Hallowed Institutional Categories, Race, and Organizations

In an era in which most organizations are not explicitly built around racist aims and most organizational actors do not admit racial bias, how do racial inequalities nevertheless persist? In recent years, research scholarship fusing race and organizational theories has made an important analytical intervention: Organizations are not merely venues of racial animus and racial inequality but, rather, race is constitutive of organizations. But contra Ray’s (2019) emphasis on attending to “broadly shared racial schemas,” this paper employs Durkheim’s notion of sacred–profane divisions to argue that analysts should focus on the case-specific issue of the binary divisions that define legitimacy within a particular organizational field. It is via hallowed institutional categories that organizations produce, encode, and obscure racial disparities and meanings. To illustrate the potential and flexibility of such an approach, this paper takes up the case of the alternative food sector, drawing on 11 months of ethnographic research at a large farmers market and analysis of four decades of organizational records. Findings reveal how the racial order is reinforced not only through racial animus and racial schemas, but it also unfolds via the most ordinary of this market’s organizational pathways, from membership lists, certifications, and placement in geographical space. Importantly, these racialized dynamics would neither be observed nor explained by prevailing organizational frameworks of racial stratification.