Kaleidoscopic Inquiries: Queering Approaches to Organizational Diversity Work

From Diversity Management to Diversity Work: A Communicative Approach

The bulk of scholarship on diversity work has come from the subfield of diversity management, which contends with both the means and purposes of managing differences in organizations. Such an approach foregrounds managerial logics and the related business case for diversity, which argues that diversity work is an important business practice that can improve productivity and profit (Holck & Muhr, 2017). Critical approaches within diversity management have challenged the presumed neutrality of the business case view, providing important frameworks for interrogating the managerial and apolitical bent of the subfield. These interrogations include challenging positivist approaches to ontology in diversity management that seek to fix and essentialize social identity categories, revealing how societal discourses shape diversity meanings, and more thoroughly contending with power and structural inequalities as the societal context of diversity management (Zanoni et al., 2010). However, even critical approaches to diversity management can inadvertently center the business case and managerialism as the key locus of inquiry, potentially overlooking organizational members outside of management as passive recipients of diversity work (Mutsaers & Trux, 2015). Comprehensive reviews of critical diversity scholarship have pointed out additional gaps and areas for advancing analysis. Zanoni et al. (2010) note the need for future critical work to extend data collection beyond written text to a consideration of embodied practice and to examine the connection between broader social discourses and everyday interactions. More recently, Nkomo et al. (2019) echo these concerns and urge diversity scholars to more thoroughly trouble ontologically stable notions of identity categories, and to use a multilevel approach—individual, organizational, systemic—when theorizing and studying diversity.

The communicative approach to difference which underlies this study provides a means of addressing these concerns in order to expand analyses of power beyond management and call attention to a more dynamic and complex political reality of organizing. In a call for a revised agenda of research in difference studies, Ashcraft (2011) notes that work can be conceived of “as a discursive formation that evolves across many sites of cultural activity” (p. 15). I suggest that scholars might usefully think of diversity work in a similar fashion, wherein empirical studies provide the opportunity to understand diversity work’s “cultural (re)production … in and across multiple sites” as well as its variegated “representations, negotiations, and enactments” (Ashcraft, 2011, p. 15). Ashcraft (2011) further argues for reframing difference not as something existing in organizations, but rather as “an organizing principle of the meaning, structure, practice, experience, and economy of work itself” (p. 8). This framing of difference helps to unseat organization as a fixed and stable container for elements such as difference and diversity.

Within an understanding of difference as an organizing principle, communication signifies an “ongoing, situated, and embodied process” that accounts for “the dynamic interweaving of material and ideational worlds” (Ashcraft et al., 2009, pp. 34-35). The entanglement of the discursive and material encourages the consideration of nonhuman actors such as built environments, documents, and everyday objects like tables and chairs as participants in the communicative interactions that constitute organizational realities (Ashcraft et al., 2009). Difference, through communication, makes some realities possible while foreclosing others; thus, communication and difference lend themselves to an inherently critical approach to examining how differences such as gender, race, and coloniality structure the status quo in organizing. Given that daily communicative interaction and practice are undertheorized in diversity literature (Zanoni et al., 2010), a communicative approach to difference helps to attend to the various sites of diversity work that span individual, organizational, and societal levels, in addition to challenging the presumed ontological stability of concepts like organization and identity (Nkomo et al., 2019).

Queering the Study of diversity Work

Queer theory’s incisive critique of normativity is uniquely suited to both address current limitations of diversity management scholarship and build upon existing communication scholarship addressing difference and diversity. McDonald (2015) broadly suggests that queer theory seeks to interrogate and disrupt normativity while simultaneously orienting towards political aims of addressing historical and ongoing inequities, oppressions, and injustices. In light of the call from diversity management scholars to shift attention from nondominant groups to dominant social identity markers and social systems of privilege (Nkomo et al., 2019), queer attention to normativity is well suited to both interrogate dominant norms that shape organizational life and explore possibilities for more liberatory modes of organizing.

The limited studies in critical diversity management literature that do take up queer theory tend to focus on the experiences of sexual minorities in organizations and organizational efforts to address differences in sexual identities (Bendl & Hofmann, 2015). In either case, queer theory’s contributions as an analytic remain harnessed on interrogating questions of sexual identity and heteronormativity in diversity management (Bendl et al., 2008). I argue that one means of extending queer theory’s potential lies in moving beyond interrogating sexuality and heteronormativity, and towards deconstructing normative logics writ large in organizing.

