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On Being Included
Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life
By Sara Ahmed
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5236-5
Chapter One
Institutional Life
What is an institution? I want to start my reflections on racism and diversity within institutional life by asking what it means to think about institutions as such. We need to ask how it is that institutions become an object of diversity and antiracist practice in the sense that recognizing the institutional nature of diversity and racism becomes a goal for practitioners. Diversity work is typically described as institutional work. Why this is the case might seem obvious. The obvious is that which tends to be unthought and thus needs to be thought. We can repeat the question by giving it more force: what counts as an institution? Why do institutions count?
These questions are foundational to the social sciences. Emile Durkheim's definition of sociology is "the science of institutions, of their genesis and functioning" ([1901] 1982: 45). If the institution can be understood as the object of the social sciences, then the institution might be how the social derives its status as science. Durkheim's description was derived from Marcel Mauss and Paul Fauconnet's 1901 contribution on sociology to La Grand Encyclopédie (see M. Gane 2005: xii). The history of sociology is indeed a history of institutional thought.
Durkheim's innovative sociological method suggested that social facts can be approached as things. Arguably, treating institutions as an object of sociological inquiry, as social facts, can risk stabilizing institutions as things. We might stabilize institutions by assuming they refer to what is already stabilized. Within the humanities, the turn to thinking on the question of institutions has been predicated on a critique of sociological models. Samuel Weber's Institutions and Interpretation (2001), for example, cites with approval the work of René Lourau, who suggests that the sociological theories of institutions tend to assume their stability. Institutions, Lourau suggests, have been:
increasingly used to designate what I and others before me have called the instituted (l'institué), the established order, the already existing norms, the state of fact thereby being confounded with the state of right (l'état de droit). By contrast, the instituting aspect (I'instituant) ... has been increasingly obscured. The political implication of the sociological theories appears clearly here. By emptying the concept of institution of one of its primordial components (that of instituting, in the sense of founding, creating, breaking with an old order and creating a new one), sociology has finally come to identify the institution with the status quo. (Weber 2001: xv)
This reading of sociological work on institutions could be described as presuming the stability of its object (can all "sociological theories" of institutions be reduced to this identification?). Across a range of social science disciplines, including economics and political science as well as sociology, we have witnessed the emergence of "the new institutionalism," concerned precisely with how we can understand institutions as processes or even as effects of processes. Indeed, Victor Nee argues that the new institutionalism "seeks to explain institutions rather than simply assume their existence" (1998: 1). To explain institutions is to give an account of how they emerge or take form. Such explanations require a "thick" form of description, as I suggested in the introduction, a way of describing not simply the activities that take place within institutions (which would allow the institution into the frame of analysis only as a container, as what contains what is described, rather than being part of a description) but how those activities shape the sense of an institution or even institutional sense. The organizational studies scholars James G. March and Johan P. Olsen suggest that a thick approach to institutions would consider "routines, procedures, conventions, roles, strategies, organizational forms, and technologies" (1989: 22). The new institutionalism aims to think through how institutions become instituted over time (to "flesh out" this how): in other words, to think how institutions acquire the regularity and stability that allows them to be recognizable as institutions in the first place. Institutions can be thought of as verbs as well as nouns: to put the "doing" back into the institution is to attend to how institutional realities become given, without assuming what is given by this given.
The new institutionalism allows us to consider the work of creating institutions as part of institutional work. Although this chapter does not engage with the "new institutionalism" literatures in a general sense, I consider how phenomenology can offer a resource for thinking about institutionality. My arguments thus connect with some of the sociological literature on institutions insofar as the new institutionalism in sociology has been influenced by phenomenology. Phenomenology allows us to theorize how a reality is given by becoming background, as that which is taken for granted. Indeed, I argue that a phenomenological approach is well suited to the study of institutions because of the emphasis on how something becomes given by not being the object of perception. Edmund Husserl (often described as the founder of phenomenology) considers "the world from the natural standpoint" as a world that is spread around, or just around, where objects are "more or less familiar, agreeing with what is actually perceived without themselves being perceived" ([1913] 1969: 100). To be in this world is to be involved with things in such a way that they recede from consciousness. When things become institutional, they recede. To institutionalize x is for x to become routine or ordinary such that x becomes part of the background for those who are part of an institution.
