Post on 21-Apr-2023
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Oscillating politics and shifting agencies: Equalities and diversity work and
actor-network theory
Abstract
Purpose – The paper has two purposes: to introduce a new perspective on power and
resistance in equalities work; and to trouble either or theorisations of success and
failure in this work. Instead it offers a new means of exploring micro-practice.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper applies/develops an “actor network
theory” (ANT) analysis to a single case study of Iopia, a Black woman equalities
practitioner working in a prison education context. It uses this to explore the ways in
which Iopia interacts with a variety of human and non-human objects to challenge
racism in this context.
Findings – Iopia, from an initial position of marginality (as a Black woman
experiencing racism) is able to establish herself (by virtue of this same identity as a
Black woman combating racism) as central to a “new” network for equality and
diversity. This new network both challenges and sustains narrow exclusionary
definitions of diversity. Thus, Iopia’s case provides an example of the contradictions,
and paradox, experienced by those working for equality and diversity.
Research limitations/implications – In the future, this type of feminist ANT analysis
could be more fully developed and integrated with critical race and other critical
cultural theories as these relate to equalities work.
Practical implications – The approach, and in particular the notion of translation, can
be used by practitioners in thinking through the ways in which they can use material
objects to draw in multiple “others” into their own networks.
Originality/value – The article is one of the first to explore equalities workers via the
lens of ANT. It is unique in its analysis of the material objects constituting both
diversity workers and diversity work and thus its analysis of diversity workers and
their work as part of a complex set of social and “material” relations.
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Key words – Objects, materiality, ambivalence, institutional racism, resistance,
micro-practice.
Introduction
Why are we angry? We are angry because we have been mistreated, we are
angry because no one understands and yet no one acts, we are angry because
no one really acts, we are angry because our thinking is not aligned with the
world, we are angry because the world is not aligned with our thinking, we are
angry because see injustice, we are angry because we have no equivalent to
the African-American movement, we are angry because we are white, because
we have power and we don’t acknowledge it, because we have boxes and the
ability to shape them from the inside, because there is every need for a social
justice movement and yet it is so hard to justify. We are angry and we’re not
sure why. These issues are complicated. (Shah, 2006, p. 19)
This quote is taken from the work of the United Kingdom (UK) independent artist and
producer Rajni Shah. It gives us some insight into the cacophony of voices and
perspectives that may be circulating within and around the contemporary concept of
diversity in all its contexts and versions. As both diversity practitioners and academics
emphasise, for good and bad, one of the notable things about the notion of diversity is
that it is elastic and baggy. It means different things to different people; and, as we
argue later, different things to the same people, depending on the context. Thus,
diversity can be invoked as a rationale for “good business”, as a way of improving
creativity in organisations, as a quantitative measure of representation, as a
description of human variety or as a policy imperative to provide a social “mission”
(Ahmed et al., 2006). As a result, diversity is simultaneously everywhere and
nowhere. It is notoriously difficult to “pin down”. At the same time, it can become as
sticky as superglue, attached to some concepts, politics, people, identities, non-human
objects and bodies more than others (Swan and Hunter, under consideration).
In spite of this complexity and multiplicity, much of the literature has tended
to reproduce somewhat simplistic binaries around diversity. For example, a dualism is
often set up between the state and activists, as a result of which state policy is viewed
as a monolithic infrastructure within which diversity work is framed, cut off from the
struggles of users. Other examples include the idea that equality is good and diversity
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is bad, or professionalisation of diversity compromised and diversity activism
uncompromised.
At the bottom of this is a relative under-theorisation of the messiness of
equalities and diversity work within the literature. Our own research (Ahmed et al.,
2006; Hunter, 2005a, 2005b) and our own experience of doing formalised and
informal equalities and diversity work suggest that this is rarely cut and dried. Our
own empirical work and that of Deborah Jones (Jones, 2004; Jones and Stablein,
2006) show that equalities and diversity workers feel a great deal of ambivalence in
relation to the types of policies, training and actions that they have to undertake. This
ambivalence arises as they feel much of this work compromises them when their
attention is diverted from what they consider to be the “real” work of equality.
Nevertheless, they report that this type of compromised work is necessary and can
lead to unexpected outcomes.
A related issue is the feeling that equality and diversity workers have to “play
the game” by presenting matters of racism and profound discrimination in more user-
friendly language; dressing up social justice interventions as commercial ventures –
the infamous business case. Thus, they draw resources – linguistic, emotional, bodily
– from different identities and discourses that can underpin equality and diversity.
These oscillations and ambivalences are seldom addressed in the equality and
diversity literature. The multiplicity of micro-practices and micro-encounters in which
contradictory identities and resources are mobilised is relatively under-explored. This
raises questions about how equality and diversity workers hold together the
contradictory aspects of their work; how they live with ambivalence and multiplicity.
Our paper starts to address some of these issues, drawing upon one case study of an
equality and diversity worker, Iopia, who worked in the UK prison education service.
