Introduction: Critically interrogating inclusion in organisations

Abstract

This Special Issue seeks to begin to map out the key issues and contours of the emerging stream of literature on critical studies of inclusion in organisations. We aim to generate and develop further debates on critically theorising the concept, rhetoric and practices of inclusion, how inclusion manifests in different organisational contexts, how it works for different social groups, and how it continues to be implicated and interwoven with the logic of exclusion and inequality in contemporary organisations. The term ‘inclusion’ seems to have augmented the term ‘diversity’, resulting in the emergence of ‘diversity and inclusion’ as a standing term, with other terms, such as ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ currently less frequently used. In this Special Issue we treat diversity and inclusion as analytically distinct and question how far the ‘inclusion turn’ is changing practices in organisations. The papers in this Special Issue discuss how organisations ‘do’ inclusion, explore the conditions on which minority groups are included, and seek to develop a more nuanced understanding of the concept of inclusion by situating it into the broader social context and questioning the inclusion-exclusion binary.