Beyond analytical dichotomies

Abstract

Management researchers habitually invoke analytical categories of difference – whether they be based on gender, race, or sexual identity – in responding to issues of systemic inequalities in organizational life. Poststructuralists and other critically orientated scholars have cited the myriad of trajectories through which analytical categories of difference reinscribe dichotomous modes of thinking and, therein, ignore the idiosyncrasies in human identification and human behavior. Extending from a poststructuralist standpoint, this article uses the question of sexual identity to advocate for the astute mobilization of ‘strategic essentialism’. Strategic essentialism serves as a means by which management scholars can tentatively engage with the research and the discourse that is reliant upon identity binaries, yet without reifying ideologically bifurcated identity classes.

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