Politics of Equality at Work

AISRI Early Career Conference, Dipartimento di Management-Venice School of Management Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia,13 June 2024

Presentation title: ‘The space between’? On the dialectical nature of collective representation in research on inclusion


Authors: Heather Connolly (Grenoble Ecole de Management); Stefania Marino (Work and Equalities Institute, University of Manchester); Miguel Martinez Lucio (Work and Equalities Institute, University of Manchester), Holly Smith (Work and Equalities Institute, University of Manchester).

Presenter: Stefania Marino

Abstract

There is an emerging critique about the need to widen the lens of study in relation to questions of inclusivity within labour representation (Alberti and Pero, 2018) which reaches earlier into the question of new actors within industrial relations (Heery and Frege, 2006). The debates dovetail and overlap with the growing recognition of the importance of intersectional approaches and the need to think more broadly about identities at work (Tapia and Alberti, 2019). These debates also intersect with a critique of established trade unions as (intentionally or unintentionally) exclusionary of disadvantaged groups of workers and argue for an actor-centric based approach to the study of IR which does not privilege established organisations (Alberti and Pero, 2018) contributing to the call for a stronger engagement with social movements and other forms of representation (Atzeni, 2021).

Starting from a reflection on these theoretical developments, the article argues that the move to a more inclusive and less institutionalised approach would benefit from a deeper analysis of the politics and meaning of solidarity and a greater sensitivity to organisational tensions (Aslam and Woodcock, 2020) and representative claims (Meardi, Simms and Adam, 2021).

Drawing on a range of projects, including an ongoing ESRC-funded project on equality at work as well as previous research on migration (Connolly, et al., 2019), and different forms of worker representation (Smith, 2022), we identify what we perceive as a need to reflect constructively on the politics and agenda-forming processes of building inclusive projects within industrial relations. In particular, this article cautions against the tendency towards the binary presentation of worker organising as “either bureaucratic or participatory,” (Cioce, Korczynski, and Pero, 2022) and makes the case for “the space between” which allows for a recognition of the ambivalent nature of trade unions. We argue that this can recentre agential power to migrant, precarious and other groups of workers within this contested terrain and overcome what we identify as theoretical and methodological shortcomings in the debate in this area.