This is not to underestimate the contribution of the emergence of equality and
diversity studies across a range of disciplines. Thus, critical policy literature has
focused on the effectiveness of a variety of equal opportunities policies, including
those concerned with equal access to goods and services (Bagilhole, 1997; Bhavani et
al., 2005; Blakemore and Drake, 1996; Gewirtz, 2000; Lewis, 2000; Phoenix, 2000).
It has also begun to focus on how diversity work is done in context, examining the
implementation of equal opportunities practices in education, social work and local
government (Gibbon, 1992; Jewson and Mason, 1992; Lustgarten and Edwards, 1992;
Penketh, 2000; Young, 1992) and the role of users and social movements in the
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development of such policies (Taylor, 1996; Williams, 1989). Management literature
has examined the political implications of the “turn to diversity”, that is, the recent
shift from equal opportunities to diversity in private sector and public sector
organisations (Benschop, 2001; Kirton and Green, 2005; Liff, 1998; Litvin, 1997;
2002; Wilson and Iles, 1996).
These literatures make important contributions to our understanding of the
effects, implications and potential uses of policy. But they continue to underplay the
micro-politics involved in making and taking up policy by diversity workers, activists
and professionals. The effect of this in the literature is that diversity workers’
identities, practices and agency power can be seen in static and unambiguous ways.
Thus, it might be understood from these arguments that diversity work is relatively
cut and dried: there are good policies and bad policies; good activism and bad
corporate diversity. In contrast, we want to approach diversity workers as engaged in
a complex micro-politics, developing multiple strategies of resistance, mobilising
different and often contradictory identities, interests, desires and discourses at
different times. This provides a richer, more complex understanding of the daily
oscillations and contradictions that equalities workers face up to but also live with.
To start to get at some of these issues, in this paper we focus on one interview
with a diversity worker called Iopia. The interview is taken from a larger project with
equalities trainers and practitioners[1] in the English learning and skills sector[2]. Our
main aim in this paper is to bring a new approach to understandings of power in
equalities work. Because power relations are integral to understanding the ways in
which diversity workers are able to make inroads into unequal organisational
practices, it is important to have a more nuanced understanding of the micro-politics
involved in doing equality work.
To help us we draw upon an approach called actor network theory (ANT),
which we shall elaborate on in more detail in a later section. In essence, ANT enables
us to illuminate the formalised and less formalised processes through which equality
and diversity gets taken up or not taken up in organisations. These processes are often
hidden or assumed – what ANT calls “blackboxed” – in the literature. Once opened
up, we can start to see not only what Vicky Singleton (1998) describes as the
“explanations, recommendations and assessments” drawn upon by diversity workers
(p. 332), but also how different actors become decision-makers, are given power, take
on different identities and become network-builders (Singleton, 1996). More recent
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versions of ANT show how these processes are not stable or uncontradictory (Star,
1991; Singleton and Michael, 1993; Singleton, 1996, 1998). Thus, ANT can help us
emphasise the multiplications, heterogeneity, mutability and uncertainty that is
involved in diversity workers’ practices, identities, interests and power, and diversity
work itself.
ANT also offers diversity studies important explanatory resources, which are
relevant to this paper. First, ANT’s conceptualisation of power allows us to explain
how quite different constituencies are able to take up “diversity” and yet
fundamentally disagree about its political aims and objectives. Second, because ANT
theorises the interdependencies between non-human and human, it also allows us to
examine how material objects commonly present in organisational life contribute to
sustaining and challenging inequalities in organisations. Thus, it enables us to explore
how diversity policies, strategies, and training manuals work with emails, electronic
discussion spaces, power point technology, flipcharts and human actors to produce
equality and diversity networks.
Actor network theory
ANT is widely used across a range of disciplines including social studies of science
(Latour, 1987, 1999; Callon, 1986a, 1986b), feminist science studies (Singleton,
1996, 1998; Star, 1991; Haraway, 1991, 1997) and anthropology (Strathern, 2004)
and organisational theory (Gherardi and Nicolini 2000, 2005; Fox, 2000, 2005),
among others. Leading ANT theorist, John Law (2004) has argued that while ANT is
widely used as a “toolkit in socio-technical analysis”, it is sometimes better
considered as a “sensibility to materiality, relationality, and process” (p. 157). As a set
of conceptual resources then, it can help us explore how diversity management creates
new relations, interactions and connections. In particular, it emphasises how
heterogeneous people, groups, interests, objects, documents, bodies and skills can
align together to produce a relatively stable but dynamic network in spite of – or as
Vicky Singleton (1996, 1998) argues – because of ambivalence, contradictions and
oscillations. Thus, ANT focuses on networks-in-the-making, and ways that human
actors and non-human actors (such as diversity policies or audit reports) associate to
produce a relatively durable diversity network.
