Commodification and Co-Modification

Abstract

Recent organizational research suggests an emerging trend in which some women of color choose to quit their jobs, head smaller firms, or start their own organizations. Other emergent trends reveal a decline of women of color in executive positions. As reasons for this trend, women managers of color often cite pervasive sex- and race-based stereotypes and the inability of organizations to deal with subtle racism. In this study, the author examines Black women's experience of such sexual politics in organizations. Drawing on interviews and written narratives from nine Black women, the author argues that organizational discourse sexualizes Black women through commodification, experiences of invisibility, and tensions of ownership and consumption of their bodies, which consequently elicits a paradoxical dialectic of accommodation and resistance: co-modification. The analysis both explicates current trends of Black women's declining participation and exit from organizations and suggests how organizations might transform their discursive practices.