Azizzadeh, Satkeen
(2015)
And who gets the job? Narratives, dialogical perspectives and practices on implementing positive discrimination in financial institutions.
PhD thesis, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Abstract
The high unemployment rate amongst nationals in United Arab Emirates (UAE) has
generated the development of the 'Emiratisation policy', a drive to nationalise the UAE
workforce. This quota-based mandate is considered a ‘positive discrimination' policy
since ethnicity markers are applied. The process of 'Emiratization' has generated a
heated public debate as organisations attempt to develop best practices across industries.
This research explores the process of implementing Emiratization in two financial
organizations in the UAE.
The extant literature on implementing positive discrimination policies is however very
limited, with an individualistic, quantitative and experimental focus. When a more
social and organizational approach has been taken, it has been to look into stereotyping
and similarity-attraction paradigms to explain work-related outcomes. Such research
takes the policy as a given, concerned with its output and rarely considers the process
through which the policy is understood, co-constructed and implemented over time and
its impact on working practices. A more practice-based perspective is therefore required
to explore the working practices and the practical and ‘hidden’ knowledge that supports
them to better understand policy implementation processes. This research aims to
address this gap by exploring the common practical (mis)understandings on
Emiratisation developed over time among different stakeholders -employees of two
financial organizations in the UAE as well as public actors- and their impact on the
‘mediated array of human activity centrally organised around [them]’ (Schatzki,
2001:2).
The research was designed as a longitudinal qualitative study conducted over a period
of three years. The data corpus consists of 54 in-depth interviews, more than 30 hours of
observations, 2 Emiratisation conferences, 4 consultancy reports, 6 annual reports and
online resources.
The thematic, narrative and dialogical analysis of the data corpus illustrates the ongoing
interaction between public narratives, intersubjective (mis)understandings between
national and non-national employees and organizational working practices when
implementing the policy. In public narratives, Emiratisation is portrayed both as an
employment opportunity as well as a strategy to replace expatriates. This tension and
the (mis) understandings it generates is reproduced at organisational and intersubjective
levels and informs the development of distinct working practices in both organizations.
The study provides new insights into the process of implementing positive
discrimination policies in organizations through the practice lens, highlighting the
emergent nature of policy implementation, grounding it in everyday knowledge and
action. It also offers a rare opportunity to capture in situ how Emiratisation ‘becomes’ a
practice.
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