Racialized Expertise: The Case of Dei Personnel

sandra Portocarrero, PhD student

Organization scholars have given significant attention to how events affect organizations. We know how organizations adapt to unprecedented environmental jolts (Meyer 1982) and that mega-events and natural disasters affect corporate-community relations (Tilcsik and Marquis 2013). Events can originate at any hierarchical level, and their effects can travel up or down throughout the organization (Morgeson, Mitchell, and Liu 2015). Most recently, we have learned that mega-threats alter employees' experiences and behavior (Leigh and Melwani 2019). We know less about how external diversity-related events, such as the killing of George Floyd, give rise to and alters forms of expertise. I examine how George Floyd's killing altered the nature of DEI expertise at Redwood University (pseudonym), one of the University of California campuses. My analysis draws from in-depth interview data gathered before and after George Floyd's murder. First, I show how this event created pressure for Redwood to legitimate their commitment to DEI. Second, I expand on how the presentation of workers' ethnoracial background as a foram of credential to fulfill tasks related to DEI work intensified after this event. Race scholars argue that whiteness acts as a credential, providing access to organizational resources and legitimizing work hierarchies, and expanding white agency. My findings show how non-Whiteness is perceived as a credential to perform DEI work after May 25th, 2020. While the emergence of forms of expertise is a highly relational phenomenon studied in racially and ethnically diverse societies (Abbott 2005; Eyal 2013; Anteby and Holms 2021), our knowledge of how race might act as the link among the different objects, people, and arrangements that make up a new form of expertise is scarce. I conclude by explaining how these changes in DEI expertise turn it into a form of racialized expertise

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 182. Expertise: Classification and Power within Organizations