Diversity – 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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The Excluding Effects of Boundaries in the Case of English Wikipedia

(Picture taken from this blog post on “Diversity in Wikipedia”)

This research essay is authored by Eva-Maria Schillinger, student in the master course Open Organizations and Organizing Openness at University of Innsbruck.

As a worldwide, open and collaborative knowledge sharing platform, Wikipedia has largely replaced the need for physical encyclopedias for many. From children using it for their first school presentations to university professors and academics, the readership is broad and diverse. And since Wikipedia prides itself on being an open-for-anyone space for collaboration, you would think that the large community of editors and contributors should be similar in diversity, but this is not the case. While there are multiple dimensions of diversity that could be examined in the case of Wikipedia, gender is the most visible and prominent facet. But not only diversity among users is more scarce than expected, furthermore there is a lack of inclusivity of perspectives and alternative opinions, which in some cases can lead to misrepresentation. Recognizing the lack of diversity among editors and the resulting bias in the content displayed is crucial for making attempts to increase inclusivity in both areas, which according to Wikipedia’s principle of equality should be the goal of the organization and its vast community. Finding the causes for this exclusion is the next step. This essay will examine potential exclusionary effects of boundaries around and within Wikipedia and how they inhibit inclusivity for both contributors and content. In total, four boundaries and their potential for exclusion are discussed. The focus lies on the English version of Wikipedia to keep an appropriate scope.

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Neuer Buchbeitrag: »Schöne Neue Digitale Organisationswelt – Offen für Diversität oder Exklusion durch Offenheit?«

Bereits vor einiger Zeit durfte ich im Rahmen der traditionsreichen Innsbrucker Gender Lectures einen Vortrag halten, auf dessen Basis nun ein Buchbeitrag mit dem Titel “Schöne Neue Digitale Organisationswelt: Offen für Diversität oder Exklusion durch Offenheit?” erschienen ist. In dem Beitrag führe ich zur Erklärung von Diversitätsdefiziten in offenen Organisationskontexten (siehe dazu auch den kürzlich erschienen KZfSS-Artikel) die Unterscheidung zwischen importierten und kreierten Diversitätsdefiziten ein. Aus dem Fazit:

Explizit als offen markierte Organisationsformen und -prozesse, wie sie in immer mehr Bereichen wie Softwareentwicklung, Strategiefindung oder Verwaltungskontexten propagiert werden, führen nicht automatisch zum Abbau von Diversitätsdefiziten in diesen Bereichen. Im Gegenteil, gerade ein besonders starkes Betonen organisationaler Offenheit oder besonders radikale Offenheitsregimes, die formal alle Interessierten zur Beteiligung einladen, können im Sinne einer Non-Performativität von Offenheitsrhetorik zu mangelnder Reflexion von real existierenden Diversitätsdefiziten führen. Die Diversitätsdefizite in formal offenen Organisationskontexten resultieren dabei einerseits aus dem Import gesellschaftlicher Ungleichheitsverhältnisse und werden andererseits durch (zu) offene Organisationsstrukturen kreiert, zum Beispiel indem exkludierendes Verhalten einzelner Beitragender nicht wirksam eingedämmt wird bzw. werden kann.

Der ganze, von Kordula Schnegg, Julia Tschuggnall, Caroline Voithofer und Manfred Auer herausgegebene, Band “Inter- und multidisziplinäre Perspektiven der Geschlechterforschung” ist open access bei Innsbruck University Press verfügbar.

EGOS 2021 Call »Openness as an Organizing Principle: Revisiting Diversity and Inclusion in Strategy, Innovation, and Beyond«

Logo of the 37th EGOS Colloquium 2021 in Amsterdam

The 37th EGOS Colloquium will take place from July 8–10, 2021 in Amsterdam, NL, and for the forth time after 2015 in Athens, 2017 in Copenhagen and 2019 in Edinburgh, I will co-convene a sub-theme on organizational openness. This year I am happy to team up with Violetta Splitter (University of Zurich) and Marieke van den Brink (Radboud University Nijmegen). Please find the Call for Short Papers (about 3.000 words) of Sub-theme 48: “Openness as an Organizing Principle: Revisiting Diversity and Inclusion in Strategy, Innovation, and Beyond” below, submission deadline is Tuesday, January 12, 2021, 23:59:59 CET:

Over the course of the past decade, we can observe a growing trend towards (calls for) greater openness in various organizational contexts such as open innovation, open government, open strategy or open science. To some degree openness has been recast as a programmatic organizing principle, promising not just gains in efficiency (e.g., Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007) but also in terms of transparency (Ohlson & Yakis-Douglas, 2019), accountability (Whittington, 2019) and inclusiveness (Mack & Szulanski, 2017). At the same time, we can observe a growing body of literature on diversity and inclusion that addresses openness in terms of inclusive organizing (Ferdman & Deane, 2014; Mor Barak, 2016; Nkomo et al., 2019; Shore et al., 2018; Zanoni et al., 2010).

Particularly regarding inclusiveness, however, we see a detachment of research on openness in various organizational contexts (e.g. strategy or innovation) from other scholarly debates on diversity and inclusion that address inclusive organizing as such (for an exception see Dobusch et al., 2019). With this sub-theme we seek to make a connection between these two separate research streams because we see three particular avenues for crosspollination that will advance our knowledge about inclusion, diversity and open organizing:

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