ANT has developed from a number of ethnographic studies on a range of
organisational practices. These include the doing of science, car production, cervical
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screening programmes, scallop fishing, etc. There have been a number of debates
within ANT, for example, around the politics of ANT, the colonising tendency of
ANT in relation to the “other”, the importance of ambivalence, and as a result,
extensive embellishments on the original work, particularly by feminists such as
Vicky Singleton (1996,1998; Singleton and Michael, 1993). Our work elsewhere
engages with these debates, (see for example, Hunter and Swan, 2005; Swan and
Hunter, under consideration); this paper provides an introduction to ANT, which will
be necessarily brief so that we outline enough of ANT’s distinct theoretical
commitments to be able to move on to use it as a framework for our discussion on
diversity work. This means that some of the more nuanced and complex debates on
ANT will not be covered here.
In essence, ANT describes how “loose assemblages” of disparate people,
agendas or things can be wrought together through alliances and negotiations into a
“stable” network. A network is a specialised term within ANT. It refers to “a co-
ordinated set of heterogeneous actors which interact more or less successfully to
develop, produce, distribute and diffuse methods for generating goods and services”
(Callon, 1991, p. 133). These heterogeneous actors in relation to diversity
management can refer to relationships, objects, knowledges, connections and
processes. Networks are spread across time and space. Identities – of both people and
objects, the human and non-human – are bound up with the network. In addition,
actors only have power in so far as they are elements of a network. Power and identity
of any actor – human or non-human – is an effect of being in a network. Thus, Callon
writes that a network is:
… not a network connecting entities which are already there, but a network
which configures ontologies. The agents, their dimensions and what they are
and do, all depend on the morphology of the relations in which they are
involved. (Callon, 1991)
Rather than suggesting that objects (actors) produce relations, he is suggesting
that it is relations that create objects.
As can be seen from the discussion above, ANT makes no analytic distinction
between the human and the non-human. This means that they are all viewed in what
leading ANT theorist, Michel Callon (1986a), calls the same analytic “register”. Thus,
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no a priori distinctions are therefore made. In tandem, ANT tends to avoid macro
notions such as institutions, state, class, “race” or gender. Rather, it examines how
these are constituted as “coherent, consistent, uniform across time and space” through
networks of people, ideas and objects (Michael, 1996, p. 62). It theorises these as
effects rather than as explanatory resources. This leads to a preference by ANT
theorists for what they describe as “neutral” terminology, such as entities or actors,
which attempts to reject orthodox social science dualistic distinctions such as human–
non-human, subject–object and social–natural.
The process of how networks are brought together and stabilised is called
“translation”. Briefly, it involves multiple interactions – negotiations, co-optations,
seductions, coercions – between different actors – human and non-human. Through
these encounters, diverse interests are aligned by one of the actors becoming the
gatekeeper, which interprets, co-opts and represents these various interests. As Michel
Callon and Bruno Latour (1981) describe it:
By translation we understand all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts
of persuasion and violence thanks to which an actor or force takes, or causes
to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or
force. (p. 279)
Translation then refers to the “work through which actors modify, displace,
and translate their various and contradictory interests” in line with the network
requirements (Latour, 1999, p. 311). It is a process of connection through cornering,
negotiation, yielding and co-opting that attempts to define particular roles for actors to
take on and particularly how problems should be understood. Essentially, it involves
finding language that is agreeable across competing interests. For example, in relation
to diversity work, translation may take the form of using the so-called “business case”
– in which equality is presented as an economic or organisational benefit – in order to
align the disparate interests of the organisation, management, black and minority staff,
white staff, diversity workers, etc.
The three core processes in these kinds of alignment are referred to as
interessement, translation and enrolment. In lay terms, Micheal (1996) defines them
as:
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Interessement: This is what you really want to be.
Translation: We are the ones who can help you become that.
Enrolment: Grant your obedience by your own consent.
Through the process of translation, translation bottlenecks are created, or what
ANT theorists called “obligatory points of passage” (Singleton and Michael, 1993).
All actors must pass through these obligatory points of passage in order to articulate
their identity or raison d’être within the network. For example, in equality work an
obligatory point of passage might be the Race Relations Amendment Act (RRAA)
2000. Therefore, different actors must be seen to abide by the terms of the RRAA to
be “doing equality work”.
Central to the concept of translation is that connections between actors do not
take the form of a cause. Thus, non-human and human actors are not all aligned in the
diversity network for the same reasons or interests, nor with the same identities or
investments. Neither is a cause followed by a string of the same connections or
explanations (Latour, 2005, p. 107). Rather, translation is “a relation that does not
transport causality but induces … [actors] into coexisting” (p. 5). The alignment
processes outlined above produce diverse and contradictory connections around
different interests. This is important in relation to diversity management because
being part of the network does not signal a unified signing up or conversion to the
same single cause. Thus, different actors are not necessarily aligned to the cause of
addressing inequality. Being translated through a network of diversity does not mean
that actors are converted or unified. Instead, the human and non-human actors’
interests are being met by enrollers in the network and, at the same time, the actors’
identities, power and practices are taken up through being in the network.
Importantly, for our discussion on diversity management, translation is a
process that displaces competing scenarios (Latour, 2005). Displacement can involve
the movement of materials, resources and information, setting up meetings, making
contacts and gaining funding, which render the actor’s network more durable
(Michael, 1996, p. 54). Thus, it is always a political process that is performative, that
is, producing new identities, relations, questions, solutions and forms of organising,
which are always dynamic and ongoing. The stability of networks is precarious and
has to be worked at through the ongoing alignment, boxing in and displacement of the
interests and identities of actors. As Susan Leigh Star (1991) writes, “every enrolment
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entails a failure to enrol and a destruction of the world of the non-enrolled” (p. 45).