In his later work, Husserl ([1936/54] 1970) came to denote the "world of the natural attitude" as "the life-world," the world that is given to our immediate experience, a general background or horizon, which is also a world shared with others. To share a world might be to share the points of recession. If the tendency when we are involved in the world is to look over what is around us, then the task of the phenomenologist is to attend to what is looked over, to allow what is "overed" to surface. In this chapter, I hope to offer this kind of attention. My primary aim is to offer an ethnographic approach to institutional life that works with the detail of how that life is described by diversity practitioners. Diversity work could be described as a phenomenological practice: a way of attending to what gets passed over as routine or an ordinary feature of institutional life. We could even say that diversity workers live an institutional life. Dorothy E. Smith suggests that an institutional ethnography "would begin in the actualities of the lives of some of those involved in the institutional process" (2005: 31). Diversity workers work from their institutional involvement. Diversity practitioners do not simply work at institutions, they also work on them, given that their explicit remit is to redress existing institutional goals or priorities.
This chapter considers why institutions matter for diversity practitioners and explores how an explicit attention to institutions teaches us about their implicit significance and meaning. I want to think specifically about institutional life: not only how institutions acquire a life of their own but also how we experience institutions or what it means to experience something as institutional. We might also need to consider how we experience life within institutions, what it means for life to be "an institutional life." If the life we bracket as our working life is still a life, we need to attend to the form of this life by attending to what is bracketed by becoming institutionalized.
Institutionalizing Diversity
A typical goal of diversity work is "to institutionalize diversity." A goal is something that directs an action. It is an aiming for. However, if institutionalizing diversity is a goal for diversity workers, it does not necessarily mean it is the institution's goal. I think this "not necessarily" describes a paradoxical condition that is a life situation for many diversity practitioners. Having an institutional aim to make diversity a goal can even be a sign that diversity is not an institutional goal.
We could say that practitioners are given the goal of making diversity a goal. In most of my interviews, practitioners began their story with the story of their appointment. In the U.K. context, the appointment of officers is often about the appointment of a writer, of having someone who can write the policies that will effectively institutionalize a commitment to diversity. Let's take the following account: "I came to [xxx] three and a half years ago and the reason that they appointed someone, I think, was because of the compliance with the Race Relations Amendment Act ... you come into a position like this and people just don't know what kind of direction it's going to go in, you're not sort of, there's nobody helping to support you, this job does not have support mechanisms and you know maybe you're just there, because if you're not there then the university can't say that its dealing with legislation." An appointment becomes a story of not being given institutional support, as if being "just there" is enough. An appointment of a diversity officer can thus represent the absence of wider support for diversity.
The institutional nature of diversity work is often described in terms of the language of integrating or embedding diversity into the ordinary work or daily routines of an organization. As one practitioner explains, "My role is about embedding equity and diversity practice in the daily practice of this university. I mean, ideally I would do myself out of a job but I suspect that's not going to happen in the short term, so I didn't want to do that and I haven't got the staff or money to do it anyway." The diversity worker has a job because diversity and equality are not already given; this obvious fact has some less obvious consequences. When your task is to remove the necessity of your existence, then your existence is necessary for the task.
Practitioners partly work at the level of an engagement with explicit institutional goals, that is, of adding diversity to the terms in which institutions set their agendas—what we might think of as an institutional purpose or end. To agree on your aims is to offer an institutional attitude: a set of norms, values, and priorities that determine what is granted and how. Edmund Husserl suggests that "an attitude" means "a habitually fixed style of willing life comprising directions of the will or interests that are prescribed by this style, comprising the ultimate ends, the cultural accomplishments whose total style is thereby determined" ([1936/54] 1970: 280). To define or agree on the ends of an institution can thus shape what is taken for granted by it and within it. A phenomenology of institutions might be concerned with how these ends are agreed on, such that an individual accomplishment becomes an institutional accomplishment. An institution is given when there is an agreement on what should be accomplished, or what it means to be accomplished.
