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This chapter focuses on diversity issues in France. It shows how these issues came historically in the French context and how the main tensions generated, notably the equality-diversity and universality-diversity tensions, are not understandable without a knowledge of the French Republicanism which gives to the foundations of the French social fabric its peculiarities.

The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the paradoxes of mainstream French anti- racism regarding Islamophobia. The authors focus on the driving role played by French republican values in the recurring inability of anti-racist activism, and anti-islamophobia in particular, to act upon the structural character of racism in France.

The authors’ analysis draws on a longitudinal and qualitative investigation of the “Sud-Education 93” controversy (SE93). The authors use the analytical framework provided by controversy studies in order to focus on the aftermath, in the public sphere, of the organisation by a French labour union of a minority-only workshop designed to provide teachers with a space for expression and purposeful guidance, in order to face Islamophobia and racism issues within French public schools. The authors collected an exhaustive set of data about the comments, criticisms and debates that emerged in the public sphere as a reaction to the workshop. The authors drew on situational analysis methodology, providing controversy analysts with several power-mapping techniques, in order to conduct a discursive analysis of the statements and claims made by the protagonists of the controversy.

First, the authors’ insights point out that French Islamophobia relies on the myth of the universal republican citizen that acts as a context-specific form of colour-blindism. Second, the authors shed light on the discursive and relational mechanisms that characterise the denial of Islamophobia undertaken by political actors who use “reverse racism” arguments as a form of backlash, i.e. a strategy of “fragility” (DiAngelo, 2018) consisting in maintaining artificially a never-ending controversy over Islamophobia. Finally, the authors discuss the role played by these strategies of fragility in the recurring rejection of anti-islamophobia activism in France and the limitations and prospects they embody for future forms of anti-racist strategies.

The Latourian perspective adopted in the paper focuses on the implications of the controversy over Islamophobia within the public sphere. The authors’ fieldwork suggests, however, that the internal dynamics of minority-only organisations embodies sites and répertoires of micro-contestation capable of bypassing on the short run, and perhaps overthrowing, the power of French hypocrisy about anti-racism and the backlash processes the authors observed in the public sphere.

The authors’ contribution lies in the in-depth analysis of “reverse racism” rhetorics as a strategy of fragility and its implications in terms of colour-blindism and backlash.

In this chapter, I argue that the activism of Muslims in France is complex and diverse and illustrates the equally diverse politics and life experiences of these Muslims. For all the disagreement among French activists who are Muslim, they are united in their opposition to an elite frame of failed citizenship and their efforts to project a new image of French Muslims that is thoroughly French. In this sense, we cannot understand French Muslim activism without considering French elites, particularly the government, and their role in shaping Muslim identity in France.

In 1967, Robert N. Bellah famously argued that there existed an “American Civil Religion,” which was distinct from churchly religion and captured the “transcendental” dimension of the American project. In this chapter, I revisit the civil religion concept and reconstruct it along more Weberian lines. Specifically, I argue that the civil religion tradition is one of three competing traditions for thinking about the proper relationship between religion and politics in America; the other two are religious nationalism and liberal secularism. Whereas liberal secularism envisions a complete separation of the religious and political value spheres, and religious nationalism longs for their (re)unification, civil religion aims for a mediating position of partial separation and productive tension. Following Bellah, I argue that the two central strands of the civil religion tradition have been covenant theology and civic republicanism. The body of the chapter sketches out the development of the tradition across a series of national foundings and refoundings, focusing on the writings of leading civil theologians from John Winthrop and John Adams through Abraham Lincoln and John Dewey to Martin King and Barack Obama. The conclusion advances a normative argument for American civil religion – and against liberal secularism and religious nationalism. I contend that liberalism is highly inclusive but insufficiently solidaristic; that religious nationalism is highly solidaristic but insufficiently inclusive; and that only civil religion strikes a proper balance between individual autonomy and the common good.

