Racial Inequality In Organisations: The Role of Attitudes, Emotions and Organisational Culture

Open Session

Around the globe we see increasingly diverse societies and workplaces. Employees and employers alike are interacting more frequently with individuals with different characteristics, culture, and experiences. This session brings together research on organizations and racial and ethnic inequality, with a particular focus on how attitudes and organizational cultures shape workplace discrimination and experiences of inequality and how organisational staff respond to these dynamics, for example through emotional labour. The session thereby aims to advance sociological understandings of how inequalities are produced, reproduced, and potentially mitigated through everyday interactions and institutional norms and practices within organizational settings. This session invites scholars studying racial and ethnic inequality across diverse organizational settings, from public institutions to for-profit organisations, to offer new insights into how attitudes, emotions, and organizational cultures shape the processes through which equality and inequality are constructed within organisations.

Paper topics could include, but are not limited to:

• Implicit and explicit racial attitudes in hiring, promotion, and evaluation
• Emotional labor among minority staff navigating racial inequality
• Workplace discrimination (e.g. micro-agressions)
• How organizational values and cultures normalize or obscure inequality
• Emotional dynamics of meetings, teamwork, and client interactions
• Emotional strategies of coping, resistance, and solidarity

Overall, the session seeks to connect insights from individual attitudes, everyday interactions and micro-level processes with broader organisational practices.