Within this queer stance of deconstructing norms, Holck and Muhr (2017) outline a norm-critical approach which involves questioning taken-for-granted assumptions and creatively transcending binaries in “a continuous act of norm-critical resistance” (p. 10). Christensen (2018) builds off this norm-critical approach, arguing that norms have the power to structure organizational life. Within a norm-critical framework, what counts as normative is that which operates as a taken-for-granted imperative and sense of rightness about how things ought to be, which in turn conditions access to organizational legitimacy and legibility. For example, a queer approach might interrogate the way norms of professionalism often condition access to organizational opportunities and resources through compulsory alignment with embodied performances of whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and compulsory able-bodiedness. Queering norms of professionalism can entail examining how such norms emerge and condition possibilities for organizational legitimacy, and perhaps working to disrupt such organizational norms for more capacious ways of identifying and relating at work.

This norm-critical work provides insights into how a queer approach might help interrogate broader normative regimes in organizing while also attending to daily practice. Such an interrogation can provide a means of bridging the gap between societal discourse and practice that scholars have identified in diversity management literature (Zanoni et al., 2010). However, this work seems to operate in isolation from other critical analytical and contextual frameworks that might make a queer anti-normative analysis more incisive. For example, Nkomo and Al Ariss (2014) identify white privilege, colonialism, and racialization as an integral part of the development of modern organizing and managerialism. Queer theorizing can strengthen its ways of addressing organizational inequities and oppression by engaging critical frameworks that have made important advances in critical diversity management literature. I therefore mobilize a queer lens that both attends to norms as they arise in everyday organizational practice and engages with other critical approaches as a means of more adequately contending with organizational histories and contexts (Nkomo et al., 2019).

The following research questions seek to address the gaps in critical diversity literature through a queer communicative approach to norms and normativity. Attending to diversity work norms arising in sensemaking practices and embodied interactions of organizational members allows for novel empirical insights that move beyond written text and managerial foci that often dominate diversity management literature (Zanoni et al., 2010). Examining normative organizational activities in relation to oppression and inequality also encourages a multilevel approach that interrogates dominant systems of privilege often overlooked in diversity literature (Nkomo et al., 2019).

RQ1

How do participants in organizational diversity work make sense of what counts as normative in diversity work?

RQ2

What norms emerge in the enactment of diversity work?

RQ3

How do normative practices relate to diversity’s work ability to alter relations of oppression and inequality in organizing?

On the Journey: Trainings and the Personalization of Diversity Work

Following traces of the metaphorical journey and training practices reveals how diversity work separates humans from other aspects of organizational activity, ultimately producing diversity work as an individual, personalized, and often internal endeavor. This personalization of diversity work 1) helps to produce a bifurcation of work, wherein diversity work is compartmentalized and set apart from other aspects of organizational work, and 2) shapes expertise in ways that adhere to the embodiment of identities understood as “diverse,” contributing to a bifurcation of expertise that separates embodied expertise from organizational expertise.

The journey appears as a conceptual reference point for making sense of diversity work, one that instills consequential “figure-ground relationships” in organizing (Putnam & Boys, 2006, p. 542). In my interview with Marilyn, a senior program manager for inclusion recruiting at a large multinational company, she draws upon notions of a journey in talking about the best parts of diversity work:

Marilyn: It’s watching the change happen, right? It’s watching people hit different levels in their journey and say, I get it now, like I actually get it … it’s those light bulb moments of authentic buy-in that I find most rewarding because when people get it, like, really get it, then the work, you know, the work is advancing.

Marilyn’s portrayal of diversity work evokes the journey as a developmental process requiring “authentic buy-in,” revealing a mode of diversity work that is individual and personal. Diversity training alights around the metaphorical journey as a practice that operates from and furthers an individualizing logic in diversity work. For example, during one organization’s internal staff training, the facilitator began with an “icebreaker” activity that asked people to stand up, move around the room, find a partner, and discuss questions including “What is a value that you got from someone growing up?” and “What is a value that you have had to unlearn?” After this activity, the facilitator asked everyone to return to their seats, and noted that the training is about creating “a space where we find out who we are.”

In setting the tone for the training, this initial activity suggests an effort that is thoroughly individual, personal, and divorced from work, wherein training participants reflect on past experiences outside the context of organizational activity. Resonating with Marilyn’s discussion of diversity work as a journey of personal change, the facilitator’s framing of the session as “a space where we find out who we are” similarly directs participants inward (i.e., “Who am I?”), rather than toward other lines of inquiry that might challenge ontological assumptions of the individual as a discrete and separate entity existing apart from the social reality of the organization.

