The Emperor Has No Clothes: Rewriting Race in Organizations
Author(s)
Nkomo, Stella M.
Abstract
Analyzes how race has been studied in organization scholarship (in incomplete and inadequate ways) and demonstrates how approaches to the study of race reflect and reify particular historical and social meanings of race. It is argued that the production of knowledge about race must be understood within a racial ideology embedded in a Eurocentric view of the world. This view is evident in the general exclusion of race when organizational theories are developed and in the theoretical and methodological orientation of the limited body of research on races. A revision of the concept of race and its historical and political meaning is suggested for rewriting race as a necessary and productive analytical category for theorizing about organizations.
