5th Workshop on Leadership, Diversity and Inclusion

In continuation of previous years’ successful workshops on theories, methods, practices and critiques of diversity and ‘its’ management, we now turn to alternative ways to understand diversity and inclusion.

The awareness of inequality and discrimination in society and in organizations is increasing. Yet, organizations continue to be sites of inequality regimes (Acker, 2006). Diversity management has been practiced in organizations for decades, and diversity management scholars have for long studied how meaning is created around diversity and how it is managed in organizations (D’Netto & Sohal, 1999; Tatli, 2011; Yang & Konrad, 2011). Despite all this, many challenges to grasp how diversity should be dealt with in organizational contexts remain (Zanoni, Janssens, Benschop, & Nkomo, 2010). For one, as management is about control and coordination, would diversity management then entail that diversity must be controlled in organizations (Christiansen & Just, 2012)? In which case, perhaps diversity management does more harm than good (Romani, Holck & Risberg, 2018). Maybe we need alternative ways to deal with diversity (Janssens & Zanoni, 2014)? Maybe diversity cannot be managed (Christensen & Muhr, 2018)? Is the managerial approach but one mode of organizing diversity and, if yes, what are the actually existing alternatives?

Should we, as Parker (2018) argues, dedicate less time researching conventional work organizations and, instead, embrace empirical sites of alternative organization to explore cases of diversity and difference outside the logic of market managerialism and corporate capitalism? Is that even possible, and can we only understand alternatives in relation to the ‘mainstream’ or is it also an option to approach the alternative as something distinct in and of itself? What if diversity, in fact, is the (emotional) labor of non-conforming bodies that inhabit normative organizational spaces differently (Basner, Christensen, French & Schreven, forthcoming)? Approaching diversity work not as the prerogative of management or somebody holding the title of manager but as something everybody does, what would we discover? And what could alternative approaches to diversity lead to? The questions around diversity and inclusion are manifold.

For this workshop, we invite contributions to explore diversity (and its management) in organization(s) in new, alternative and innovative ways. Alternative, therefore, should not only be understood as an alternative to something else, but also as something distinct in itself. To stay true to the ‘alternative’ in this call we are open to different types of contributions. Feel free to experiment with the style of your abstract from the conventional academic to the more artistic. We also welcome submissions with proposals for workshops, panel debates, and other co-facilitated sessions. If in doubt, reach out!
 

Download Preliminary Program

Keynote speakers:

Professor Jo Brewis, Open University, UK
Professor Anders Neergaard, Linköping University, Sweden
Professor Dorthe Staunæs, Aarhus University, Denmark
 

Sign-Up

These are some topics to explore, but the workshop is open for any ideas critically exploring alternative ways of understanding and working with diversity in organization(s).

Registration for workshop here.

Date & Location

May 13-14
Copenhagen Business School
Dalgas Have SV.089 and 1V.089