The ontological bifurcation of human actors from other aspects of organizational activity facilitated by the metaphorical journey and training practices contributes to a formation of diversity work that is fixated on authenticity, personal motivation, and accountability. As CSC, a volunteer member of an organizational diversity, inclusion, and equity committee, noted: “if you are going to really do this work authentically, then that’s because you have done this work internally. And that for me kind of like elevates you to different levels.” Such notions of authenticity spring from a personalization of diversity work that the metaphorical journey and trainings help to instantiate.

This personalization prompted by authenticity can serve to set diversity work apart as unique from other organizational activities. Queen, the head of a governmental department that has spearheaded diversity and inclusion efforts, notes how the personal element of diversity work makes it unique and different from other aspects of work:

There is the personal energy that goes into [diversity work]. I mean, this is very difficult work. And, and you’re, you know, there are many things in terms of your professional job that- when people say it is not personal choice; not personal if you’re working and talking about a budget or, you know, talking about a program, maybe. But I think this is always personal. So I think it’s the personal energy that it requires and the fact that you, by the nature of the work, you are always vulnerable.

For Queen, diversity work involves consistent vulnerability and emotional investment in ways that other organizational activities such as budgeting and programming do not. The personal realm of the journey estranges diversity work from day-to-day organizational activity, and potentially inadvertently reinforces a notion of other organizational activities as somehow normatively impersonal.

The coupled bifurcations of human/organization and diversity work/organizational work further help to construct notions of expertise that differentially distribute labor among organizational members, contributing to tokenization and additional labor required of people with marginalized identities. Diversity work often calls upon individuals who recognizably embody diversity. In an interview with an equity program manager at a large government institution, Paco notes how training settings become spaces that spotlight people with marginalized identities, and particularly people of color:

Sometimes I think in diversity work that we can harm people of color by looking at them and tokenizing them … because it’s like, you know, you’ll be doing your training, you’ll be talking about somebody, or you’re talking about a group. And there’s the one person in the room who fits into that group. And everybody’s looking at them to see their reaction or coming to them and asking them for kind of help and guidance. And it’s like we have to stop relying on those who are negatively impacted to help do the teaching … So I think the marginalized groups who often are most impacted are the ones who can also be harmed.

Paco reveals that training spaces, particularly those in predominantly white organizations, further spotlight the embodied expertise of individuals understood to be diverse. The notion of diversity work as a personal journey elevates such embodied expertise as providing a means of “knowing” the Other’s journey for the benefit of one’s own, rather than prompting reflection on how all people are implicated in creating inequitable social orders together with nonhuman actors. As Paco notes, the foregrounding of the personal journeys of marginalized people results in additional labor for such individuals, upon whom privileged participants rely for “help and guidance,” and to “help do the training” itself.

Paco was not the only person to point out the ways that diversity work spotlights people viewed as embodying notions of diversity for leadership in such work. Abby, who helps spearhead her business’s inclusion and diversity initiative, similarly indicates that she was asked to lead a diversity training in her organization because of her sexual identity as a lesbian. She shares some discomfort she experiences having to lead trainings and efforts while still being on her own personal journey with diversity work: “I don’t have everything perfected in my own life around my own DEI work internally … it feels hard to be called upon, to be a leader in a space where I'm still learning.” Embodied expertise can effectively extract people with marginalized identities from the journey of diversity work, suddenly converting them from wayfarer to guide. To be “on the journey” of diversity work is itself a kind of privilege, one that requires less in the way of knowledge, responsibility, and action. The journey as it arises in diversity work therefore helps enact a differential accountability, doling out responsibilities across organizational bodies via marginalized and privileged identities. Despite this added labor and responsibility, a bifurcation of diversity work as distinct and separate from other parts of organizational work contributes to a delegitimization of diversity work expertise in other organizational activities. Abby notes that decisions about new hires on the part of leadership generally come down to a decision between diversity or work-related skills:

I’ll just say our leadership team is constantly tripping over words when they talk about like bringing in diverse people. It’s always, well, they need to have great skills and they can be diverse. It’s like, it’s kind of like one or the other.

Embodied expertise in the form of identities marked as diverse, prized in training sessions and within the personal journey of diversity work, loses its currency outside of such contexts. As a siloed, personal endeavor, diversity work becomes both time intensive and undervalued as a skillset in other organizational activities. For people with marginalized identities, the journey of diversity work can therefore lead to a dead end. As the metaphorical personal journey and training practices call upon the labor of particular bodies, they simultaneously foreclose opportunities for diversity work and related expertise to be recognized and valued organizationally. The metaphorical journey’s ability to help separate human actors from other aspects of organizational activity maintains a normatively individualized construction of diversity work that contributes to inequitable relationships, even as such work purports to address them.

