DISCRIMINATION BY AVOIDANCE - A study of mechanisms that contribute to the under-representation of Indigenous players in leadership positions within the Australian football institution

Abstract

Purpose: The aim is to explore diversity management in the Australian football institution, its clubs and state organisations, and its work to improve the representation of Indigenous players in leadership positions, such as coaching, board and executive levels. Indigenous players are over-represented as football players and yet under-represented in leadership positions. Theory: This study approaches the institution of Australian football through Institutional Theory and Critical Race Theory, which allows for the consideration of mechanisms that hinder Indigenous players from reaching leadership positions. Whereas Institutional Theory examines the practices, processes and outcomes of diversity management, Critical Race Theory examines underlying mechanisms situated in the context and dominant structures of whiteness. It is within such structures that documented patterns of ethnic penalties in the labour market must be understood. Method: A qualitative study using a grounded theory approach and theoretical sampling of semi-structured and open-ended interviews with managers of Australian football clubs and state organisations, organisational documents and a mixture of complementary online news articles from the mainstream media. Findings: The overall mechanism that help explain the continued underrepresentation of Indigenous players in leadership positions and appears as a result of the grounded theory coding, is avoidance (i.e. avoiding underrepresentation). This mechanism can, in turn, be divided into three sub-mechanisms that appear as central. These mechanisms have been conceptualised as claiming equality for all (i.e., caring as a duty or assuming a climate of inclusion), legitimising practices (i.e., using diversity management to improve the brand of the organisation or the active undertaking of image-making), and silencing (i.e., diverting attention away from the issue of under-representation or exercising internal control over discussing e.g., racial abuse in public). Thus, these mechanisms contribute to avoiding under-representation, and introduces this study as a case of discrimination by avoidance that contributes to maintaining the under-representation of Indigenous Australians in leadership positions within the Australian football institution.