Reinventing Diversity, Activists interfering with the managerialization of the law

Buchter, Lisa Danielle

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-ysen-sm57

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Reinventing Diversity, Activists interfering with the managerialization of the law

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A growing body of research analyzes how corporate social responsibility programs are used to absorb and neutralize the social criticisms coming from social and environmental movements and to superficially respond to the ensuing new regulations. If companies have powerful tools to resist changes and blunt the meaning of the law, then we need further research on how social movements develop forms of legal mobilizations to interfere in the endogenous design of organizational policies. While important bodies of social movement literature look at how social movement actors keep denouncing and monitoring symbolic structures exogenously – relying on contentious or disruptive repertoires of actions – I take the case of French diversity programs to explore ways in which social movement actors seek to get involved within the interpretation and the design of these organizational symbolic structures. Relying on a qualitative research design (ethnography, interviews, textual analysis), I study how activists and social movements organizations developed repertoires of actions to seek to change what happened within diversity programs of public and private organizations. Most insider activists and non-profit organizations I studied within this research used forms of prefigurative diversity programs, designing and proposing to organizations new practices to source job applicants, assess them, raise awareness about discrimination, monitor discrimination, or develop more equitable policies, in the hopes that organizations would appropriate or recuperate them. I argue that the ways in which activists design and propose to companies new sourcing venues (e.g. recruitment channels for racialized minorities or workers with disabilities), new assessment tools (e.g. universally accessible job forums, preliminary face-to-face assessments, video resumes), new awareness campaigns (e.g. posters, leafleting, game-based simulation of disabilities), or new policy or collective agreements blueprints could be analyzed as a specific repertoire of action and an understudied form of legal mobilization targeting endogenization processes within organizations. These practices are ways for activists to fuel different perspectives on legal compliance and to bring their own critical perspectives into the organizational design of diversity programs. I also contend that the goal of this repertoire of actions is not only to change organizational practices, but also to endogenously challenge the ways in which France conceived its anti-discrimination laws.

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