An institution gives form to its aims in a mission statement. If diversity work is institutional work, then it can mean working on mission statements, getting the term "diversity" included in them. This is not to say that a mission statement simply reflects the aims of the university: as Marilyn Strathern has shown, mission statements are "utterances of a specific kind" that mobilize the "international language of governance" (2006: 194–95). Giving form to institutional goals involves following a set of conventions. This is not to say that mission statements are any less significant for being conventional; the aim of a convention is still directive. When I participated in an equality and diversity committee, some of our discussions were based on how to get "equality" and "diversity" into the university's mission statement and other policy statements that were supposed to derive from it. We aimed not only to get the terms in but also to get them up: to get "equality" and "diversity" cited as high up the statement as possible. I recall the feeling of doing this work: in retrospect or in abstract, what we achieved might seem trivial (I remember one rather long discussion about a semicolon in a tag line!), but the task was still saturated with significance. The significance might be thought of as a distraction (you work on something you can achieve as a way of not focusing on—and thus being depressed by—what you cannot) but could also point to how institutional politics can involve the matter of detail; perhaps diversity provides a form of punctuation.
However, institutionalization was not simply defined by practitioners in terms of the formal or explicit goals, values, or priorities of an institution. Many spoke about institutionalization in terms of what institutions "tend to do," whatever it is they say they are doing or should be doing. The very idea of institutionalization might even denote those tendencies or habitual forms of action that are not named or made explicit. We can thus think of institutions in terms of how some actions become automatic at a collective level; institutional nature might be "second nature." When an action is incorporated by an institution, it becomes natural to it. Second nature is "accumulated and sedimented history," as "frozen history that surfaces as nature" (Jacoby 1975: 31). When history accumulates, certain ways of doing things seem natural. An institution takes shape as an effect of what has become automatic. Institutional talk is often about "how we do things here," where the very claim of a "how" does not need to be claimed. We might describe institutionalization as "becoming background," when being "in" the institution is to "agree" with what becomes background (or we could speculate that an agreement is how things recede). This becoming background creates a sense of ease and familiarity, an ease that can also take the form of incredulity at the naiveté or ignorance of the newly arrived or outsiders. The familiarity of the institution is a way of inhabiting the familiar.
Institutionalization "comes up" for practitioners partly in their description of their own labor: diversity work is hard because it can involve doing within institutions what would not otherwise be done by them. As one interviewee describes, "You need persistence and I think that's what you need to do because not everyone has an interest in equity and diversity issues, so I think it needs to be up there in people's faces, well not right in their faces, but certainly up there with equal billing with other considerations, so that it's always present, so that they eventually think of it automatically and that it becomes part of their considerations." The aim is to make thought about equality and diversity issues "automatic." Diversity workers must be persistent precisely because this kind of thought is not automatic; it is not the kind of thought normally included in "how institutions think," to borrow an expression from the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1986). Or as Ole Elgström describes in a different but related context, such thoughts have to "fight their way into institutional thinking" (2000: 458). The struggle for diversity to become an institutional thought requires certain people to "fight their way." Not only this—the persistence required exists in necessary relation to the resistance encountered. The more you persist, the more the signs of this resistance. The more resistance, the more persistence required.
The institution can be experienced by practitioners as resistance. One expression that came up in a number of my interviews was "banging your head against a brick wall." Indeed, this experience of the brick wall was often described as an intrinsic part of diversity work. As one practitioner describes, "So much of the time it is a banging-your-head-on-the-brick-wall job." How interesting that a job description can be a wall description (see figure 1). The feeling of doing diversity work is the feeling of coming up against something that does not move, something solid and tangible. The institution becomes that which you come up against. If we recall that most diversity practitioners are employed by institutions to do diversity (though not all: some have "equality" and "diversity" added to their job descriptions), then we can understand the significance of this description. The official desire to institutionalize diversity does not mean the institution is opened up; indeed, the wall might become all the more apparent, all the more a sign of immobility, the more the institution presents itself as being opened up. The wall gives physical form to what a number of practitioners describe as "institutional inertia," the lack of an institutional will to change.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On Being Included by Sara Ahmed Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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