Award from Responsible Research in Business and Management
Dr Kate Lockwood Harris has been shortlisted for the RRBM (Responsible Research in Business and Management) Award for her article, “Re-situating organizational knowledge: Violence, intersectionality, and the privilege of partial perspective“.
This article is free to access this month – it appeared in our journal, Human Relations volume 70, issue 3 in 2017. It is part of the HR special collection: Knowledge and Knowing in the Study of Organization: From Commodity to Communication.
Kate Lockwood Harris is Assistant Professor of Organizational Communication at the University of Minnesota. Her research on the relationship between violence and communication appears in many different journals and edited books. She is part of a reverberating scholarly chorus for more nuanced understandings of organisational knowledge.
In this article, she asks, how do social differences – including gender, race and sexuality – shape knowledge? We are familiar with analyses of power focusing on role differences, however, Kate Lockwood Harris draws upon standpoint theory and intersectionality to show how whiteness, masculinity and heteronormativity are embedded in organisational knowledge. She uses a case study at a US university known for having some of the best systems for building organisational knowledge about sexual violence on campus.
She argues that the university’s practices – the way it interprets and defines – mask heterogeneity in knowledge across the university. She also shows how practices give the university’s knowledge the appearance of neutrality and, subsequently, can unintentionally defer important organisational actions.
Responsible Research for Business and Management (RRBM) is dedicated to inspiring, encouraging, and supporting credible and useful research in the business and management disciplines. It is a virtual organisation initiated by a group of 24 leading scholars in 5 disciplines at 23 university-based business schools in 10 countries and now much expanded by a growing community.
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Human Relations is an international peer reviewed journal publishing the highest quality original research to advance our understanding of social relationships at and around work. Find out more about Human Relations.