300854 Intersectional approaches to organizations (S) (SoSe 2025)

This seminar explores how gender, race, and class shape the everyday life of organizations, how organizational processes reinforce and sustain social inequalities, and how inequality regimes have shifted in response to gender and diversity policies. Through a critical engagement with foundational and contemporary scholarship, students will examine the structural, symbolic, and interpersonal dimensions of inequality within organizational settings.

The course begins by interrogating the concept of "work" through a gendered analytical framework, drawing on key theoretical contributions from scholars such as Rosabeth Moss Kanter, R.W. Connell and Joan Acker. Students will familiarize with the debates on gendered labor, organizational power structures, and the persistence of occupational segregation. The seminar then expands to analyze the intersectionality of gender with race and class, looking at case studies that employ qualitative and ethnographic methods to explore institutional practices across different organizational contexts.

A key focus of the course is the examination of violence—broadly defined to include harassment, stigmatization, and alienation—as an embedded institutional feature rather than an aberration. Students will engage with contemporary scholarship that critically assess how formal diversity policies and workplace reforms intersect with, fail to dismantle, and sometimes contribute to perpetuate systems of exclusion and discrimination.

Through a combination of readings, discussions, and analytical exercises, students will develop the tools to critically evaluate how social inequalities interplay with organizational processes. By the end of the seminar, they will be equipped to analyze organizational structures through an intersectional lens. Active participation in class is expected.