Local inefficiencies in French public–private diversity and inclusion policies: Envisioning a locality-based intersectional analysis

This study aims to explore inefficiencies that arise from public and private policy initiatives undertaken in suburbs and outlying localities, where various intersecting economic, educational, ethnic and geographical disadvantages mutually reinforce each other. The authors propose to transpose the cross-disciplinary concept of intersectionality from an individual and community-based level (i.e. encompassing a variety of racial, ethnic and socio-economic minority communities) to a locality-based context.

The empirical data underlying this study were based on a long-term field study drawing on both interviews and observations. A self-administered ethnographic research approach was combined with classic analyses of conversations transcribed verbatim, using qualitative coding.

The main actors’ inability to understand the concrete situations experienced by subjects residing in outlying localities, as well as the managers’ failure to cooperate and engage collectively to promote employment among these populations, can be explained by the ineffectiveness of the categories that were designed and used in carrying out managerial action, as part of corporate policy, and then implemented within factories. These findings are particularly well-illustrated by the relatively lower inefficiency of SMEs, which had more limited resources, as compared with the actions undertaken at production facilities run by large companies, even though the latter devoted considerable resources to vocational inclusion (recruitment, integration and job preservation) and efforts to combat discrimination.

In identifying a new way to categorize a certain type of social dynamic driven by businesses and various social actors, the authors sought to overcome the epistemological obstacles that arise from relying on neo-institutional theory, which, when applied to the case at hand, would have merely resulted in mimetic similarities, without offering any means for unblocking the socio-economic factors that come into play. The limitations of the study are related to its strict temporal and geographic isolation (i.e. a two-year study examining three production facilities located within the same suburb north of Paris).

The authors hope the study will urge actors operating in the same disadvantaged locality to collectively address the multiple intersectional challenges that tend to render policies for social inclusion and economic development so difficult to implement within areas suffering from a myriad of socio-economic ills. The first step in that direction, the authors feel, consists in naming these intersectionalities adequately.

Using a rich empirical database, this paper aims to show the relevance of the concept of intersectionality beyond its traditional scope of application (disadvantaged minority communities and individuals) while directing interest toward a less anthropocentric level of analysis: the locality.