“Tea girl and garden boy” bankers: exploring substantive equality in bankers’ narratives

The purpose of this paper is to explore what narratives of inequality tell us about societal inequality both inside and outside of workplaces. It illuminates the intertwined fates of social agents and the productive potential of seeing organisational actors as social beings in order to advance resistance and substantive equality.

This research empirically examines narratives of inequality and substantive empowerment among a group of 25 black bankers within a major bank in Johannesburg, South Africa. Data were gathered through one-on-one interviews. The data were analysed using narrative analysis.

The findings indicate that narratives of organisational agents always contain fragments of personal and societal narratives. An intersectional lens of how people experience inequality allows us to work towards a more substantive kind of equality. Substantive equality of organisational actors is closely tied to the recognition and elimination of broader societal inequality.

The implications for teaching and research are for scholars to methodically centre the continuities between the personal, organisational and societal in ways that highlight the productive tensions and possibilities for a more radical form of equality. Moreover, teaching, research and policy interventions should always foreground how the present comes to be constituted historically.

Policy and inclusivity interventions would be better served by using substantive empowerment as a theoretical base for deeper changes beyond what we currently conceive of as empowerment. At base, this requires policy makers and diversity practitioners to see all oppression and inequality as interconnected. Individuals are simultaneously organisational beings and societal agents.

Third world approaches to diversity and inclusion need to be vigilant against globalised western notions of equity that are not contextually and historically informed. The failure of equity initiatives in SA means that alternative ideas and approaches are necessary.

The paper illustrates how individual narratives become social scripts of resistance. It develops a way for attaining substantive empowerment through the use of narrative approaches. It allows us to see that employees are also social agents.