The role of racio-ethnic otherness in capital’s exploitation of blue-collar workers

Abstract

To understand how whiteness and economic exploitation are (re)produced, this dissertation intersects capitalism and racio-ethnicity. In doing so, it responds to recent calls by critical organization and diversity scholars (e.g., Nkomo et al., 2019; Prasad, 2021; Romani et al., 2021) to open up more radical conversations about racio-ethnic diversity in organizations. This intersection is needed as, first, current critical management studies that focus on capitalist exploitation often present class relations as involving seemingly homogenous, abstract categories of management-employee relations and the organization of work (Smith, 2006; Thompson and Smith, 2009; Wickman et al., 2006). Such an approach has been criticized for ignoring the role of racio-ethnicity in the workings of capitalism (Bonilla-Silva, 2012; Issar, 2021; Prasad, 2021). Second, the critical studies that do have racio-ethnic inequalities as their main focus, such as postcolonialism and whiteness studies, traditionally pay less explicit attention to capitalism. These studies present capitalism predominantly as a context in which whiteness and othering are at work (Bartolovich et al., 2002; Mezzadra, 2011; Parry, 2004; Prasad, 2021; Romani et al., 2021), thereby restricting the understanding of capital’s role in systematically (re)producing inequality of othered workers (Nkomo et al., 2019; Prasad, 2021).

This dissertation takes a different approach: by intersecting capitalism and racio-ethnicity, it points to the need to understand capital as strategically using racio-ethnic otherness as a resource to exploit, and as a means of maintaining and maximizing this exploitation. In this process, the discourse of inclusion is used by capital to frame the access to exploitative workplaces, and the rigorous control imposed once othered workers are employed, as organizational inclusion. It involves specific processes of (in)visibilization, in which both people and power processes are made invisible, thus enabling employers to deny their own role in reproducing whiteness while maximizing exploitation.