Search results

Scholars of race and work have shown that social categories shape how individuals interact with coworkers and clients. Social categories also inform the creation of roles within an organization when nonwhites are hired to interact with other nonwhites. This study examines these roles, or racialized labor, and illustrates how racial categories govern organizational behavior. By studying immigrant-serving providers at a range of nonprofits, this chapter shows how the assumed relationship between racial category and knowledge is evidence of ethnoracial logics, or the practice of using racial categories to organize work because of assumptions about the inherent racial ethnic knowledge an employee possesses. To make the case for these logics, the chapter draws on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with Latino, Latina, and White nonprofit professionals to show how expertise is developed and differentiated along racial lines.

To date, most research that takes up race as a theoretical or empirical category remains focused on uncovering the processes that lead to disparities in individual-level organizational outcomes such as pay and promotion. We aim to shift analytic attention away from people to organizations. This volume represents a collection of nine chapters that investigate how race shapes organizations and an organization’s ability to get the cultural, political, and material resources it needs to survive, that is, the organizing process. This interlocution argues for the importance of understanding organizations as social actors that also contend with race. Additionally, the introduction provides an overview of the chapters in the volume by briefly summarizing each contribution and highlighting the connections between them. The introduction closes with a discussion of the direction future research studies in this area might take.

Purpose: To understand how lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and asexual (LBTQA+) young women interpret the social construction of “lesbian obesity” in the context of their lived experiences and membership in the LGBTQ+ community.

Methodology: Individual, in-depth interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of 25 LBTQA+ women, ages 18–24, to explore how participants perceive and experience dominant discourses about gender, sexuality, and weight. Interviews were analyzed using a combination of deductive and inductive coding approaches.

Findings: Participants resisted public health discourse that frames obesity as a disease and the implication that their sexual identities put their health at risk. Many participants viewed their sexual identities and membership in the LGBTQ+ community as protective factors for their health statuses in general and their body image in particular.

Implications: Our findings suggest a need to reconsider the utility of the concept of “lesbian obesity” to characterize the significance of elevated rates of overweight and obesity in this population. Public health and clinical interventions guided by body positive approaches may be of greater relevance for sexual minority women.

Originality: This study centers the perceptions and experiences of LBTQA+ young women in order to examine how the intersections of sexual minority identity, dominant cultural ideals about weight, and obesity discourse inform their health.

Highly educated and skilled contract workers come from a range of occupations, have different worker characteristics, and work under organizational practices that are precarious in varied ways. Our current understanding of the experience of contract work does not fully encompass this diversity. This chapter focuses on early-career contract workers who contract across national borders – an increasingly prevalent but little understood phenomenon – to broaden our understanding of contract work. I draw on an analysis of 38 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 30 international and early-career contract workers in the United Nations (UN) system in Geneva, Switzerland. Eight participants were included in follow-up interviews. I find that my participants demonstrate flexibility to their employer. They accept uncertain and short-term contracts, because they hope to secure longer-term positions within the prestigious UN system. Demonstrating flexibility impacts them, their relationships, and has financial implications as participants center the demands of their contracts. At times, participants place limits on how much uncertainty they will bear. This chapter thus illuminates the experiences of an understudied group of contract workers – early-career workers in transnational settings – who fall within the broad umbrella of contract workers. It highlights how even elite workers experience challenges as they engage in contract work.