Author ORCID Identifier

0009-0003-7704-4175

Date of Award

8-31-2026

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Business Administration

First Advisor

Alessia Contu

Second Advisor

Jared M. Poole

Third Advisor

Stephanie J. Creary

Abstract

Why do organizational justice commitments so rarely produce structural transformation, and what happens to the people who take them seriously? This dissertation addresses that question through a longitudinal qualitative study of Aequitas University, a large public urban research institution in the northeastern United States, during a multi-year attempt to become “anti-racist.” Drawing on 129 semi-structured interviews with 115 organizational members, 7 focus group discussions, four years of field observation, and an archival corpus spanning more than a decade of institutional history, the dissertation examines how justice commitments move through organizations over time. Justice commitments do not simply succeed or fail. Organizations actively convert them into processes that generate meaning, mobilize embodied labor, and reproduce the inequalities they nominally challenge. The analysis advances three theoretical contributions. First, it theorizes justice proclamations as interpellative organizational events: institutional hails that recruit members into subject positions relative to a justice project. Drawing on Althusser’s concept of interpellation, the dissertation shows that this recruitment operates asymmetrically within racialized organizational structures. For Black and Brown faculty and staff, the call to become anti-racist is not an identity invitation alone. It is a redistribution of labor, risk, and institutional exposure toward those already most burdened by the structures the proclamation challenges. Second, the dissertation introduces embodied accumulation as a longitudinal process through which organizations distribute and extract the labor of justice work unevenly across organizational careers. Tracing 43 participants across early-, mid-, and long-tenure stages, the analysis shows how paradox embodiment evolves from visceral shock, through strategic navigation and compounding invisible labor, to integration of exhaustion and institutional wisdom. Third, the dissertation theorizes erasure as a mechanism of organizational stabilization: the deliberate removal of a contested signifier from authoritative institutional discourse once its redistributive implications can no longer be managed through aspiration alone. Unlike symbolic decoupling, which preserves aspirational language while separating it from practice, erasure removes the language itself, producing stabilization without resolution and closure without reconciliation. Together, these mechanisms, interpellative recruitment, embodied accumulation, and erasure, form a cycle through which organizations manage justice. Organizations do not fail to become anti-racist; they actively structure their own survival of the attempt.

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