Organization as Container: Data Collection and a Politics of Measurement

An interrogation of the metaphorical journey and training practices highlighting diversity work as an individual and personalized endeavor begs the question: where is the organization in organizational diversity work? The container metaphor aids in tracing the other side of the human/organization bifurcation instantiated in diversity work practices and sensemaking. While the particular metaphors vary, evocations of the organization as a container abound in diversity work, appearing under various guises including climate, ecosystem, environment, culture, and system. One company’s diversity work materials frame its efforts around diversity and inclusion as fostering a particular kind of environment:

Objective: To provide an inclusive environment that attracts and retains a values- and purpose-driven workforce; cultivates the intellectual capital of unique skills, backgrounds, and experiences for innovative solutions; and enables all of our people to thrive in their careers.

Whether referencing an environment, culture, or climate, these kinds of statements craft the organization as a container in need of intentional design for the sake of conducting diversity work. The organization is charged with cultivating, enabling, and providing such optimal conditions, under the implicit understanding that a container spatially demarks the organization as a bounded entity. Yet, as evident in the quote above, the organizational container plays a supporting role to the main event: human actors. Whether attracting and retaining a diverse workforce, making people feel valued and welcomed, or promoting the “intellectual capital” of workers, the container metaphor tasks the organization with providing the right kinds of conditions for organizational members to engage in diversity work as an individual endeavor.

Quantitative data collection, as a practice normatively associated with diversity work, often evokes the organization as a container and provides further evidence of the human actor’s separation from other aspects of organizational activity. Central to the practice of data collection in diversity work is workforce demographic information, as the following excerpt from a human resource guide on “How to Develop a Diversity and Inclusion Initiative” makes evident:

By capturing data on employee demographics, an employer is better able to understand the diversity of its employees and identify any areas of concern or trends. Historically, these data have included federal and state protected categories; however, recent trends indicate that other factors, such as personality type and thinking/learning style, may also be of value, though perhaps harder to find national data for.

The report also recommends collecting data on “the current company culture,” suggesting that “surveying employees can help shed light on their perception of the company in relation to encouraging and appreciating diversity in the workplace.” Here, data collection implies quantitatively focusing on organizational members’ social identities, perceptions, personality types, and learning styles, seeking to provide data points to individuals’ cognition and behavior. Data collection as a practice therefore also aligns with the personal journey metaphor. Focusing on the individual and social identity groups helps to ensure that the “areas of concern” identified by data collection remain centered around interrogating and understanding the individual in diversity work, rather than extending to other relations that similarly shape the social orders of work and organizing. Just as training practices help further notions of the metaphorical journey and an ontological bifurcation of human and organization, data collection practices operating from a container metaphor further a separation of human actors from other aspects of organizational activity.

Data collection also helps to define diversity and inclusion as operative terms within the container metaphor. From a container viewpoint of the organization, diversity implicitly signifies the numerical representation of people coded as diverse, and inclusion signifies their retention and satisfaction within the boundaries of the workplace. Diversity defined as such scrutinizes people demographically identified as diverse, despite efforts to position diversity work as pertaining to all organizational members. One national corporation’s inclusion and diversity presentation materials note that “A White person is not ‘non-diverse,’” yet earlier in the presentation an infographic states that the organization’s board of directors is “41% diverse,” presumably indicating people of color and other marginalized identities. Similar to diversity trainings, such data practices in diversity work disproportionately draw attention to marginalized identities, allowing whiteness and other normative identities to fall away from view and potentially contributing to less of a focus on “the privileges and power of dominant groups” (Nkomo et al., 2019, p. 509).

In addition to relegating whiteness to the background, diversity work that centers on counting populations within the organization as a container can inevitably exclude certain identities. During a research interview, Ryan, an executive manager of a diversity, equity, and inclusion programs office in a large multinational company, mentions concerns with not being able to count certain identity categories with an employee self-identification (ID) program due to legal restrictions in other countries:

I know that there's definitely some shortcomings that we still have to fix. Like a whole proper global self-ID program. It’s not there yet. It’s only here in the U.S. and I feel like that’s the basis of getting things done is it’s a census, to be honest. Like if you can’t be counted, how are you going to be represented? And if it’s illegal to be counted, then it’s like, I don’t know. I feel like it’s the end of the road for that group until either laws change or they do it behind their back and hope to God nobody sues them for it.

