October 9, 2020 | by Milena Doytcheva

Drawing on a longitudinal, qualitative approach to corporate diversity policies in France, my contribution to the special issue on marketing and managing racial dynamics sought to address a highly compelling paradox, conveyed within these policies by the rise of “raceless” diversity concepts. 

This is what I term white diversity, aiming to explore its construction and appropriation in the light of technologies of normalization, referred to in English as standards. Building on a Foucauldian perspective on normalization—i.e. one of modern governmentality’s key techniques to exert power and control—it aims to highlight how market-based mechanisms of (self-)regulation shape the management of race difference. 

Based on the extended case study of the French Diversity Label, a protective labor standard generated with government leadership since 2008, data demonstrate in particular how normalizing antidiscrimination through voluntary diversity certification has contributed to upholding whiteness in organizations; as notably, but not solely, in the case of France.

To start with, almost four decades after civil rights and race relations laws in the US and the UK, respectively, antidiscrimination emerged in the early 2000s, under EU influence and legislation, in many European countries, including France. Like other member states with a so-called “continental law” system, France had until then a rather thin legal and political framework against racism and discrimination; enforced mostly through criminal proceedings, it triggered an average of about ten convictions per year to date, and even less in employment cases (Suk, 2008). 

Yet, in a prevailing climate of low regulation and resistance to additional “constraints,” rather than bolstering right-based litigation, French public authorities and corporate actors alike have been quick to embrace the rationales of diversity management; stressing the business case for workplace and marketplace diversification, beyond legal and social justice aims. Voiced by the corporate community, these concerns have joined a broader EU path towards so-called soft-law employment policies, built on new regulatory, meta-regulatory, and self-regulatory schemes (Levy-Faur & Gilad, 2004). 

Whereas purportedly designed to complement antidiscrimination law by certifying good practice of voluntary organizations, techniques of normalization, as a governance form, have brought about important changes in the ways of constructing diversity and non-discrimination. Converging with a large body of international scholarship, my contribution highlights how these processes coalesce around three tenets, in the transition from legal to market realms: instrumental rationality and valuation, privatization, and devolution of responsibility. 

Borrowing from Foucault's (2007 [2004]) words, against the backdrop of neoliberal governmentality, techniques of normalization which consist in bringing an “average normality” into play by presenting it precisely as “normal” —i.e. “suitable”, “acceptable”, “desirable” —have led to the definition of what I refer to as normalized diversity. One of whose most remarkable characteristics is that of being predominantly white. 

Making use of Foucauldian conceptualizations of norms, normality, and normalization, the research highlights the propensity of techniques of normalization to uphold privilege and power relations (Johnson et al., 2017), alongside already well-documented trends towards individualization, self-responsibilization, and the neglect of social concerns. I underscore how white diversity is empowered through macro-global features of late neoliberalism, such as privatized governance, and corporatized social movements and responsibilities, unprecedented economic inequality that accompanies new forms of racialization, in the context of rising white nationalism. 

I apply the concept of “white diversity” in a dual sense: first, it is intended to highlight the paradox of swiftly evicting race and ethnicity from the space of corporate diversity procedures - as has been notably but not solely in the case of Europe and France; second, the progressive embedding of these ideals into a majority-centered discourse, around “a good diversity” that “benefits us all’. Both these aspects concur to reinscribe, rather than mitigate, racist hierarchies and power relations within the very procedures, designed to pursue equality (Ray, 2019 ; Berrey et al., 2017).

Unlike colorblindness, white diversity reinscribes discrimination within purportedly race-conscious frames and policies, designed precisely to right its wrongs. As such, it calls for fresh explanatory strategies, where CRTs and the “theory of racialized organizations” (Ray, 2019), in particular, offer an invaluable set of conceptual tools. Here my choice is to link its analysis to some key traits of late capitalism , by considering diversity as a dispositif of neoliberal governmentality - that is a set of discourses, policy instruments, and technical arrangements that are embedded in vested interests and power relations. . 

From this position, “white diversity” contends that mainstream corporate policies not only do nothing to grapple with structural racism, including within their own institutions (Sobande, 2019). Rather, it highlights how these policies designed to fix racial bias and dismantle racist hierarchies end up  doing quite the opposite, through the spread of whitewashed notions of diversity that ultimately reinforce white normativity; yet still circumscribing the realm of possibility for more substantive change.

On the one hand, the case study thus attempts a theoretical contribution towards conceptualizing race and ethnicity that calls, in particular, for a closer attention to the intertwining of scholarly and practical applications of the diversity paradigm (Doytcheva, 2020). On the other hand, this research offers a novel account of how markets, alongside organizations, appropriate legal ideals and social justice goals. 

Read the article in the Journal of Marketing Management: link.

References

Berrey, E., Nelson, R. L., & Nielsen, L. B. (2017). Rights on trial: How workplace discrimination law perpetuates inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Doytcheva, M. (2015). Politiques de la diversité. Sociologie des discriminations et des politiques antidiscriminatoires au travail. Peter Lang.

Doytcheva, M. (2020). White Diversity: Paradoxes of Deracializing Antidiscrimination, Soc. Sci. 2020, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci9040050

Foucault, M. (2007), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at Collège de France 1977- 1978. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Johnson, G. D., Thomas, K. D., & Grier, S. A. (2017). When the burger becomes halal: a critical discourse analysis of privilege and marketplace inclusion. Consumption Markets & Culture, 20(6), 497-522.

Mueller, J. C. (2020). Racial ideology or racial ignorance? An alternative theory of racial cognition. Sociological Theory, 38(2), 142–169.

Sobande, F. (2019). Woke-washing: “Intersectional” femvertising and branding “woke” bravery. European Journal of Marketing. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-02-2019-0134

Ray, V. E. (2019). A theory of racialized organizations. American Sociological Review, 84(1), 26-53.

Milena Doytcheva is Professor of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Lille and Fellow at the Institut Convergences Migrations (Collège de France-CNRS). She is a Fulbright laureate and Distinguished Visiting Scholar (2021) at the ARC Institute (The Graduate Center, CUNY). Her research focuses on processes of regulating race and ethnicity through politics and public policy, including issues of diversity and non-discrimination in the marketplace. Her work has appeared in top journals, including SociologieS, Revue des Droits de l’Homme, Revue Française des Migrations Internationales, Revue Française de Sociologie.