Race and identity in organizations

This chapter tackles the question of how race can be researched and written about as a formative rather than circumstantial aspect of identity in organizations. The authors go beyond race as a subject of inquiry for scholars who specialize in problems of managing racialized bodies in subfields such as cross-cultural management, diversity, and inclusion. Their aim is to connect the study of identities in organizations to the rich, extant literature in other fields that theorizes race and identity. The authors renew calls for understanding race as an organizing principle and conclude with the proposition that thinking about racial identity as a productive, generative identity rather than a limit and a problem of particular bodies may give a new direction to organizational studies of race and identity.