Ryan implies that there is little diversity work can do for those identities that are not counted in data collection because they legally cannot be counted, because employees choose not to volunteer such information, or because certain identities do not register as necessary to be counted in diversity work. If data on demographics provide “the basis of getting things done” in diversity work, not being counted in the organizational container signifies the “end of the road.” Data collection therefore enacts a politics of measurement that relies on the notion of the organization as a contained environment where opportunities and resources are afforded to those who can be counted and represented as diverse. Such a politics relies on discrete identity categories amenable to being counted, a willingness among organization members to volunteer potentially closeted parts of their identities (Harris & McDonald, 2018), and a means of determining who does and does not count as diverse. While data collection presumes to merely reflect the reality of the organization, data practices are, in fact, making a difference, spotlighting human actors while other aspects of organizational activity fall to the background, and bringing certain social differences to the fore as salient and potentially erasing or minimizing others.

Data collection practices focusing on demographic information help to shape what diversity work can be in terms of organizational activities, furthering a division between diversity work and other organizing practices. During field observations of a committee charged with overseeing a nascent diversity and inclusion initiative in a company, one member noted that the organization’s recently drafted diversity statement had been completed and was now live on the website: “One person asks how they can find the statement on the website, and [the committee member] responds that you need to click on the ‘Careers’ subtab, which is nested within the ‘Our Story’ tab, and the statement is located under the heading ‘Join the Team.’” For this nonprofit, as for many other organizations, a diversity and inclusion statement seeks to make public an organization’s commitment to engaging in diversity work. The statement itself reads on the website: “In order to grow our impact, we’re becoming an inclusive organization where the diversity of our program is reflected in our staff, and where each individual’s unique background is valued for the perspective it adds to our collective vision.” Both the statement and its placement on the website signal that the organization’s diversity work efforts are primarily relevant to recruitment and hiring activities, and less important to aspects of the organization highlighted elsewhere on the website. Positioned where it is on the company website, it is difficult to envision someone finding this statement unless they are specifically looking for employment at the company, as even the company’s current employees had difficulty locating the statement.

Diversity work mediates a prospective employee’s entrance into and experience within the organization as a container but does not necessarily permeate all aspects of organizing and work. In this manner, data collection practices and the container metaphor further contribute to a bifurcation of work: diversity work’s division and isolation from other organizational activities, which ultimately limit diversity work’s capacity for more comprehensively addressing inequities in organizing. Container metaphors help to fashion the organization as an entity relegated to the background of diversity work, responsible for the conditions or surroundings in which human activity occurs. Such metaphors foster a view of diversity work, and attendant notions of diversity and inclusion, that are fixated on counting and accounting for individual and group, marshalling an approach to diversity work that is both instrumentalist and bounded, further bifurcating the organization from individual activity.

Leadership at the Table: Dependency and Agency in Diversity Work

Persistent questions arise out of the human/organization bifurcation that diversity work instantiates. If diversity work is conceptualized as a personal journey, where the organization serves as a container that provides the optimal conditions for personalized and internal work, what is organizational change in diversity work, and how does it occur? How does a sometimes-microscopic emphasis on individual skill, action, and thought translate to achieving organizational aims of diversity, inclusion, and equity?

The metaphorical table emerges in diversity work as one means of addressing the divide. Participants in interviews and during field observations frequently invoked the metaphor of the table, typically using the table as a conceptual sensemaking tool for describing diversity work and its aspirational aims. In my interview with Abby, after she mentions the metaphorical table several times earlier in the interview in various contexts, I ask her to more specifically define what the table represents:

Abby: Great question. I think it’s, it’s a table of belonging. And. And so therefore, it’s like, it’s the table where everyone has a voice. I think it’s a, it’s a desired state. It’s not a space that I think we currently have. But I think it’s a, yeah, it’s a hope. It’s a hope … It’s not there yet. We’re not there … I think it’s a place of having a voice in DEI work and making change and, yeah, it’s very elusive … That’s a great question. I am struggling myself to define it.

When pointedly asked to define the table, Abby has difficulty finding the words. This future-oriented description includes having a voice and making a change, encapsulating a more expansive capacity to act that implicates organizational change. If the table represents the possibility of diversity work to bring about organizational change, then it is little wonder that organizational members might struggle to define such a ubiquitous metaphor: the table represents a mode of being that is strange to diversity work as it is practiced and discussed, grounded in a bifurcation of human and organization that individualizes and separates diversity work from other aspects of organizational activity.

