Intersectionality Reclaimed: From Identity Optics to Institutional Accountability

Abstract

As intersectionality gains traction in policy, academia, and organisational discourse, its critical potential is increasingly diluted through reductive interpretations. In this paper, Professor Mustafa F. Özbilgin interrogates the epistemic slippage between intersections, the co-presence of multiple identity categories, and intersectionality as a theory of power that exposes how systems of oppression interact to produce compounding inequalities. While intersections tend to be operationalised descriptively through identity markers, intersectionality, in its original and radical intent, is an analytic of structural injustice rooted in Black feminist and decolonial thought.

Drawing on empirical examples from his research across different national and sectoral contexts including work on minoritised academics, migrant entrepreneurs, and LGBTQ+ inclusion, Professor Özbilgin distinguishs between individual intersectionality, which focuses on lived experience, and institutional intersectionality, which interrogates how policy, bureaucracy, and managerialism reproduce intersecting forms of marginalisation. He shows how institutions often perform inclusion through demographic optics while evading deeper forms of recognition, redistribution, and relational accountability.

By reclaiming intersectionality as a mode of institutional critique rather than identity celebration, this paper offers a framework for enacting what he calls recognition-based accountability. Professor Özbilgin argues that intersectionality must not only make power legible but also actionable, calling institutions to account for the social harms they obscure or perpetuate. In doing so, he reorients intersectionality toward its emancipatory roots, grounded in structural transformation, epistemic justice, and global solidarity.

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Mustafa F. Özbilgin is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Brunel Business School, London. His research focuses on workplace equality, diversity and inclusion from comparative and relational perspectives. He has conducted field studies in the UK and internationally. Supported by international and national grants from the ESRC, EPSRC, EU Horizon2020, CIPD, ACE, ACCA, and British Academy he studied changing policies and practices of workplace equality, diversity and inclusion. He is an engaged scholar, driven by values of workplace democracy, equality for all, and humanisation of work.

He has authored and edited more than 20 books and published over 200 papers in academic journals, including the British Medical Journal, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Learning and Education, Journal of Management Studies, and British Journal of Management, among others. He has conducted research, consultancy and training at a large number of organisations, including the House of Commons, Barclays Bank, The Bank West Australia, Google, Halifax, the CIPD, the National Health Service, the NHS Employers, L'Oreal, Tesco, the Probation Services, The UK Fire Service, the Economist Research Unit, the OECD, the WRVS, DTI, Rio Tinto, PwC, Linklaters and ACCA.