Through these ongoing processes, networks can stall, break down and change
direction, and our next section starts to explore these through examples from our case
study.
Feminist challenges
There are many versions of ANT and one important challenge to what we might refer
to as the canonical ANT outlined above comes from feminist writers such as Vicky
Singleton (1996, 1998) and Susan Leigh Star (1991), and others – often referred to as
“after ANT” writers – such as Annemarie Mol (2005), Charis Cussins (1998) and
Helen Verran (2002). These writers draw on some elements of ANT, but challenge
and extend it in quite new ways. In essence, their work has stressed indeterminacy,
ambivalence and multiplicity in practices across a number of fields. They differ in a
number of ways but they all point to the importance of recognising that practices not
only make identities and agency but also more profoundly “enact” realities (Mol,
2005). In addition, participation in practices, and networks, is multiple. One of the
reasons this occurs is because networks exist within networks. Thus, actors’ identities
are partly defined through their relationship to one network forged by others, while
they are also involved in constructing their own networks. This latter network can
both problematise and reinforce the identities on which the original network is based.
If networks are multiplicitous and multidimensional … they are rendered
durable by the way that actors at once occupy the margins and the core, are the
most outspoken critics and the most ardent stalwarts, are simultaneously
insiders and outsiders – in sum are ambivalent. (Michael, 1996, p. 65)
If networks are created through the alignment of multiple actors, each with
multiple identifications and conflicting perspectives related to these identities, the
enroller must call on these actors to prioritise one element of that identity in order to
fulfil their role within the network to achieve network durability.
But there are other reasons why multiplicity, ambivalence and contradiction
are central to networks. For example, for Singleton (1996, 1998), actors can have
several contradictory identities at once, and these actually help sustain a network as in
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her case of the UK Cervical Screening Programme (the CSP). Her main argument is
that the CSP was held together by instability and multiplicitous identities. For Cussins
(1998), multiplicity operates in a different way in her study of women undergoing in
vitro fertilisation (IVF). Her main, somewhat counter-intuitive argument, is that
women have agency in their own objectification in the IVF process, as they render
themselves compatible with instruments and practices, and manage themselves as
much as the medics and procedures. Cussins argues that women’s agency and
subjectivity are multiply configured through this process. Cussins’ work profoundly
challenges simple notions of agency. Thus, she suggests that women can participate
actively in their own objectification – for Cussins, this is not a contradiction in terms.
This is because women have agency in the IVF process at times when they might
appear not to; they have to render themselves objectifiable, we might say.
Furthermore, agency comes and goes over time, and depending on the context (for
example the success or failure of the treatment) can even be enacted retrospectively.
She refers to this as ontological choreography. Through these accounts, feminist
theorists are suggesting that contingency, contradiction, mutability and multiplicity
are at the centre of networks, practices and realities.
A final contribution from this feminist literature that we take forward in our
own work is in determining where we focus in the network. Feminists have critiqued
much of ANT’s focus on the “heroic” actor, the most obviously powerful actor
positioned at the pinnacle of hierarchical networks (Star and Griesemer, 1989).
Haraway (1997), positioning herself in contrast to Bruno Latour, claims that as
analysts too we “must always be in the action, be finite and dirty, not transcendent
and clean” (p. 36). For Haraway, all knowledge is situated and located knowledge
whether it is official or unofficial. Similar to Cussins’ (1998) notion of “ontological
choreography”, we suggest that knowing involves a kind of “epistemological
choreography”, where, following Haraway: “location is the always partial, always
finite fraught play of foreground and background, text and context”.
Susan Leigh Star (1991), suggests that one powerful way in which feminist
analysis and ANT can be joined is in linking the outsider or marginalised actors
characteristic of feminist work with the translation model of ANT to explore “the
point of view of that which cannot be translated: the monstrous, the Other, the wild”
(p. 38). This perspective enables us in this paper to understand what marginal actors
achieve through day-to-day work and the novel ways in which organisational futures
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may get played out as a result. But it also enables us to think through how the
perspectives of those actors also change depending on where they are positioned in
the network; depending on what constitutes their foreground and their background.
Thus, such a feminist analysis enables us to consider the ways in which all actors are
always “powerful and powerless” (Hunter, 2005a, p. 159, 2005b), the ways in which
they embody contradiction and points to why network durability for equality and
diversity is so precarious.
Iopia and the human and non-human actors
In this next section, we want to draw upon the key concepts and techniques of a more
feminist ANT to illuminate some of the less visible processes involved in diversity
and equality work in the learning and skills sector. To do this, we turn to the case
study, drawn from interviews by one of the authors with a Black woman working in a
men’s prison education unit in the North of England. As Vicky Singleton (1996)
argues, the starting point for any ANT analysis is chosen by the researcher, and this
affects the viewpoint created. We chose to enter the network alongside of Iopia, to
enable us to explore the dynamics by which so-called marginal actors can create and
sustain a central role, thus developing our understanding of equality and diversity
work.
