The Gendered Intersectional Corporation and Diversity Management

The gendering of organisations and management has been established through an analytical approach (Broadbridge and Hearn 2008), even if it is frequently questioned. However, much less attention has been given to the notion of ‘the gendered corporation’. Debates on gender and gendering corporations have been superseded, even undermined by discussions on ‘diversity’, in both theory and in practice (Hearn and Collinson 2006). The notion of diversity is now widely in use in both management and analytical discourses, sometimes critically, often less so. At the same time, the concept of intersectionality (Davis 1981, Crenshaw 1989, 1991, Collins 1990, Meekosha and Pettman 1991, McCall 2005, Meekosha 2006) remains far less developed in studies of organisations, perhaps because it, in some ways, challenges any simple approach to or prescription of promoting diversity. Perhaps a key issue is that diversity can mean almost anything to anyone, and for that reason it can function as an empty, and perhaps profoundly ideological signifier, while the concept of intersectionality complicates and demystifies ideology. Thus the notion of ‘the gendered intersectional corporation’ is not, or at least rarely, discussed.