#1paper1meme – ConJunction

New Article in Journal of Business Ethics: »Parrying Diversity-Hostility and Ethical Dilemmas of Organizing Inclusion«

various covers of journal of business ethics

It is not a coincidence that organizational efforts to support diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are in the eye of the neofascist storm that is currently devastating US-based institutions and has already begun to reverberate globally. The hostility toward DEI results from the fact that such initiatives not only seek to broaden participation, but also unsettle entrenched hierarchies and cultural privileges. This makes them an obvious target for movements aiming to restore exclusionary orders under the guise of tradition, merit, or freedom of speech. Yet, despite their centrality to current political contestations, organizational approaches to DEI remain ill-prepared to address the growing intensity of diversity-hostile communication.

In the article “Parrying Diversity-Hostility and Ethical Dilemmas of Organizing Inclusion” co-authored by my sister Laura Dobusch, Milena Leybold and me, we explore ‘parrying’ diversity hostility as an increasingly necessary DEI practice (in addition to traditional orientations of promoting inclusion and preventing discrimination). The case we are looking at is that of the controversy around the so-called ‘Google Diversity Memo’ by James Damore, which eventually led to the author’s dismissal. Check out the abstract below:

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New Article: »Reviewing is Caring! Revaluing a Critical, but Invisibilized, Underappreciated, and Exploited Academic Practice«

How ChatGPT visually summarized the abstract of the paper on “Reviewing is Caring!”.

Together wie Mie Plotnikof (Aarhus University) and Matthias Wenzel (Leuphana University Lüneburg), I have written an essay proposing a care perspective to the way we organize academic peer review. The paper entitled “Reviewing is Caring! Revaluing a Critical, but Invisibilized, Underappreciated, and Exploited Academic Practice” has now been published open access in Organization. Check out the abstract below:

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New Article in Organization Theory: »Taking Individual Choices Seriously: A process perspective of self-selection in strategy work«

I am very glad to announce that the article “Taking Individual Choices Seriously: A process perspective of self-selection in strategy work”, co-authored by Martin Friesl, Martin Brielmaier and myself, has been accepted for publication at Organization Theory and is already available online. Particularly the growing interest in open approaches to strategy, which at least formally invite broad audiences to participate in organizational strategy-making, was one of the reasons for writing this paper. Not just because an invitation to participate cannot hardly intrinsic motivation to actually contribute but also because inviting everyone does not guarantee that you will actually arrive at a more diverse and inclusive bunch of people (see also Dobusch et al., 2019). The abstract reads as follows:

An increasing body of work investigates the participation of a diverse set of actors in strategy making. We argue that extant research tends to gloss over a fundamental condition underpinning such participation: while participation may reflect a hierarchical mandate, insofar as it relates to the actual involvement of employees, it is the result of a process of self-selection. From this perspective, forms of participative strategizing are neither fully the outcome of deliberate top-down choice, nor do they form a random pattern that is subject to the whims of individual employees. Such forms of strategizing are rather, as we argue in this paper, based on an endogenous logic of whether and how an individual self-selects, and in turn involves her/himself in the process, or not. To conceptualize the broader phenomenon of strategy participation, we draw on practice theory to conceptualize how individuals knowingly choose to involve themselves in strategizing events and we develop in turn a process model of self-selection as an ongoing social accomplishment. This model elaborates different patterns of participation in strategy making (stabilizing and shifting trajectories) with variable emergent outcomes. We end the paper by discussing the implications of our theorizing for ongoing research on open and participatory strategizing, and for the body of work on strategy as practice.

The paper is open access available at Organization Theory. Summary threads ft. #1paper1meme can be found over at Mastodon and Twitter.