causing them to feel uncomfortable or subjecting them to sexual harassment or . . . sexual assault, that is akin to making a specific complaint, that in my mind needs to be addressed institutionally. Which is very different than just a dialogue around the issues . . . If they’re going so far as to talk to a faculty member, to talk to a [mandated reporter], you know, that so and so has harassed me, has discriminated against me, has assaulted me, that is akin to raising a complaint to the institution that we have an obligation to address and it’s helping people understand that distinction.

Emma distinguishes dialogue and complaint by considering what people say about their own experiences of sexual violence. If a speaker does not name a perpetrator, the comments count as dialogue and do not prompt mandated reports. If a speaker names a perpetrator, the comments constitute a complaint that must be reported.

As a consequence, the university does not know about many instances of violence because when people speak about their experiences, their speech is often not considered a complaint. During the course of this research, without asking any questions about specific violent incidents, I learned of at least 20 assaults and/or episodes of harassment that university members experienced.³ Though I was required to make reports of sexual violence during the time I was a researcher at WU, I was not required to report any of these 20 incidents, in most cases because the person speaking did not identify a perpetrator. For example, at an educational session run by a campus theater group, the moderator asked the audience for feedback on the skit they had just watched about date rape: ‘Does this seem real?’ A woman in the audience replied, ‘I’ve seen it happen, and I stopped it.’ Another audience member expressed remorse for leaving a friend at a party who was assaulted later that same night. As a person sitting in the room, I knew that two instances of sexual violence or attempted assault occurred, but my knowledge did not become official WU knowledge because the talk I heard did not include any names of perpetrators and thus required no reporting. These incidents provide one illustration of how WU’s requirement that complaints include names buffers the university from more complete knowledge about sexual violence on campus.

The incompleteness of WU’s knowledge is not necessarily a problem. On the contrary, it is inevitable and has some benefits. Leaving space for non-reporting is important because it can grant those who have experienced violence some control over what happens in the wake of those assaults. Additionally, this study would not have been possible without the distinction between dialogue and complaint. In interviews, I would have needed to make multiple reports that would compromise participant confidentiality, subject participants to undue risk, and make the interviewing unethical per the standards for research communities. In some interviews, after an extensive discussion about how the reporting requirements would operate during our conversation, the participant and I would later spend time discussing how to speak about sexual violence in order to navigate our own sometimes conflicting roles as mandated reporters, researchers and research participants.

What is troubling, however, is that the boundaries around university knowledge can legitimate non-responsiveness even when an organizational member explicitly requests university action. Under the practices at WU, if a university member says to a mandated reporter, ‘J. Smith committed violence against me on this campus, and I do not want the university to take any action,’ that statement must be reported and becomes part of the organization’s knowledge. If, however, that university member says to a mandated reporter, ‘I have experienced violence on this campus and I want the university to do something about it,’ that statement does not have to be reported, does not constitute official knowledge, and requires no formal university response. Mandated reporting may paradoxically give survivors of violence some control over how the institution responds and, simultaneously, legitimate lack of action from the university in cases where survivors want the university to respond.

A group of student protesters articulated this latter experience – one of frustration with university inaction – in a meeting I attended at WU. After several racially motivated hate crimes on WU’s campus, students organized a series of dialogues for WU members to discuss discrimination, harassment and assault at the school. At the second meeting I attended, I arrived and was not sure if I was in the right place. The room was nearly empty, and the meeting was to begin in five minutes. At the last meeting, the space filled early. As I considered leaving, a group of undergraduate students walked single-file into the room. Duct tape covered their mouths, and they held signs reading: ‘Ignorance,’ and, ‘I hate it here.’ Most protestors were students of color, LGBTQ people, and advocates and allies for underrepresented campus populations. A spokesperson for the protestors said that students had been asked to explain themselves repeatedly, but the university ignored their testimonies about violence at WU. A few moments later, one of the protestors, a recent graduate and a Latina, spoke and predicted that violence would increase at WU. Referring to the new state law allowing students to carry concealed weapons, she said, ‘And now that there are guns on campus? What’s it going to take?’ She said that administrators claimed to be unable to ‘find the numbers’ to substantiate students’ descriptions of their experiences. She retorted, ‘Of course! That would be terrible. Hate crimes happen everyday.’ She said of the unresponsive university personnel, ‘They’ll create the time [to take action] when they don’t feel safe.’