At the centre of the case study is Iopia, an African–Caribbean woman teacher
who works in a prison education department in England. Iopia is employed as a basic
skills teacher[3] working with prisoners. In the case study, Iopia shows how she
draws upon a range of human and non-human actors in order to create and maintain a
central role for herself as a race equality leader. This is in spite of her having
experienced racism (direct and indirect) within the prison and explicit exclusion from
applying for the post of Race Relations Officer.
The equality context in which Iopia is working is critical for understanding
how she works with human and non-humans in this example. One of the more
significant non-human additions to the equality landscape in the UK in recent years
has been the RRAA (2000). It has had a significant impact on how equality and
diversity work gets structured, understood and carried out. The Amendment, brought
into existence after the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and the subsequent MacPherson
Report (1999), is seen to signal an ideological break with previous equality legislation
for two reasons. It enshrined the concept of institutional racism in statute and
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emphasised the concept of “public duty”, meaning that educational institutions have a
specific duty to demonstrate the ways in which they encourage equality and diversity
to develop within their organisations. In theory then, a shift has occurred in the
“burden of proof” for racism. Rather than assuming a level playing field,
organisations now have to assume the existence of race inequality and evidence the
ways in which they are combating it. These provisions have led to educational
providers being required to publish diversity strategies, race equality action plans,
race equality schemes (RES) and race equality impact assessments; so adding to the
proliferation of other non-human objects flowing from the RRAA.
UK diversity work has been, and continues to be hugely influenced by the
work of Black activists (see Alleyne, 2002; Shukra, 1998; Lentin, 2004). There is a
long history of Black activism in education (Mirza, 1998) and more recently in the
learning and skills sector specifically. The work of Black activists has contributed to
the creation of a number of different formal and informal networks for Black and
minoritised staff, students and managers. A consortium of some of these networks,
together with trade unions and a network of principals, produced the Commission for
Black Staff’s Challenging Racism: Leading the Way In Further Education (2002) and
the subsequent creation of the Black Leadership Initiative (see also Bhavani et al.,
2005). Despite this activist influence, it continues to be “formal” statements of race
(in)equity, as presented in official documents and positive action programmes
locating the problem of (and solution for) race equality in minoritised staff, that tend
to accrue value in organisations (Ahmed et al, 2006; Bhavani et al., 2005; Gulman,
2004). Thus, equally importantly, many more informal challenges to the unequal
organisational structures levied by Black and minoritised staff on a daily basis are less
valued, accrue less organisational capital and often remain hidden from view (Hunter,
2006; Kilic, 2006; see also Sudbury, 1998).
In relation to Iopia’s prison education context, there are two key reports that
are central to Iopia’s network-building, both by the Commission for Race Equality
(CRE): the first is the report into the racist murder of Zahid Mubarek at Feltham
Prison in 2000 (CRE, 2003a); the second is the report of a wider investigation into
race equality in prisons in England and Wales (CRE, 2003b). The CRE investigation
was established as a result of representations made by Zahid’s family after his murder.
CRE commissioners and the HM Prison Service were the key players in examining
what went on and creating the two formal reports. These reports, however, drew on a
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vast array of perspectives that went beyond the CRE commissioners and the Prison
Service. The range of materials used included police interviews conducted at the time
of the murder with White and Black prisoners and prison officers, the individual
commissioners and prison governors. It also draws upon materials from the HM
Prison Service initial internal inquiry into the murder, supplementary materials from
the CRE investigation, along with evidence from two other cases of unlawful racial
discrimination within the prison service in which the CRE had been involved (see
CRE, 2003b).
As a result of the investigation, the CRE had the right to serve a Non-
Discrimination Notice on HM Prison Service on the basis of the finding of unlawful
racial discrimination[4]. However, they suspended the decision to do this for two
reasons. First, the Prison Service agreed to work with the commission to accelerate
the pace of change on race equality. Second, it had provided evidence of steps being
undertaken to deal with the problems the investigation had focused on (CRE, 2003a,
p. 13). This report and the investigation surrounding it are important because they are
representative of broader cross-sectoral epistemological struggles over the notion of
“institutional racism” post-MacPherson, a significant part of which was characterised
by the resistance to recognise the category at all (Neal, 2003). Many have argued that
the definition is too tight. Others have argued however that the nebulous nature of the
MacPherson definition comes out of the continuing tension between activists’ and
establishment understandings of the term “institutional racism” (Solomos, 1999).
The struggles around institutional racism can be understood in ANT terms in
relation to what Susan Leigh Star (1999) refers to as “control of the indicators”. Her
case comes from quarrels between psychoanalysts and biologists over disease
classification systems, in which numeric indicators were developed that squeezed out
psychoanalytic perspectives altogether. She writes:
When large epistemological stakes are at issue in the development of a system,
one political tactic is to focus away from the larger question, and instead to
seize control of the indicators. (p. 388).
