ADVANCING RACIO-ETHNIC AND DIVERSITY THEORISING THROUGH ‘INTERSECTIONAL IDENTITY WORK’

Abstract

Racio-ethnic literature is criticised for essentialising and insufficiently accounting for context. Intersectionality, whilst acknowledging multiple identities, remains theoretically under-developed and narrow in focus. Drawing on process perspectives on identity, we offer a framework of 'intersectional identity work', in which individuals make sense of multiple identity dimensions that often simultaneously confer both disadvantage and privilege. We propose a symbiotic relationship between identity and diversity theorising which entails investigating the sensemaking and sensebreaking of 'oppositional identities'. Taking a post-structural feminist approach, we offer theoretical, empirical and methodological contributions of this framework for investigating racio-ethnicity in organisations.