Organizational Theory for Understanding Universities as Sites for Antiracist Praxis

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Administration and Adversity (Table 27)

Abstract

This paper explores key concepts from organizational theory to understand how universities enact and inhibit change toward anti-racism. Social-symbolic work (Phillips & Lawrence, 2019) explains how challengers mobilize for change while power-holders and governance units utilize existing organizational norms and bureaucratic processes to resist it (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012). Theories of inequality regimes (Acker, 2006) and racialized organizations (Ray, 2019) provide insights on the processes through which universities perpetuate inequities based on race and other intersecting social categories. Organizational learning theories (Engeström, 2001; Henderson, 2008) emphasize that contradiction and learning “in the unknown” are essential for instigating the process of transformational change. Throughout, I ground organizational theory in examples from a research study of a university environmental science anti-racism course.

Author

• Rosalie Zdzienicka Fanshel, University of California - Berkeley