This “narrowing to control” is one way of interpreting what many
commentators argue has happened with the concept of institutional racism. Thus,
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many academics and practitioners argue that institutional racism is now interpreted
“narrowly” in bureaucratic diversity management interventions and, hence,
disconnected from its original use (Bhavani et al., 2005). Under these circumstances,
the indicators for race equality become dominated by racialised body counts and
numerical targets that can easily be met while organisational practices remain
unchanged (Puwar, 2004; Wrench, 2003). Our case study below shows how Iopia, a
marginal actor, worked with official policy documents, concepts and identities
produced after the CRE investigation to stop this quantification of institutional racism
and to foreground her own identity as a leader for race equality.
Oscillations
Prior to the publication of the CRE report, Iopia had experienced difficulty in “being
heard” regarding her own personal experiences of racism and those of Black and
minority ethnic prisoners within the prison. She had been feeling that she had been
“fobbed off” over quite a long period of time by the prison administration. However,
she saw the report’s publication as a possible opportunity for starting to address some
of these issues: “I thought, well okay, I’m not going rush things; I’ll just see how
things progress”. The rest of the case study explores what happened and how in our
view Iopia constructs “new” networks and draws upon the non-human to work for
equality and diversity within the prison.
We begin with a quote towards the middle of the interview. At this point, Iopia
was answering a question about how things progressed after she first raised the issue
of discriminatory practices in the prison.[5]
As a result of me challenging the situation at HMP lock-up I was able to liaise
with the director on a one to one. I attended a couple of interviews with him
where I was able to highlight my concerns. And the actual effects that the
adverse effects could have if they didn’t change their attitude to the concerns
that I had. And also the fact that if they continued in a certain methods that
they were doing using stereotypes to sack prisoners and their attitudes then
they would risk the institution of becoming, well, being classified as
institutionally racist. I also brought to light the fact that the CRE in the prison
service had recently completed the study that showed institutional racism was
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prevalent within … the prison service anyway. And that prison service
included our establishment cause we’re part of the prison service...
In this first part of the excerpt, we can understand Iopia’s account in terms of
translation. Translation involves bringing together her interest in race equality
together with the prison’s interest in not being described as racist. Using Michael’s
(1996) ANT framework, we can explore the situation in the following terms:
You want to be a high quality prison (ie for equality) yet you institute bad
quality (“racially” unequal) employment practices.
I can help you become for a high quality prison (by helping you with “race”
equality).
Grant me your autonomy; support me in this by putting me in the position by
which I can help you become more “racially” equal.
Translation in this instance refers to the way that certain roles and definitions
of the situation are being offered for take-up that produce a network around race
equality. These roles and definitions crucially close off competing roles and
definitions. In this case, the prison can only not be institutionally racist if it changes
its procedures. It cannot continue to discriminate and be considered as equal.
In this next quote, Iopia presents her account of how she mobilised other
actors in the network, while being mobilised herself. As she develops her explanation,
through the lens of ANT, we can see how she enrols different actors – both human
and non-human – into her network around race equality:
I was also able to bring to their attention the criteria for both race relations
officer and assistant race relations officer and how that had changed.[6] So
that helped me. And gave me the confidence to apply for a job that that’s taken
me into the public sector. But it’s also … put me in a position now where I can
actually implement policies in regards to race relations. That I can actually
investigate race relations. I can actually define packages – packages that are
looking at cross-cultural communication, religion, identity with both prisoners
and with officers, and the actual prison service staff.
16
In this excerpt, we can see how Iopia creates “allies” through non-human
objects to redefine the network. These include the job descriptions for the race
relations officers, educational courses and policies. She also enrols discourses on race
equality such as cross-cultural communication, religion and identity that go broader
than the legislative network that arose from the CRE investigation and the RRAA.
Iopia is also creating new roles for the humans: prisoners and staff in the network as
“learners” in race equality. It is important to emphasise here, lest we produce an
account of these moves that can be seen as humanist, that Iopia is also being enrolled
as she enrols. Thus, she is aligning her own interests with different human and non-
human actors, at the same time as she is being enrolled by others in ways that she
might not intend. New roles and identities are being taken up by Iopia as she draws
upon resources from different actors and networks. Thus, none of this is without
contradiction and ambivalence.
In the next excerpt, Iopia gives an account of how she extended the network
even beyond the group of non-humans and humans identified in the quote above.
Also working with directors as well. Not just officers or senior officers. But
also managers and directors. And it’s given me an opportunity also to liaise
with organisations and the communities … To get them to participate more
within the prison. And get involved in the prison aspect in bringing people in
hopefully. And also to increase the number of Black minority ethnic
employees within the establishment that I belong to. So from a negative, a sort
of negative experience that I’ve had at the lockups inspired me to move on to
something else now … there’s something good come out of it.