In this vignette, the student protestors suggested that those with privileged identities are able not to notice violence. The recent graduate argued that administrators cannot ‘find the numbers’ because these incidents are so normal, so part of the fabric of everyday life, that certain groups – those with power and privilege – are able to overlook them. This claim echoes the one I detailed earlier in my discussion of Vin’s comments about privileged groups on campus not recognizing when they need to make reports. Additionally, this vignette illustrates an important consequence of that uneven recognition of violence: WU responds to claims that align with the dominant group’s knowledge and experience.

Despite the underrepresented students’ direct calls for the university to take action, the protestors’ descriptions counted as dialogue, not complaints. Because they discussed broad and systemic patterns of injustice, the protestors’ accounts did not include names of specific individuals. Per WU’s practice of mandated reporting, the testimonies generated no official organizational knowledge. In effect, WU requires knowledge in the dominant group’s terms – that is, ‘numbers of reports’ – before it takes action to change what is happening on the campus. The mandated reporting process is thus imbued with circularity. Knowledge is built upon reports, but reports often do not occur because privilege insulates reporters from knowing they need to report. When the numbers are then lower than what students say they are experiencing, those testimonies about experience are also discounted because they do not fit into the rules for reporting.

The circularity embedded in WU’s knowledge practice appears elsewhere, too. In an interview with several participants who enforce mandated reporting, we discussed whether WU’s official knowledge about the prevalence of campus violence was accurate. I asked a question about a comment one participant had made earlier in the interview:

Kate:

[Ashley], you mentioned, on a couple of occasions earlier as we were talking, this phrase, ‘if people report.’ So I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit, right, just in terms of people being willing to speak about the issue. Your particular office gets involved if there’s knowledge of [violence] and I wonder if you have a sense for – does the office have knowledge of what’s going on on campus? Is what’s coming here – does it fit with the broad scope of issues that may be coming up at the university? . . .

Ashley:

I think you’re asking are we aware that there may be pockets out there that don’t report, is I think kind of what you’re getting at and you’re right, I think to some degree we’re at a handicap in that it’s – obviously if we have any indication that that’s true we’re likely to be looking into it. Or we are looking into it, frankly. So I don’t know. I mean – do you guys have other thoughts on that [gestures to other interviewees]?

Emma:

I mean, I guess maybe I’m misinterpreting your question. Does the allegations that we receive through our office, does it sort of match . . . what is really going on in the broader community? I think that’s a very hard question to answer because we are – we only have the knowledge that we have . . . I’m not sure if that exactly answers your question but I – you know – we don’t – what we don’t know about it’s hard to know.

In this excerpt, Emma and Ashley suggest that if they knew university members were not reporting, they would investigate. In an explanation they offer later in this conversation, they clarify that the university would investigate if a WU member said, ‘Person X did not make a report when she should have.’ In other words, an investigation would require the same specific names of individuals that the reporting system for violence requires. The university would not investigate based on the claim that I detailed in earlier sections: groups of people, based on a lifetime of experience in a particular social location, do not know when they need to make reports because they do not recognize instances of sexual violence. At the end of the excerpt above, Emma offers the pithy phrase, ‘What we don’t know about it’s hard to know.’ If I use the vocabulary of standpoint theory to analyze this statement, Emma appears to be saying that it is difficult to account for how organizational knowledge becomes partial.

The idea that the university’s knowledge – and subsequent responsiveness to sexual violence – depends upon dominant groups showed up again in some responses to the white paper I circulated following the conclusion of this study. In that document, I stated the vast majority of participants indicated the reporting burden was unevenly distributed across the university. I shared the white paper with a number of people at WU, including the university’s legal team. The legal team looked into this claim and said:

An examination of university-tracked employment data associated with reporters of all cases indicates that approximately 80% of reporting witnesses identify as Caucasian, 55% of all reporting witnesses identify as female and 45% as male . . . Thus, while the small segment of the [WU] population you interviewed may feel that members of marginalized intersectional identities shoulder a greater reporting burden, this may not, in fact, be statistically accurate; and [it] is a bold conclusion to make based on the perception of a few employees without any supporting demographic data.