Even with this additional explanation from Abby, questions linger. Where might this table be? Who is already at the table, able to determine access for others? Interrogating the table further reveals that positional leadership often adheres to the metaphor of the table. Leadership is often implicitly associated with the metaphorical table, and at times slips the bonds of categorization within the human/nonhuman bifurcation, inhabiting both simultaneously. Positional leaders begin to take on qualities in diversity work that extend beyond the individualized and personal journey. Take, for example, one consulting agency’s “maturity model” for organizational diversity and inclusion work, which includes four levels of organizational advancement. The authors note that the engagement of positional leaders prompts meaningful organizational change:

More substantial cultural change begins at level 3 - a true transition point - when the CEO and other influential business leaders step up, challenge the status quo, and address barriers to inclusion. By role-modeling inclusive behaviors and aligning and adapting organizational systems (e.g., by tying rewards and recognition to inclusive behavior), they create the conditions that influence employee behavior and mind-sets.

Both the individual and organization are present in this discussion of diversity work and leadership, with the focus progressing from leaders’ individual behaviors to changing organizational systems. By “aligning and adapting organizational systems,” leaders help to shift “employee behavior and mind-sets” in a way that is evocative of the container metaphor discussed in the previous analysis section. Here, though, the leader assumes the organizational task of creating the conditions for diversity work. Similar to evocations of the metaphorical table, such discussions of leadership speak simultaneously to both diversity work as an organizational container and as an individual journey, appearing to traverse the bifurcation between human actors and the organization. A change in the behaviors of positional leaders becomes a linchpin, “a true transition point” in instituting organizational change in diversity work.

Leadership is therefore discussed in a way suggesting that leadership action is synonymous with organizational change in diversity work, in ways that the actions of other organizational members are not. In this manner, leadership becomes a stand-in, effectively functioning as a metonym, for the organization. Leadership as a metonym for organization provides a means of bridging the gap between individuals and organization that diversity work itself helps to instantiate: a way of talking about the organization as an actor with agency in order to conceptualize organizational change in diversity work beyond the individual journey.

Diversity work’s continued and persistent bifurcations of ontology, work, and expertise through activities like trainings and data collection help to ensure that leadership remains relevant and necessary for diversity work. Evidence of leadership’s centrality to diversity work abound, and leaders serve as frequent reference points throughout practices and accounts of diversity work. A human resource guide to developing a diversity and inclusion initiative asserts that the success of diversity work hinges upon leadership:

For the diversity initiative to succeed, senior level buy-in and support are vital. Senior management must understand the business case for diversity and inclusion initiatives, with direct links to the company’s strategic goals. It is helpful to identify a senior-level champion who can be tasked with visible support of the initiative and ultimately responsible for keeping the program “alive.”

Here, diversity work depends upon leadership, needs a leader to serve as a champion, a voice, an advocate, and an evangelist for the changes diversity work seeks to bring about. Leadership’s centrality in diversity work might be self-evident, in the sense that leaders are already positionally oriented as central to organizational activity writ large. However, diversity work’s bifurcation of human actors from the organization, and the dilemma this bifurcation presents in envisioning organizational change, helps to explain the persistent preoccupation with the actions of leaders. By spanning the organization/human divide, positional leaders signify an attempted resolution to the bifurcation and the concerns arising from it. This unique position in relation to the organization/human bifurcation also lends insight into leadership’s implicit connection to the metaphorical table. The ability of positional leaders to traverse the bifurcation of organization and individual, and to translate action into organizational change, suggests that positional leaders might occupy the same location as the table, or at least the promise of transcendence it implies.

Leadership’s distinction as positionally and hierarchically apart from other organizational members means that leadership does not resolve the gap between individual and organization, but merely bridges it. In eliciting leadership, this attempted bridging also reinforces the gap itself, ensuring the bifurcation will stay in place by framing leadership as the locus of power and change in the organization, and maintaining human actors and the organization as separate entities. Positional leaders maintain a capacity to alter systems, design culture, and steward climate, activities that remain beyond the purview of other organizational members as depicted in diversity work. With leadership’s inhabitation of the metaphorical table, the promise of the table as a mode of being, and the potentialities that this holds, therefore remain elusive in diversity work.

Leadership’s centrality creates relations of dependency and limits a capacity for action in diversity work, ensuring that the organization/individual bifurcation—and the inequities it contributes to—persists. Kate, an organizational diversity and inclusion consultant, notes that diversity work often lacks positional leadership, creating an emphasis on existing hierarchical leaders in the organization in order to obtain resources:

I’ve heard a lot of DEI professionals internally who’ve had a real difficulty because they have expectations on impact, but they really aren't given the resources to implement that. It’s a bigger problem. It’s sort of like, “How do I convince leadership that this needs budget?” is a question we hear a lot.

