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‘On Being White: There's Nothing I Can Say’

Exploring Whiteness and Power in Organizations

Thames Valley University, UK, opustrg{at}ntlworld.com

Sheila Marsh

Thames Valley University, UK

We aim to illuminate the construction of ‘whiteness’ in organizations, in order to contribute to changing power relations, and the enduring material inequalities they produce. We chart four cycles of inquiry, encompassing: gender and sexuality; ethnicity; surfacing issues of whiteness at work; and making sense of the whole, drawing on concepts of discourse, identity and hegemony. Our work with public sector managers and professionals (third cycle) highlights the taken-for-grantedness of whiteness: silence about ethnicity means that talk about ethnicity is ‘transgressive’; and silence about whiteness masks white power through normalizing whiteness. The discourse of neutrality is dominant. The article offers two helpful concepts: power/identity, to signify the intricate intersections of different identities with the complex manifestations of power within organizations; and silencing as a hegemonic discourse, policed through embarrassment, which perpetuates inequalities and conceals white power. The task of management educators is to draw attention to this discursive concealment, and model a process of surfacing both ethnicity and whiteness.

Key Words: discourse • ethnicity • hegemony • identity • power • whiteness

Management Learning, Vol. 36, No. 4, 429-450 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1350507605058138


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