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The Reach and Limits of Asian Panethnic Identity: The Dynamics of Gender, Race, and Class in a Community-Based Organization

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Abstract

What are the processes that foster or inhibit the development of panethnic alliances? Through ethnographic study of an Asian pan-ethnic community agency I examine the ways organizational dynamics simultaneously shape ethnic, gender, and class relations and how these in turn both thwart and facilitate interethnic and interracial alliances. I find that the deployment of multiple organizational processes and discourses had a direct impact on ethnicity, gender, and class. The paper also explores how the politics of race and ethnicity at the agency created, supported, and subverted institutional authority relations. Through this analysis of organizational processes that draw on and create race, gender, and class differences the study widens the scope of organizational theory to include multiple axes of inequality.

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Correspondence to Eileen M. Otis.

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Otis, E.M. The Reach and Limits of Asian Panethnic Identity: The Dynamics of Gender, Race, and Class in a Community-Based Organization. Qualitative Sociology 24, 349–379 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010638924129

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