Positional leadership signifies access to the influence, time, and resources necessary to create organizational change. Yet, Kate’s comment reveals that a positional leader in diversity work is often lacking in many organizations. Leadership eludes diversity work even as diversity work edifies it, resulting in a continual appeal for leadership support. Within such a relationship of dependency, access to leadership and the decision-making tables that leaders inhabit becomes critically important, shaping diversity work’s preoccupations and the kinds of objects towards which it orients. Meanwhile, “outside” of leadership, diversity work calls upon organizational members to “own their own work,” and engage in their own personal journey of consciousness raising and education.

Queering Theorization and Research

This project’s findings have notable implications for diversity work theorizing and research. Queering diversity work helps to reveal that the normative bifurcation of individual and organization is central to how diversity work is constituted, even as this bifurcation ensures diversity work’s limitations and maintains the organizational status quo. This finding extends the work of other scholars who have investigated ontological divides arising in diversity work research and organizational practice. Janssens and Steyaert (2019) argue that diversity research, arising from Western social theoretical traditions, operates under a dualism constituted by individualist and societist stances. My analysis reveals that this ontological dualism separating the individual from an external world to some degree reflects organizational members’ sensemaking and practices related to enacting diversity work. Importantly, this empirical research lends insights into how such a bifurcation arises in situ, rather than in the literature, and what varied effects emerge from such practices to shape diversity work as an organizational phenomenon.

Shifting from scholars to practitioners, Mease (2016) notes that diversity consultants also navigate the disjuncture between organization and individual when it comes to envisioning change in diversity work, toggling between change at the structural level of the organization and change in individual mindsets and behaviors. While not necessarily resolving the tension encountered by diversity consultants in envisioning change, the relational nature of kaleidoscopic inquiry further challenges the categories of individual and organizational as stable and unproblematic. A queer reading reveals that normative constructions of individual and organization—and the collective maintenance of their cleaving—ensures a particular inequitable social order finds footing and persists.

Perhaps more than extending the extant scholarship on ontological dualisms in diversity work, this study provides greater understanding as to the varied effects that arise from the social orders brought into relation under diversity work’s bifurcations. Attending to these effects brings into relief broader normative logics such as whiteness and coloniality in organizing. Diversity work’s emphasis on individualism serves as a continuation of Eurocentric and American ideological systems that edify a view of the discrete and stable modern human subject (Cruz & Sodeke, 2020). In doing so, diversity work reinforces distinctions along colonial lines of difference that perpetuate inequities (Mignolo, 2007). As the white, cisgender, heterosexual, and able-bodied subject sets out on their diversity work journey, organizational members with marginalized identities shift from journey-goers to guides, becoming teachable objects who assist those with privilege. The journey, which forever orients spatiotemporally towards a future horizon, suggests that those unable to access such a path are also unable to access its attendant organizational futurity. Similar to rights-based discourses, diversity work activities can be said to “discriminate which bodies are vested with futurity, or more accurately, they cultivate (some/certain) bodies that can be vested with futurity” (Puar, 2017, p. 15).

Kaleidoscopic inquiry, which foregrounds dynamic social relations in examining norms and normativity, serves as a vital means of naming and addressing the status quo in diversity work research and scholarship. This aligns with Christensen’s (2018) norm-critical approach to diversity training, which aims for “denaturalising and hence repoliticising dominant norms as a contingent and contested terrain by means of explicating the norms” (Christensen, 2018, p. 113). In modern organizational contexts rooted in white privilege, coloniality, and white supremacy (Frenkel & Shenhav, 2006; M Nkomo & Al Ariss, 2014), a queer kaleidoscopic approach to diversity work in the United States reveals how a normative bifurcation of individual and organization reproduces the inequitable organizational status quo along lines of difference in social identities. Diversity work might therefore be understood as a technology of organization, wherein organization is understood as a mode of coloniality, a logic of whiteness.

Kaleidoscopic inquiry therefore models the generative opportunities for intentionally bringing queer theorizing to bear in organizational research and scholarship as a means to name, interrogate, and disrupt inequitable norms and their associated social relations as they arise in practice. McDonald (2017) has outlined foundational commitments for engaging queer theory methodologically in qualitative research, though he notes that much of the queer scholarship in organization studies is conceptual in nature. Opportunities therefore remain to more fundamentally integrate queer commitments into empirical research projects, as I have attempted to do here in the analysis and explication of the data.