In the legal team’s refutation of this claim from my white paper, a contest over knowledge claims at WU is evident. Though the team grants the claim may be true for the individuals I interviewed, they challenge that the claim could apply to WU as a whole. They suggest that without numbers – that is, demographic data – my own knowledge claims are suspect. Indeed, the legal team cites percentages that appear to disprove participants’ claims. The legal team’s response is similar to the graduate protestor’s characterization of university administrators: the legal team cannot find the numbers to support my characterization of participants’ claims. In additional analysis, guided by some of the individuals who evaluated my claims during peer debriefing, I found that the numbers the legal team cites in this passage do support what study participants had said. When I compare these numbers with WU’s total demographics, White women along with men and women of color do report more than their White male counterparts. For example, though 45% of people who made third-party reports were male, 53% of WU’s possible reporters are male.

In this section, I have highlighted some controversy over the knowledge about sexual violence at WU. Additionally, I have underscored the difficulty of articulating non-dominant knowledge claims. Indeed, you can see a tenet of standpoint theory illustrated quite plainly: dominant groups need not understand the knowledge of non-dominant groups. In response to student protestors’ testimonies, participant claims and questions about the accuracy of WU’s numbers, the university repeatedly asks for knowledge claims to be translated into their own terms: ‘numbers,’ ‘reports,’ ‘complaints’. Yet at WU, dominant practices effectively prevent the translation of non-dominant claims into official knowledge. The practices I have identified offer some explanations for the gap between prevalence studies of sexual violence and WU’s official knowledge.

Re-situating organizational knowledge

This analysis of organizational knowledge practice at WU complicates existing scholarly frameworks for organizational knowledge. Across the data, participants suggest and my own observations confirm that organizational members’ practice is not homogenous. Yet WU’s refutation of claims that reporters’ practices are uneven make sense if those who have designed mandated reporting assume it can be what Kuhn and Jackson (2008) call a ‘determinate situation.’ People involved in determinate situations ‘evince confidence that others will employ similar interpretive schemes, use a common code, agree about the grounds and meanings of activity, and understand the action requirements’ (p. 459). I can read the administrators’ and legal team’s challenges to claims that knowledge is not homogenous as one way they ‘evince confidence’ that the organization can manage the schemes reporters use to interpret survivors’ accounts about incidents of sexual violence.

Indeed, this idea – that organizations can control organizational knowledge from within the organization – occurs quite a bit in existing understandings of organizational knowledge. For instance, Tsoukas and Vladimirou (2005:124, emphasis in original) state that ‘knowledge becomes organizational when . . . individuals draw and act upon a corpus of generalizations in the form of generic rules, produced by the organization’. Similarly, Patriotta (2003) and Lave and Wenger (1991) use the term ‘situated’ to link knowledge to organizational contexts and communities, both of which operate primarily within contained organizations and professions. Yet my analysis shows that many of mandated reporting’s tacit rules are neither produced by the organization nor developed through professional communities. At WU, the interpretive capacities of both underrepresented and dominant groups develop in concert with the social power attached to those groups. Furthermore, heteronormativity and whiteness – products of those same forms of social power – shape the category ‘sexual violence’. Neither practice is governed by WU alone. By downplaying the social and cultural influences on organizational knowledge, WU’s mandated reporting system insulates the university from addressing the partialities of its knowledge. As a result, mandated reporting ironically upholds some of the inequalities it is designed to reduce.

When study participants point out that they depend upon their extra-organizational experiences to understand what must be reported, they hint at an idea that exists in some organizational knowledge literature. Tsoukas (2005: 104), for instance, claims ‘history leaves its mark on how actors see the world’. At first glance, this claim parallels my argument. My participants advance that their experiences – their histories – shape how they see the world. But reading further, I note that Tsoukas’s use of the term ‘history’ bears different burdens than it does in standpoint theory. Tsouaks draws upon Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to connect individual organizational actors to history, yet that history remains the history of the individual:

The set of dispositions of each individual technician (i.e. his [sic] habitus) is the result of past socializations, reflecting the diverse social contexts each technician has gone through in the course of his life. The history of each technician will, no doubt, have left its mark on how he tends to think and behave. (2005: 107)

In this passage, the history that influences knowing is the technician’s history. His personal and individual experience affects him. This is an important starting point for the conceptualization of ‘situatedness’ I am developing, but Tsoukas’ rendering of individual history leaves out something crucial in these WU participants’ accounts: a focus on group membership.

