Slow Motion Revolution or Assimilation? Theorizing Entryism As a Mechanism for Destabilizing Regimes of Inequality

Post-essentialist and post-structuralist conceptualizations of identities and social structures offer the theoretical potential for social change to emerge from actions and interactions among socially located actors. This “micro-emancipation” approach suggests that changes negotiated in relations among actors can be “scaled up” or expanded beyond individual interactions to effect change in societal structures that sustain inequality. This micro approach contrasts sharply with binary, essentialist and structuralist approaches that implicitly suggest that hegemonic structures will undermine any incipient changes in social relations that emerge in interactions (Ahonen et al., 2014). What has been called “entry-ism”, i.e. the entry of marginalized actors into organizations has, as Swan and Fox note “always possessed an ambivalent reputation with many critical theorists wondering whether “oppositional forces [can] enter… without becoming coopted? (Cooper, 1995:100)” (2010: 574). Does the entry of some actors from marginalized groups into organizations advance the opportunities for others or, as some have argued, do actors who succeed become coopted or even participants in the legitimization and reproduction of systems of exclusion? Consistent with this call for papers, we theorize the role organizations play as mechanisms contributing to the reproduction or disruption and transformation of regimes of inequality. Scholarship regarding the potential for micro-emancipatory actions to generate more substantial social change is at a crossroads. While research findings illustrate the binary of outsider/insider is transgressed and there is a sense that larger scale change is occurring as a result, existing theories have not enabled us to account for how this change is occurring-if it is. In this paper we illustrate how postcolonial theories offer distinctive conceptual tools that enable us to advance our understanding of how the entry of marginalized actors into organizations may contribute to destabilization and transformation of regimes of inequality.