Most of my published article appeared in French-language academic journals. Below are the articles I have published in English-language journals. If you don’t read French and would like to learn more about my contributions to the field of workplace DEI and to several other areas of the social sciences (socio-legal studies, the sociology of inequality, and the sociology of work and organizations), you might also check out my book, Managing Corporate Virtue (Oxford University Press 2025).
1/Workplace diversity and corporate virtue practices
This essay offers a progressive critique of the business case for diversity, which has been the hegemonic justification for workplace diversity programs over the past 40 years. First, the article shows that, since its emergence in the 1980s, this approach has gained only fragile recognition in the corporate world. Second, it highlights three main conceptual inconsistencies of the business case for diversity: 1) it cannot be falsified, since the generic notion of diversity is so inherently polysemic and ambiguous; 2) even when the scope of diversity is more clearly delineated, the relationship between diversity and performance is inevitably circumscribed and contingent; 3) in practice, it is most often the appearance of diversity, equity, and inclusion that is tacitly acknowledged as a source of economic benefits in the corporate world. The article concludes by pointing to the political perils associated with the hegemonic position of the business rationale, not only for diversity initiatives but also for other “responsible” corporate programs such as sustainability and human rights.
Bereni, Laure. 2024. ““Why not a blonde woman?” Identity realism and diversity work in New York and in Paris.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 47(10): 1964-1986. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2023.2252876
Drawing on 112 in-depth interviews with diversity managers in the regions of New York and Paris throughout the 2010s, this article explores how identity realism plays out in large companies that simultaneously affirm their commitment to abstract individualism and celebrate the benefits of diversity. The notion of identity realism refers to the organizational valuing of workers’ group identity attributes, notably race and gender, for the performance of specific functions. The comparative study shows that while in the United States minority identity (being all but a white male) is perceived as a qualifying attribute for the job, in France, majority identity (white masculinity) is tacitly valued as an asset for the role. Ultimately, the gendered and racialized bodies of diversity managers are major symbolic vehicles through which U.S. and French-based companies align the transnational category of diversity management with distinct national frameworks of equality and difference.
2/Social movement theory/institutional activism
Bereni, Laure. 2021. “The Women’s Cause in a Field: Rethinking the Architecture of Collective Protest in the Era of Movement Institutionalization.” Social Movement Studies 20(2): 208–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2019.1679107
This article introduces the concept of women’s cause field, which refers to the relational structure of groups mostly devoted to the advancement of women in a variety of social settings, cutting across the line between civil society and political institutions. Unlike the women’s movement, the women’s cause field encompasses a set of both extra-institutional and intra-institutional mobilizing structures. This concept expands on scholarship on institutional activism, and on field and network theory. Beyond the case of the women’s movement, it provides a new framework – the notion of cause field – to capture the architecture of specialized collective protest in the era of movement institutionalization, distinct from, and complementary to, the concept of social movement.
Bereni, Laure, and Anne Revillard. 2018. “Movement Institutions: The Bureaucratic Sources of Feminist Protest.” Politics & Gender 14(3): 407–32. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1743923X18000399
Over the past several decades, scholarship on women’s movements, feminism, and the state has brought renewed attention to the study of protest politics by questioning its frontier with dominant institutions. This article takes this critique a step further by considering the institutional dimension of the state-movement intersection. Drawing on the French case, we argue that institutions that are formally devoted to women’s rights inside the state (women’s policy agencies) can operate as movement institutions—that is, as bureaucratic instances routinely engrained with a protest dimension—rather than being only a shelter for a network of insider activists. As such, they can provide a specific, institutional feminist socialization to their members; they can purvey, rather than only relay, feminist protest, and they can deploy institutional repertoires of protest, combining bureaucratic and movement dimensions. We conclude that the definition and boundaries of the women’s movement need to be broadened to include bureaucratic sources of feminist protest.
3/Gender quotas for senior positions in the French state bureaucracy
Jacquemart, Alban, Anne Revillard, and Laure Bereni. 2020. “Gender Quotas in the French Bureaucratic Elite: The Soft Power of Restricted Coercion.” French Politics 18(1): 50–70. 10.1057/s41253-020-00112-y
Drawing on a collective study of gender and executive careers in the French Civil Service, this article provides an account of the genesis and implementation of the gender quota introduced by the 2012 “Sauvadet law” in senior executive positions of the State bureaucracy. First, it shows the crucial, yet unobtrusive, role played by feminist actors in the process, in spite of the absence of any strong open politicization of the issue, from agenda setting to implementation. Second, the article points to the dual character of the reform. On the one hand, the gradual character and limited perimeter of the quota (to senior executive “initial appointments”) restricted its immediate quantitative impact. On the other hand, the constraining, technical dimension of the tool endowed it with a potential to foster incremental social change.
4/Diversity policies in French local governments
Drawing on the qualitative study of three French local governments (Paris, Nantes and the Seine-Saint-Denis department), this article examines the implementation of local anti-discrimination policy during the 2010s. To what extent have these local governments, particularly eager to assert “diversity” values, renegotiated the dominant, colour-blind perspective prevailing at the national level? To address this question, we examined how they used a policy instrument called the “Diversity Label”. We found that in the three cases, the commitment to the label reinforced both the institutionalization and the managerialization of anti-discrimination policy. Yet, in Nantes and Paris, it also led to a deracialization of anti-discrimination policy – i.e. to the obliteration of its ethno-racial dimension. The Seine-Saint-Denis department, where the majority group tends to become a minority, appears as a contrasting case, as ethno-racial concerns have remained central. This study reveals the unlikely conditions under which French local governments differ from national colour-blindness.
5/Women’s movements and the gender parity reform in France
This article explores the feminist campaign that led to the adoption of the gender parity laws (1999–2000), mandating an affirmative action policy to enhance women’s representation in elected assemblies. After reviewing the history of demands for equalizing women’s access to electoral office since the emergence of the second wave of feminism in France, shifting from quota to parity, it shows the discursive tactics used by proponents of parity to shape their claim within the terms of the dominant republican universalism, which was a priori hostile to the recognition of gender in political representation. The last section is a discussion of Joan Scott’s recent analysis of the ‘refiguration’ of universalism in the discourses of the proponents of parity. The article concludes that these discourses both challenged and reinforced the dominant discourses in which they were embedded, in line with a long history of feminist challenges to the gender hierarchy.