Marjolein Dennissen

62 The Herculean task of diversity networks Janssens, 2015). While it was first used to pinpoint and explore the intersections between gender, race and related processes of disadvantage, intersectionality today is used in a broader sense considering the intersections between various other categories, i.e., class, religion, age, sexual orientation, disability and occupational status (e.g., Atewologun & Sealy, 2014; Boogaard & Roggeband, 2010; Bowleg, 2008; Essers & Benschop, 2007; Kelan, 2014; Mik-Meyer, 2015). Although the importance of intersectionality is widely recognized, intersectionality remains at the margins in management and organization studies and does not live up to its full potential to explore structures of inequality in organizations (Rodriguez et al., 2016). The majority of organizational scholarship adopts a structural intersectionality perspective and focuses on the individual experiences of people with multiple (mostly disadvantaged) intersecting identities (e.g., Adib & Guerrier, 2003; Essers & Benschop, 2007). A political intersectionality perspective on the other hand is less prevalent. Responding to the call by Rodriguez, Holvino, Fletcher and Nkomo (2016) for more systemic analyses of intersectionality in management and organization studies, my study draws on both structural intersectionality and political intersectionality to gain insight into how diversity networks and their members deal with multiple intersecting identities. Structural intersectionality Structural intersectionality refers to how the experiences of people within a particular identity category are qualitatively different from each other depending on their other intersecting identities (Cole, 2008; Crenshaw, 1991). Structural intersectionality thus focuses on the individual experiences of people at the intersections of multiple identities. Both positive and negative deployment of identity categories is possible. A person can be advantaged belonging to certain social categories as a source of social and political empowerment, while simultaneously be disadvantaged belonging to other social categories as a source of powerlessness and subordination (Boogaard & Roggeband, 2010). For example, in their study in the Dutch police force, Boogaard and Roggeband (2010) demonstrated how individuals as agents reflect on and engage with their intersecting gender, ethnic and organizational identities. They reveal the paradoxes of intersectionality by showing how privileged identity categories are used to gain advantage over other identities that relate more to disadvantage. By doing so, people end up reproducing structures that generate inequalities along both identity categories. In this study, I use the concept of structural intersectionality to analyze howdiversity network members negotiate their multiple identities vis-à-vis their membership of diversity networks. Political intersectionality Crenshaw (1991) also introduced the concept of political intersectionality to indicate how inequalities and their intersections are relevant to policies and political strategies of groups of people who occupy multiple subordinate identities. As strategies on one axis of inequality are almost never neutral towards other axes, political differences are most relevant (Verloo,