Recognition Justice in Generative Relational Being: A Preliminary Discussion of Inclusion

Organizations now hold a large and well developed apparatus of inclusion. International instruments prescribe consultation, representation, accessibility, disaggregated data and grievance channels, and organizational research has established that admission to an existing structure falls short of what inclusion requires. This paper asks what an organization must retain in order to recognize a person at all, and under what conditions that capacity may be lost. Working within Generative Relational Being, it treats recognition as a condition under which relations continue to be generated, and distinguishes six levels of an organization at which recognition may fail, ordered by whether a failure at that level can be entered into any record. Two working theses are offered for examination. The first is that recognition failure tends to appear at the levels that instruments do not reach, so that measured performance and the position of a person may move apart. The second is that a standing interpretation of a person may absorb every refutation available to him, at which point a procedure of revision remains open and carries no information. A test in two clauses and a criterion are proposed on that basis, together with a constraint stating that an obstacle may be a condition and may not be a person, from which the paper derives its positions on admission, on separation, and on measures taken against an anticipated harm. Later sections examine the mechanisms through which the capacity is retained, which arise from the relational structure of an organization and admit of no installation. The paper is preliminary, much of it concedes ground to prior work, and a closing section records that it supplies no procedure by which the condition it describes could be established in a given case.