Organizing Inclusion

Moving Diversity from Demographics to Communication Processes

Marya L. Doerfel, Jennifer L. Gibbs

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032400082
• eBook ISBN: 9780429833861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Meetings & Presentations
• Index: Business

Organizing Inclusion brings communication experts together to examine issues of inclusion and exclusion, which have emerged as a major challenge as both society and the workforce become more diverse.

Connecting communication theories to diversity and inclusion, and clarifying that inclusion is about the communication processes of organizations, institutions, and communities, the book explores how communication as an organizing phenomenon underlies systemic and institutionalized biases and generates practices that privilege certain groups while excluding or marginalizing others. Bringing a global perspective that transcends particular problems faced by Western cultures, the contributors address issues across sub-disciplines of communication studies, ranging from social and environmental activism to problems of race, gender, sexual orientation, age and ability. With these various perspectives, the chapters go beyond demographic diversity by addressing interaction and structural processes that can be used to promote inclusion. Using these multiple theoretical frameworks, Organizing Inclusion is an intellectual resource for improving theoretical understanding and practical applications that come with ever more diverse people working, coordinating, and engaging one another.

The book will be of great relevance to organizational stakeholders, human resource personnel and policy makers, as well as to scholars and students working in the fields of communication, management, and organization studies.

1 Organizing Inclusion

Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches

Marya L. Doerfel and Jennifer L. Gibbs

In her memoire Becoming, former United States first lady Michelle Obama (2018) wrote about her time at Princeton, recalling her experiences engaging ethnically blended groups. Despite great strides in the civil rights movement in the United States (US) and even with legal changes to the US constitution, she still felt like an outsider and recognized the challenge that she had experienced. She explained, “(b)ut even today, with white students continuing to outnumber students of color on college campuses, the burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students. In my experience, it’s a lot to ask” (p. 74). Obama’s view underscores the complexity that comes with modernity—a world where society’s understanding of equality coevolves with issues of inclusion and exclusion.

Inclusion, as in Obama’s experience, is communicative and is also a function of perspective. From Princeton’s point of view, these new policies designed to open up access and increase diversity were progressive. But underlying such inclusion policy is that those being brought in are expected to blend in (Ahmed, 2012). Obama’s perspective illuminated the tendency for those in positions of power to invite and enable assimilation (blending in) into existing institutional structures. To blend into the dominant group, however, is not enough, nor does it substantially alter how organizing processes generate lenses defined by elites and outsiders. That is not the intent of our use of inclusion. Rather, our intent is to show how communicating can be structured for unique voices to be heard. What structures support polivocal organizations? How do individual-level interactions transform organizations?

People have a tendency to trust and, therefore, build relationships with people like themselves (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001). This tendency reveals how everyday events define deeper-rooted hegemonies. True inclusion involves changing such tendencies and transforming existing institutional norms and structures to listen to “others” rather than expecting “others” to conform and blend in. Obama’s experience at Princeton is an example of organizational initiatives falling short by emphasizing diversity over inclusion (see Gailliard, Davis, Gibbs, & Doerfel’s chapter). Inclusion under such circumstances reproduces whiteness (Ahmed, 2012). When diverse people communicate, white people may feel uncomfortable (as Doerfel described in the preface). Candor and disagreement are difficult and can shift the focus from being about the issue to making the uncomfortable people feel better about themselves (Diangelo, 2018). Mutual trust, then, is necessary so that differences are opportunistic rather than casting blame on those who bring up those differences to begin with.

Both Obama’s experience and the case of the organizational communication division’s (OCD) top paper response illustrate that issues of inclusion are obvious to the excluded, yet can be unapparent as marginalizing acts to those in positions of power and privilege. Exclusion is not just the result of overt forms of racism and sexism. Though overt forms of exclusion still exist, inclusion, and its counterpart exclusion, can be difficult to identify when people become part of or are excluded from a dominant, insider, or powerful group. That dominant group can be defined by a variety of demographics but can also be socially constructed through expertise and knowledge (see Barbour, Rolison, & Jensen’s along with Gailliard et al.’s chapters in this volume), access to resources (as in Gonzales & Yan’s chapter), a stigmatized trait or behavior (see Meisenbach & Hutchins’ chapter), or in the ways in which white supremacy becomes an underlying organizing mechanism because white people are over-represented due to their roles in society (see Afifi & Cornejo’s and Parker et al.’s chapters). Even those who claim to support diversity may inadvertently take part in systems of exclusion, as both the top paper response (see the case detailed in our preface and Gailliard et al.’s chapter) and a recent debate about how distinguished scholars are selected by the National Communication Association (NCA) vividly illustrates (see Gailliard et al.’s chapter). In this way, academic institutions (e.g., universities, professional associations) are designed around a certain set of values constructed by homogeneous groups (i.e., white men) that serve to keep these groups in power and reproduce these systems in their own image (Ahmed, 2012; Allen, 2011). As the NCA controversy demonstrates, a false dichotomy is often drawn between “diversity” and “merit” that reveals that the criteria used to define merit have white supremacy inherently baked into them. Similarly, treating racism as a dichotomy (either racist or not) can lead to the fragility white people feel when they are challenged to consider how their own actions may perpetuate racism (Diangelo, 2018). The top paper response described in our preface illustrated the quandary white progressives make for themselves when they frame racists as bad; non-racists as good. In doing so, we perpetuate institutionalized racism. Doing so frees the progressive from recognizing her own role. To truly be progressive and therefore contribute to organizational transformation, it is important to be reflective about our own identities and the experiences that go with those identities (Allen, 2011). To that point, Diangelo (2018) implores that people ask themselves to consider the experiences that come with their identities and ask “how did [one’s particular identity] shape me as a result of being that identity?” (p. 12). Today, as Gailliard et al. explain, universities’ track records show that tweaking a system is not enough.