Standpoint theory is able to center questions of power precisely because of its focus on groups. As Collins (2004: 248, emphasis added) states, ‘The notion of standpoint refers to groups having shared histories based on their shared location in relations of power . . . It is common location within hierarchical power relations that creates groups’. When the participants in this study – who overwhelmingly inhabit underrepresented populations – claim that they see things more privileged groups do not see, they are not making claim to personal experience alone. Instead, they repeatedly point out that their personal knowledge differs because they have lived a lifetime in a group that has been granted less social power. The historical accumulation of experience attached to color, queerness and femininity – in other words, group affiliations – is the basis for my participants’ claims. For these WU members, organizational knowledge does not depend on an individual’s history. Instead, as participants articulate, organizational knowledge depends on individuals’ social location in a cultural system of power. This claim resonates with Bourdieu’s (1990) discussion of habitus, but it differs from Tsoukas’ (2005) discussion of history because its makes social power dynamics central. Furthermore, this claim suggests that calls for better explanations of the relationship between individual member knowledge and organizational knowledge (Foss, 2007; Hecker, 2012; Taylor, 1999) may usefully think about the social groups standpoint theory brings into focus.

Although many organizations – including WU – work to eliminate inequalities on the basis of power, Healy et al. (2011), as well as Ahmed (2012), argued that intersectional inequalities persist even when organizations commit to eradicating them. My analysis shows that at WU, the practices that generate organizational knowledge help to maintain these inequalities, despite what I believe are the organization’s good intentions. Importantly, I join other organizational scholars who have used standpoint theory to illustrate how a seemingly neutral academic concept – organizational knowledge – is only neutral if whiteness, masculinity and heterosexuality are considered the norm.

The privilege of partial perspective

In this article, I advance organizational theory along two accounts. First, I re-situate organizational knowledge by drawing it in proximity to standpoint and intersectional theory. These lenses draw attention to axes of difference, namely race, gender and sexuality, that permeate the practice of organizational knowledge. By making these moves, I have responded to calls for additional analyses of power in organizational knowledge. Second, I have detailed a connection between organizational knowledge and inequality. Practice provides the appearance of neutral and uniform knowledge across an organization, and that appearance prevents the organization from accounting for how its knowledge is partial.

In the feminist traditions upon which I draw, the term ‘situated’ emphasizes the politics of knowing (Haraway, 1988). By demonstrating some of the power dynamics in WU’s organizational knowledge practice, I elevate questions of ethics. Collins (2004: 247) stressed, ‘standpoint theory never was designed to be argued as a theory of truth or method’ but is instead an ‘interpretive framework dedicated to explicating how knowledge remains central to maintaining and changing unjust systems of power’. My core concern is not what the organization knows, but how organizational knowledge re-centers whiteness, masculinity and heteronormativity.

In this piece, ‘the privilege of partial perspective’ operates in two senses. Following other standpoint theorists, I have prioritized some partial knowledge. Haraway (1988: 584) said ‘“Subjugated” standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more . . . transforming accounts of the world’ and Hartsock (2004: 245) echoed, ‘I want to privilege some knowledges over others because they seem to me to offer possibilities for envisioning more just social relations’. According to this logic, I have assumed the accounts of non-dominant groups at WU are more complete than other partial accounts. At the same time, I have critiqued ‘privilege’ to the extent that it insulates partial perspectives that, in their seeming completeness, blunt organizational transformation. I want to advance Harding’s (1991) question – Whose knowledge? – in scholarship on organizational knowledge. This question can evoke a more power-sensitive conversation about knowledge not only within organizational scholarship, but also within organizations. As a variety of institutions – including US higher education – evaluate the knowledge claims of their minority members, standpoint theory’s capacity to build transformative practices should not be overlooked.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Karen Ashcraft, Shawna Malvini Redden and Noah Schabacker for their feedback on this manuscript at various stages of its development.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Kate Lockwood Harris is Assistant Professor of Organizational Communication at The University of Minnesota Twin Cities, USA. Her scholarship examines the relationship between violence and communication from critical, feminist and intersectional perspectives. Harris’ research on organizational responses to sexual assault has been published in Management Communication Quarterly, Communication Theory and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. Related work appears in Discourse & Society, Violence Against Women, Women and Language and Women’s Studies in Communication, among other outlets. [Email: kharris@umn.edu]

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