You people: Membership categorization and situated interactional othering in BigBank

Stephen Fox, Amie Ramanath and Elaine Swan

Gender, Work and Organization, 2023, vol. 30, issue 2, 574-595

Abstract: This paper offers an ethnomethodological membership categorization analysis (MCA) of an episode of argumentative talk in a bank, between a recent Indian migrant and her white British area manager. MCA examines how members use categorizations in the course of their everyday practical activities including workplace meetings. Our analysis shows how the “interactional trouble” between an employee and manager leads to the manager racially Othering the employee by invoking attributes resonant with what researchers call coloniality. Although theories of everyday racism and microaggression focus on everyday interactions, attention is not usually given to the moment‐by‐moment, turn‐by‐turn interactions and racial categorizations. In contrast, the MCA of our case study enables us to explicate the complexities of racializing and re‐colonizing work in specific organizational encounters. Racist interactions in organizations are complex, contestable, and draw on various shared categories, resources, and knowledges deployed to achieve situated institutional aims. In our in‐depth, close analysis of a relatively short interaction, we are able to reveal the institutional, gendered, racial, and colonial categories, and institutional and colonial devices that were made relevant; enabling us to explicate how racism works in the organizational every day. Studies of racist interactions stress there are specificities to the categories mobilized in organizational settings for example, parents, neighbors, race, and ethnicity and therefore the forms of racism produced. Our article contributes to studies of everyday racism in the workplace by showing the specific categories and devices―such as English, Indian, English Economy―mobilized turn‐by‐turn which led to a racially minoritized member of staff being interactionally Othered by the white manager in ways which not only does interpersonal harm but leads to her exclusion and dehumanization. We show how ethnomethodology and MCA are very useful, but somewhat neglected approaches, for learning about racism, coloniality, and gender in mundane, everyday workplace interactions.

Date: 2023
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