Over the last three quarters of a century, the discourse on economic and social policy has oscillated between two polar opposites: an interventionist approach and a free market-oriented one. The former led to the establishment of the Keynesian welfare state and was dominant in the post-war years, but the latter gained much ground beginning in the 1980s, forcing defenders of the welfare state to retreat into a more defensive position. In the wake of the ‘Great Recession’, however, these two visions are once again sustaining vigorous debates in the global public arena. Economists in their role as policy advisers and public intellectuals, in other words as ‘experts’, have participated actively in such debates; the gains made by (what its critics call) ‘neo-liberalism’ were due, in no small measure, to the growing prestige and influence of Austrian economics. The experts’ discourse tends to be a historical and arguments are often phrased in terms of supposedly ‘cutting edge’ theoretical and empirical advances.¹ Yesterday's theories are judged obsolete and irrelevant. I argue that a more historically informed perspective can actually be more rewarding.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that national history plays an important role in formulations of workplace religious diversity strategies and practices. It builds on a discussion of the organization of religion in the workplace in two countries, namely, France and Lebanon.

This is a conceptual paper that provides an analysis into how national history plays an important role in formulations of workplace diversity strategies and practices.

The paper shows how religion has historically been organized and deployed in contemporary France and Lebanon by the same colonial power, albeit in different ways. While the workplace in France remains religiously neutral in the context of its national labor market, the colonial power has largely contributed to organized religion in contemporary organizations in Lebanon. In analyzing the Lebanese and French cases, it is argued that the use of religious diversity has weakened the process of adopting equal, diverse, and inclusive managerial strategies.

Experiences in both countries suggest a failure of “blind neutrality” in the case of France, and another failure of a form of positive discrimination in the case of Lebanon. The authors draw lessons from those two experiences and propose future directions of how policy makers/legislators and organizations can advance and capture more equal, diverse, and inclusive diversity strategies.

The above two cases offer rich lessons for religious diversity scholarship and practice. The paper contributes to the literature on diversity in the workplace by questioning the organization of religious diversity in two countries that are under researched in management and organization studies.

The paper has two goals. The first is to develop a conceptual framework for analyzing the strategies of internationally mobile professionals in managing barriers to their career development. This framework is developed using Duberley et al.'s and Richardson's concept of “modes of engagement”. The second goal is to better understand the nature of the careers that ethnic minority migrants undertake.

Qualitative interviews were conducted with 43 skilled Lebanese migrants. Six additional interviews were conducted with key informants involved in the development and implementation of immigration policies in France. Furthermore, French and European immigration policymaking is analyzed.

In order to manage structural barriers to their career development, participants navigated within the organizational and national structures using four modes: maintenance, transformation, entrepreneurship, and opt out.

There was limited access to the developers of immigration policies. The paper focused on only one ethnic minority group.

The management of migrants in France needs to be more supportive of their efforts in using their capital.

The paper contributes to the literature on careers of internationally mobile professionals by offering an understanding of the experiences of an under‐researched group of participants, that is to say persons from an ethnic minority who relocated from Lebanon to live and work in France.

Based on ethnographic research in the Paris metropolitan region, I discuss how my identity as a Black American ethnographer was implicated in this urban ethnography. Specifically, I discuss the intersections of researcher identity with that of the “researched” and how I was simultaneously framed as an insider and outsider due to different facets of my own identity. I further argue that these insights were data in and of itself as they revealed how race and racism operate in a society that has long disavowed their existence.

This chapter explores the development of organizational narratives of identities for embodying the qualified jobseeker with disabilities in the French job market.

While the concept of “organizational narratives of identities” has primarily been used to study the access to services to individuals with “troubled identities,” my study looks at how organizational narratives are shaped in labor market intermediation for the professional integration of workers with disabilities.

In this context, fitting the right formula story goes beyond embodying the morally “deserving” target population in order to encompasses corporate-related expectations, such as demonstrating resilience and grit, as well as disclosure-related expectations, that navigates the contradictory injunction of the French antidiscrimination system to both demonstrate a commitment to diversity and to remain indifferent to differences.

This chapter highlights the ways in which the cultural narratives surrounding disabled identities, workers’ identities, and the French cultural ideology of “indifference to differences” were translated into specific recruitment advice on the job market, as well as into organizational changes that favored the creation of a disability-friendly buffer zone in corporations: the activist disability manager. The chapter also shows how widely circulating cultural narratives shape, and are shaped by, organizational policies and procedures that can in turn shape personal experiences in the workforce.