What Iopia’s account shows is that she is wanting to bring in new and less
formalised equalities networks into the prison network. In ANT terms, this account
suggests the bringing together of loose assemblages around different perspectives on
race equality and drawing them into a network. This account suggests that the prison
network will be broadened out to situate diversity work within its broader community
context and wider identities and interests around equality. This is achieved, not
through an imposition of will, but through processes of translation and enrolment, of
which Iopia is both subject and object. In particular, she presents herself as enrolling
the prison education department in such a way that they are persuaded of the value of
17
race equality not only in terms of numbers but also in terms of the qualitative
experience of employment.
At the same time, we need to understand Iopia herself as part of a network. By
taking on the formal race equality work in her institution she too is being enrolled by
the prison network on the basis of racialised positioning, occupying a certain space
within the organisation, working for race equality and providing a “Black
perspective” (Hunter, 2006; Kilic, 2006; Turner, 2006). This positioning in itself,
however, reproduces racism by confining Black and minority ethnic staff into certain
racialised roles. Thus, Iopia is in the position of enrolee and enroller. This reinforces
the notion that ambivalence and multiplicity can be part of participating in networks
and, in particular, equality and diversity networks. It also underlines that simplistic
binaries in diversity studies of insider and outsiders, or good diversity work versus
bad diversity work, need more debate.
This account also suggests the oscillations that form part of Iopia’s
participation in the prison network. From an initial position of marginality (as a Black
woman experiencing racism and direct exclusion) within the network of the prison,
Iopia is able to establish herself (by virtue of this same identity as a Black woman
combating racism) as central to a “new” network for equality and diversity. This new
network also challenges narrow decontextualised understandings of diversity, while at
the same time gaining much of its power from narrow decontextualised
understandings of diversity. Iopia is enrolled, through a specific part of her identity,
but she then simultaneously enrols others (community groups, an Asian woman
colleague, Black prisoners) previously marginal to the prison network through the
CRE’s report (2003a, b) and other documents. She then moves on to create new non-
human objects integral to sustaining the network. These objects rely on broader
classifications of equality than the inclusion and quantification of Black bodies. These
objects now enrol ideas and actors around ethnicity, religious experience and
communication practices.
Finally, we begin to see the way in which Iopia gestures towards a re-
definition of the prison itself. She re-situates it in terms of its interdependence with
the “outside world”, the variety of communities and other objects that give meaning to
and thus perform the prison. At the same time, the heterogeneity of actors, interests,
ideas, etc. within this network enrol different aspects of Iopia’s identity and provide
different types of agency and resources. Some of these, as we have suggested above,
18
are what might be seen as racist and anti-equality, underscoring the contradictions,
ambivalence and multiplicities in diversity work.
This case study points to the ways in a range of actors, human and non-human,
are currently being brought into equality and diversity work. Through the use of ANT,
we can see how the CRE report (2003a, b) constitutes a non-human means of
standardising equality and diversity work within prisons. This enabled the broader
prison network to enrol Iopia and other actors, but also enabled Iopia to enrol other
different actors into her own race equality network. The report acted as a means for
translating information across different “worlds” but crucially without homogenising
the interests or discourses of different actors. A form of contemporary management
device that serves to define relations and coordinate different actors, it constitutes
end-points but also starting points. It structures behaviour but allows for restructuring.
Diversity work in this case involves continual renegotiation, amendment and
rewritings between different non-human and human actors. As a result, it is also
precarious, contingent and creates ambivalence and contradictions. May be that is
what much diversity work involves: ambivalence work?
Conclusion
In this paper, we have drawn upon an ANT approach to introduce a more complex
analysis to explore the hidden, often forgotten elements of diversity work. Through an
empirical case study using an ANT analysis, we have sought to challenge the taken-
for-granted notion that there is a monolithic state that creates the only infrastructure
for equalities. One way we have done this is to show how this infrastructure is
profoundly relational in character. Thus, there are struggles surrounding the inclusion
of multiple perspectives in its very construction; and also in terms of how it is then
taken up. Our main argument has been that rather than viewing professionals as
complicit in the narrow bureaucratisation and quantification of inequalities, and
activists as “impotent” in the face of this managerialism, the very diversity
infrastructure itself is constituted through a complex network of relations where
activists, professionals, organisations and states are interdependent.
There are two other important aspects of this relationality that we want to
emphasise. As ANT shows us, materiality is central to this relationality: non-human
actors create and sustain relations between different actors. Through our case study,
19
we have explored how the prison network was extended and rendered durable through
the agency of the non-human as well as the human: documents, policies, reports,
investigation accounts and legislations among others all enrolled human and other
non-human actors. The second significance around relationality is that being aligned
to the network does not mean that you are signed up to one cause or interest. Our case
study shows how Iopia joined different worlds around the notion of “race equality”,
although these worlds understood race equality differently. Nevertheless, the notion of
race equality itself enrolled Iopia and enabled her to enrol other actors.
