Ethnicity, Race, and National Identity in Management and Organization Studies

Abstract

This chapter critically assesses Management and Organization Studies (MOS) approaches to the topics of ethnic, racial, and national identity. It discusses how MOS has ignored ethnicity, race, and national identity or depoliticized these issues by conceptualizing them as "natural" and disconnected from processes of power and inequality. The chapter introduces alternative perspectives in MOS that address ethnicity, race, and national identity as political phenomena, reconnecting them explicitly to power. It proposes a research agenda for MOS on recent social developments that can have an important impact on power relations connected to ethnic, racial, and national identities. MOS has the ambition to generate “universal theories” that apply to “universal subjects” independent of their identities or geographical location. Mainstream explanations in MOS concerning discrimination are based on social identity or social categorization theory. The business case is grounded on three economic arguments for managerial attention for the topic of diversity–including ethnic, racial, and national identities.