Too often commitment to merit is seen by selection panels as a clarion call to reproduce their own talents. It is as if merit is to be transmitted by the process of cloning.
Peter Shergold (1996), Former Public Service Commissioner
For more than a decade, my research has examined the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employees in the Australian Public Service and the ways racism is embedded within institutional structures. My book Unmasking the Racial Contract revealed how everyday racism shapes Indigenous experiences at work.
This new paper shifts the focus from exclusion alone to the terms of inclusion. I ask how institutions produce the figure of the “good Indigenous employee” and what this reveals about race, merit and organisational power.
“Producing the Good Indigenous Employee: Cultural Cloning and the Reproduction of Sameness in the Australian Workplace,” explores exactly that question.
Drawing on interviews with Indigenous Australian Public Service employees, I examine how workplaces can reward conformity to institutional norms while marginalising Indigenous people who challenge dominant ways of thinking and working. Bringing Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s theorisation of the “good Indigenous citizen” into conversation with Philomena Essed’s concept of cultural cloning, I theorise the figure of the “good Indigenous employee” as a way of understanding how organisational cultures reproduce sameness under the language of merit, professionalism and inclusion. I also introduce the concept of de-cloning, showing how Indigenous refusal disrupts institutional demands for sameness and opens space for imagining workplaces differently.
Although the paper focuses on the Australian Public Service, its arguments extend well beyond government. It speaks to broader questions about race, whiteness, organisational power, merit and the limits of diversity and inclusion initiatives.
I hope this article encourages readers to think differently about what genuine inclusion requires, and whose interests are served when institutions reward sameness while calling it merit.
The full open-access article is available below.
Producing the “good Indigenous employee”: cultural cloning and the reproduction of sameness in the Australian workplace (Bargallie 2026)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2026.2643489