This analysis is important as it adds another dimension to burgeoning work on
auditing for diversity, or audit culture. Much of this work, including our own, strikes
significant notes of caution about the ways in which documents sustain cultures of
performativity rather than cultures of action (Ahmed et al., 2006; Blakemore and
Drake, 2006; Swan, 2006), going so far as to demonstrate the ways in which the
documenting of inequality through race equality statements actually blocks action for
race equality. But, there is another story to tell here. We have pointed to the way in
which these non-human actors of audit and performativity can actually force action,
constituting important starting points from which to make bolder claims for race
equality. These non-human actors do this in spite of perspectives that continue to
support inequality through liberal discourses of natural progression. Thus, they hold
and show the traces of more than one set of concerns, enabling other actors in a
network to maintain their respective concerns. At the same time, there is a
precariousness to all of the moves. There are epistemic and ontological oscillations at
every turn. This may mean that we cannot hold on to a simple binary of cultures of
performativity versus cultures of action.
Challenging racism and sexism is about challenging hierarchically ordered
dualistic and simplified modes of thinking and organising. This is because these fail to
take account of the heterogeneity and multiplicity of being. We have suggested ways
in which ANT as a mode of theorising against this oversimplification is a useful tool
for theorising against racism and sexism. It enables us to think about how Black and
minoritised staff can be marginalised by racism, but also how they can mount strong
and successful challenges to their marginalisation through their everyday work. This
is important to recognise in order to rewrite common narratives around Black and
minority ethnic staff as lacking the agency to challenge the oppressive relations of
racism. Thus, policy and policy documents are not as “fixed” as we may believe.
20
Policies can be oppressive, but they can also be used as means to force social change
in unexpected ways. One of us has argued elsewhere (Swan and Fox, under
consideration) that the way in which diversity workers interact with diversity
discourses can have unstable and unpredictable consequences; we are also claiming
that their multiple interactions with documents have unpredictable impacts. At the
same time, we need to acknowledge the ambivalence and precariousness involved in
work that seeks to disrupt the status quo, and to work harder at understanding the
emotional and psychic consequences of such labour.
Acknowledgements
Thanks very much to the reviewers for their most helpful comments, challenges and
insights. Thanks to Professor Sara Ahmed for her emotional and intellectual
inspiration.
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27
Dr Shona Hunter
Dr Shona Hunter is Research Councils UK Fellow in the New Machinery of
Governance in the School of Sociology and Social policy at the University of Leeds.
She has carried out a variety of interdisciplinary research into gendered and racialised
relations in health and social care and education. For the fellowship she is doing more
work around the relational politics of equalities policy-making. The aim is to develop
a new approach to exploring governance, which considers the affective dimensions of
policy analysis in social policy. This project draws on a theoretical synthesis between
psychodynamic, critical cultural theories (critical race, feminist and queer), feminist
sciences studies and actor–network analysis. Her teaching interests are around post-
colonial and feminist approaches to social policy and research methods on
professional, post-qualifying, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. She is
articles editor for Critical Social Policy and has published on her work around the
negotiation of gendered, raced and professional identifications in Critical Social
Policy, Journal of Social Work Practice and Policy Futures in Education; she is
currently working on other pieces for Social Politics, Policy and Politics and
Feminism and Psychology and the Scandinavian Journal of Management.
Dr Elaine Swan
Dr Elaine Swan is senior teaching fellow at Lancaster University Management
School, where she teaches organisational behaviour and diversity to postgraduate and
post-experience students. She also runs the Leaders for Change Programme for the
Health Foundation. Elaine has co-directed two large-scale interdisciplinary research
projects funded by the Centre for Excellence in Leadership/Department for Education
and Skills on Equality and Diversity work and Leadership Development Practices in
the learning and skills sector (2003–2006). Her other research focuses on the rise of
therapeutic cultures in organisations, diversity training and audit cultures. She is co-
editor with Professor Sara Ahmed of a special issue of Policy Futures in Education on
“Doing Diversity Work in Education”, has published articles in Gender Work and
Organization and Management Learning. She is currently completing a book on
workplace diversity for Sage with Dr Caroline Gatrell and regularly reviews articles
for Management Learning and Gender, Work and Organisation. Other planned work
is for the Scandinavian Journal of Management. She and Dr Shona Hunter are also
28
working with Dr Diane Grimes of Syracuse University, USA, on a further
international editorial project around White Spaces? Racialising Organisational
Femininities and Masculinities.
1. We tend to use the labels equalities practitioners and equalities workers interchangeably. We
recognise the contested nature of these categories (see Swan and Fox, under consideration, and Hunter,
2005), but use the terms here as shorthand for all of those professionals working in the learning and
skills sector with some form of responsibility for equality and diversity work. This may be additional to
their principal role, as is often in the case in the English learning and skills sector, or their only
responsibility, as is increasingly the case.
2. By English learning and skills sector, we refer to the vast and diverse set of institutions and practices
that make up post compulsory education in England including adult and community learning, further
education, higher education and work-based learning.
3. Basic Skills in an English context refers to numeracy and literacy.
4. Non discrimination notices constituted one of the few legal powers open to the CRE. The serving of
such a notice constitutes a mandate that discrimination be stopped.
5. To protect anonymity, the prison is referred to as “lock-up” in the extract; Iopia is also a pseudonym.
Both were chosen by the participant.
6. Here, Iopia was referring to changes in the requirements for race relations officers in terms of rank
and position within the prison.