Inclusion and exclusion can be obvious, especially when public discourse, debates, and positioning overtly identify groups as desirable or not. But more often than not, roadblocks are subtle and difficult to recognize. For example, Ahmed’s (2012) study of diversity officers employed at universities around Australia and Europe showed how diversity initiatives at universities can be superficial:

Diversity provides a positive, shiny image of the organization that allows inequalities to be concealed and thus reproduced… Diversity is a way of not addressing institutional cultures, or perhaps addressing them only ‘slightly,’ which implies that a slight address can be a way not to address.

(p. 72)

Issues of inclusion and exclusion have emerged as a major challenge facing organizations and institutions as both society and the workforce become more diverse. Yet white supremacist ideologies persist which in turn cause emotional, material, and physical harm to people of color.¹ An obvious case of this can be seen in a central argument US President Donald Trump made in his years leading up to and has made since his 2016 election. Through speeches, social media commentary, and policy, he persists in vilifying Mexican immigrants, referring to them as “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists” (BBC.com, 2016). A recent attack came in an ad leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, which CNN analyst Stephen Collinson (2018) argued was “the latest example of the President’s willingness to lie and fear-monger in order to tear at racial and societal divides” (¶3). At the same time and in the years since, some aspects of the national discourse have been driven to counter both overt and subtle forms of divisive mistreatment of people based on their identities.

Such counterattacks are driven by goals of inclusion, but they are also geared to reverse societal exclusion and unfair treatment of people who are not in positions of power. Counter movements include organized actions and communication campaigns like the now viral #metoo and #takeaknee movements, the #CommunicationSoWhite movement in academia, countless news articles about diversity and inclusion, as well as the statements some organizations and businesses across the spectrum are now providing about their diversity and inclusion efforts. Divisive public discourse and political rhetoric further divide implicitly, as well. Because such discourse may be obviously racist to progressives, the obvious events like these further perpetuate treating racism as a binary, as discussed above. The public racism becomes a red herring that then distracts people in their everyday lives from awareness of the problems that exist in their own institutions. The top paper response illustrates this all too well. As Doerfel explains in her own words:

Lately, hate groups have been in the news so much and their public disdain for people of color seems even more vocal than ever. It is easy to see their racism and their belief in white supremacy. But I allowed their obvious-ness to narrow my own use of the concept of white supremacy. As a result, my underlying thinking was binary in terms of evil/good: ‘They’re white supremacists; I’m/we’re not.’ As such, I became defensive about its use against the organization in which I was a leader. I treated it as a binary rather than recognizing how we are all capable of reproducing white supremacy.

While some strides have been made in valuing diversity and providing more equal opportunities to workers of different race, ethnicity, gender, age, ability, and sexual orientation, policies and practices designed to promote inclusion are contested, imperfect, and ignored. As discussed above, policy can also be window dressing. “But in being spoken, and repeated in different contexts, a world takes shape around diversity. To speak the language of diversity is to participate in the creation of a world” (Ahmed, 2012, p. 81).

While speaking the language of diversity is vital, Ahmed warns that inclusive policies and practices can put the onus on those whom such policies attempt to help (as in Obama’s experience at Princeton; as in the scholars who walked out of the OCD top paper panel). Such policies and concomitant practices are only progressive when everyone engages in them. Unfortunately, what happens too often is that only a few speak up. Those few who speak up get framed by those who don’t as “difficult.” To frame their actions as ‘disrupting peace’ undermines progress toward social justice. A possible solution is to reframe policies as prototype (see Buzzanell’s chapter in this volume). Viewing diversity policies as prototypes offers a way to reorient social systems and the people who design them. Some prototypes can be tweaked and incrementally coevolve with changes that happen in those systems’ environments, while other changes (corrections to the prototypes) may be substantial. Change can be consequential and imperfect. Recognizing systemic corrections as prototypes is a more realistic way to think about the complexities that come when people aim to coordinate and control their environments.

Framing progress through a series of prototypes offers a challenge to improve circumstances without suffering the consequences of not getting solutions right in the short run. Diversity management programs were a first step toward providing opportunities for women and minorities in institutions. Using the language of diversity, however, was critiqued for driving quotas rather than being transformative (see Gailliard et al.’s chapter). Inclusion reorients institutions through identifying ways to give voice to previously silenced groups (see Tracy, Razzante, & Hanna’s chapter). Through this inclusive orientation, problem-solving and the discussions that support problem-solving do not just facilitate improved outcomes but also improve the experience for the people involved. Kent and Logan’s chapter in this volume elaborates on the ethical consequences that come with a sense of connection and engagement when people are included.

There are also many systemic and institutionalized ways in which implicit biases work against inclusion. Fundamental assumptions prioritize rationality over emotionality and efficiencies and profits over people (see Mitra’s chapter). Some organizational practices privilege certain groups while excluding or marginalizing others. Exclusion and marginalization are especially felt by people whose identities are intersectional such that an indiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Images
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Organizing Inclusion: Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches
• Part I Bottom-Up Approaches
• Part II Top-Down Approaches
• Index