Queering Practice

For practitioners and organizational members engaging in diversity work, a queer approach aids in surfacing norms in everyday organizational activity that shape action even as they might escape notice and definition. Following Ahmed (2019), kaleidoscopic inquiry provides an opportunity for a mode of “queer furnishing” that surfaces and makes strange the normative and often invisible: “A queer furnishing might be about making what is in the background, what is behind us, more available as ‘things’ to ‘do’ things with” (p. 168). If the ontological bifurcation instantiated by diversity work can be named, it can also be addressed and disrupted; it can be transformed from inequity to organizational capacity for doing diversity work and organizing differently.

Attending to organizational practice might therefore start with recognizing the normative relations that diversity work occasions, and how such relations reify the organizational status quo and the power of positional leadership. Understanding the potential effects of a bifurcation of the organization and individual might prompt a more expansive understanding of organizational agency and diversity work that acknowledges the enmeshment of human and nonhuman actors like office spaces, policies, documents, seating arrangements in a conference room, and so much more. Rather than viewing “the table” and the capacity for action it implies as being under the purview and control of organizational leadership, practitioners might instead understand the table otherwise: what constitutes organization and the opportunity for organizational change is the enmeshment of all human and nonhuman actors in a given scene. Such a shift might unseat leadership as the necessary reference point and instead see the articulation of meaningful change happening at a multitude of nodal points. In other words, far from being kept away in the boardroom, the table is everywhere organizing occurs. Rather than asking “how can we get a seat at the table,” organizational members might fruitfully ask “who and what is at the table we inhabit in this moment, and what opportunities for care, concern, anti-oppression, and equity might this moment provide?”

Following Christensen’s (2018) vital work applying a queer lens to diversity trainings, below are questions organizational members might fruitfully explore in diversity training sessions, planning meetings, or in daily practices as a first step towards a disruption of the ontological bifurcation:

• How do your work experiences, relationships, and practices shape what diversity work can be here?

 ○ What are the people and things implicated in that shaping?

Rather than a prescriptive list or guide, I provide the above questions as one starting point among many for returning to the situated and embodied daily practices of diversity work, and the varied human and nonhuman actors implicated in these practices. Such work attempts to recuperate a sense of self as deeply embedded within relations to human and nonhuman actors that constitute organizing: kaleidoscope as a dynamic and relational plane of being and situated experience.

Disorganizing Organizational Communication and Organization Studies

Beyond examining diversity work research, theory, and practice, the interrogation of diversity work in this paper might point to opportunities for disrupting and disorganizing the broader fields of organizational communication and organization studies. Normative inquiry into diversity work reveals that it is impossible to separate the organization and the individual, despite the many scholarly and practical technologies that attempt to do so, opening up new possibilities for undoing, relating, and thriving in organizing and work. What is more, the continued maintenance of this bifurcation extends beyond enactments of diversity work and helps to reify organizational inequities. Diversity work research therefore uncovers new ways of understanding work and organization.

Of course, the fields of organizational communication and organization studies are far from neutral in the maintenance of such normative conceptualizations of organization and the inequities that arise in academia and organizing at large (Ibarra-Colado, 2006). Speaking broadly about bias in the field and the influences of networks, scholarly identification, and routines that center Euro-American scholars, Cheney (2000) argued that “Along a number of dimensions, organizational communication can be thought to suppress difference” (p. 136). A queer approach to diversity work therefore presents a challenge to what counts as organizational, and to the norms that undergird organization and organizing.

For example, in her study of diversity work consultants, Mease (2016) noted a fundamental tension in diversity work between what she defined as organizational and social justice imperatives. In tracing the history of diversity work, Mease (2016) suggested that “organizational imperatives” imply increased profit and productivity. If social justice and organizational aims are at odds, this begs the question: towards what ends do organization and organizing orient? In other words, what is the purpose and telos of modern organizing? The whiteness and coloniality of organizations, in which modern organizing is rooted in white supremacy, slavery, and colonial projects (Cooke, 2003; Frenkel & Shenhav, 2006; M Nkomo & Al Ariss, 2014), suggests that organization as a modern construction mobilizes a particular social order, a reality and way of being normalized through practice. Put another way, organization is useful to coloniality and whiteness.

More comprehensively contending with the ontology of organization and the sociohistorical context of organizing signifies an effort to contend with whiteness and coloniality. The reticence of fields like organizational communication and organization studies to interrogate their own ontological assumptions and understand how those assumptions are bound up with the racist and colonial histories of modern organizing mean that the fields themselves are complicit in perpetuating harmful and oppressive logics that ensure the status quo prevails. A refusal to follow and orient towards such normative lines might signify an opportunity to do organization differently: to disorganize as a mode of being and working against regimes of whiteness and coloniality and as a means of orienting towards more capacious otherwise worlds.