ESSENTIALIZED UTILITY: Organizational Adaptation to Diversity Initiatives

Abstract

Contemporary U.S. organizations are increasingly adopting diversity initiatives. However, what diversity means and how these efforts are implemented remain contested. This article uses the case of women in policing to examine how organizational diversity initiatives can either alleviate or entrench existing inequalities. Drawing on 1 year of ethnographic fieldwork at four police training academies and 40 in-depth interviews with officers, I argue that during the onboarding process, police departments use women to bolster the existing masculine organizational ethos of policing. Police departments use a framework of essentialized utility, in which essentialized perspectives of minoritized groups—in this case, women—are used to reify organizational inequalities.