Events

Prof. Tom Lawrence
Professor of Strategic Management
Saïd Business School
University of Oxford

This study explores the role of imagined communities in shaping organizational trajectories of inclusion—longer-term movements in organizations’ efforts to foster inclusion. We draw on a qualitative comparative revisit study of three organizations that were considered disability inclusion champions at the beginning of the study. We found that organizational trajectories of inclusion moved in unexpected downward directions—in which disability inclusion was diluted, expelled, and compartmentalized. These shifts did not occur because of explicit opposition to inclusion or wholesale abandonment of diversity commitments, but because organizational changes reshaped how members understood the workforce as a collective, altering patterns of social relations, expectations of membership, and the distribution of responsibility for accommodating difference. We contribute to inclusion research by showing how inclusion can be a fragile, temporally unfolding organizational achievement shaped by material changes and dependent on the relational and moral capacities of imagined organizational communities. It contributes to the research on imagined communities by demonstrating how dynamically evolving workforce imaginaries mediate these changes and reshape the governance of difference and inequality.