Promise Of Diversity Research Articles

The Promise of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in 2021 and Beyond

We are living through a very volatile period—one induced and disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Businesses world over have recalibrated (and continue to recalibrate) their systems, processes and protocols to suit the new normal(s). How are progressive organisations approaching diversity, equity and inclusion? What are the promises of this universal talent management dimension of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)? This article is an exploration of what DEI holds for the future of organisations, drawing insights from corporate India’s largest diversity analytics exercise—Working Mother and Avtar Best Companies for Women in India (BCWI).

The Promise of Diversity, Inclusion, and Punishment in Corporate Governance

Governance inclusion mandates require that a corporate board include diverse individuals (such as members of under-represented communities under California’s AB 979) or representatives of a constituency (such as employees under Senator Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act), and are largely intended to change corporate behavior in a more pro-social direction. This article applies the economic insights of the Coase theorem to determine when and if such inclusion mandates will result in desirable changes to corporate activities. The main promise of inclusion mandates is that they allow the corporation to make its own decisions, based on private information, rather than depend on ex post liability or command-and-control regulation to enforce optimal corporate behavior. The boardroom is a “Coasian bubble” in which the abilities to bargain and contract are greatly enhanced; inclusion of interests in the boardroom allows those interests to be taken into account. Inclusion also results in some transfer of corporate surplus from shareholders to the newly included. This implies that corporate behavior may not change, since all those represented in the boardroom have incentives to maximize corporate surplus. Exceptions are where inclusion enables efficient contracting that was otherwise infeasible, or if the included group has significant interests that are subject to corporate externalities. The latter channel is most likely to result in more pro-social corporate behavior, since such interests represent significant “skin in the game” for avoiding corporate malfeasance. Skin in the game can also be manufactured through ex post liability, such as by making a represented constituency liable for corporate failures or misbehavior; further, such liability may be necessary so that incentives are not degraded where the constituency receives benefits that are not in the nature of residual claims. Viewed through this lens, constituency mandates, in which directors are accountable to groups with significant interests, show some promise for promoting socially beneficial corporate behavior; diversity mandates, in which diverse but atomistic directors generally lack such accountability (at least as proposed), are unlikely to effect such change.

Improving Board Decisions: The Promise of Diversity

Improving Board Decisions: The Promise of Diversity

Diversity's Promise for Higher Education: Making It Work

Diversity's Promise for Higher Education: Making It Work

Perceived career challenges and response strategies of women managers in Indian five-star hotels: a mixed-method study

This descriptive phenomenological study is designed to investigate and describe the lived career experiences of women managers in Indian five-star hotels. Data were collected from face-to-face interviews with 29 women managers of two five-star hotels in Delhi and one five-star hotel in Mumbai along with responses to open-ended questions from 158 women managers of 46 five-star hotels in the cities of Delhi, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, and Bangalore and analysed in lines of qualitative content analysis. The content analysis of the data yielded 13 themes related to career experiences of women managers that enabled and hindered their career progression. Findings revealed that women managers in five-star hotels are keen to ascend to leadership positions and they expect organisations to realise the promise of diversity to facilitate their career ambitions. They adjust their feelings of satisfaction and develop career strategies to reduce dissonance with their lack of ability to attain executive positions. The findings of this study may be useful for women who desire advancement to executive positions and to organisational leaders who wish to hire and promote the right person regardless of gender.

Explicating Net Diversity in Trend Assessment

This study tracks the increasing supply of Internet access and the diversity of Internet use by analyzing data from the three waves of a survey conducted in the United Kingdom in 2005, 2007, and 2009. Data on Internet access and three dimensions of online use (civic-government, economic-commerce, and generic information and news) reveal that the Internet not only offers an emergent promise of diversity but also presents a systematic divide in which the increase in benefits (of Internet capacities and actual consumed) does not uniformly occur, while the impacts of social disparities remain constant over time. Our discussion addresses how characteristics of social backgrounds are salient in harnessing types of Internet use that may be a critical tipping point for information diversity. We argue that policymakers will be better served by understanding the constraint of actual use that is to be in par with the continuous explosion of technological supply.

Book Reviews: Motivation and Learning Strategies for College Success: A Self Management Approach: Diversity's Promise for Higher Education: Making it Work

Book Reviews: Motivation and Learning Strategies for College Success: A Self Management Approach: Diversity's Promise for Higher Education: Making it Work

Diversity's Promise for Higher Education – By Daryl G. Smith

Diversity's Promise for Higher Education – By Daryl G. Smith

Book Review: Diversity's promise for higher education: Making it work.

Book Review: Diversity's promise for higher education: Making it work.

Diversity's Promise in Higher Education: Making It Work (review)

Reviewed by: Diversity's Promise in Higher Education: Making It Work Christine A. Stanley Daryl G. Smith, Diversity's Promise in Higher Education: Making It Work. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 333 pp. Hardback: $50.00. ISBN: 978-0-8018-9316-2. One of the most compelling and vexing issues that has troubled academic institutions for years and may well be with us for years to come is how to deliver on the promise of making diversity work in higher education. While there is a substantial body of research on diversity in higher education, this book draws on some of the existing research, which spans more than 40 years, to address the issue from a variety of critical perspectives. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 focuses on "The National Imperative," Part 2 on "Reframing Diversity," Part 3 on "Building Capacity by Interrupting the Usual," and Part 4 on "What Will It Take?" [End Page 521] Daryl G. Smith, a senior scholar and much sought-after authority on diversity in higher education, begins the Preface with a simple, yet profound statement that undergirds the very essence of issues raised in the book, as well as for humankind, "I see the significance of diversity everywhere" (p. vii). In Part 1, she examines the national and global context for diversity in higher education. Too often, we engage in vigorous discussions of diversity and social justice without contexualizing these issues. A serious problem that results is a lack of attention to research on changing demographics, the health of our democracy and community, the contributions of indigenous peoples, the history and legacies of injustice directed toward marginalized groups in our society, and how institutions are, by nature, characterized as workplaces. Furthermore, the national and global contexts demand attention to the role that identity plays in human diversity. The human dimensions of diversity—age, cultural identity, gender identity or expression, nationality, physical and mental ability, political and ideological perspectives, racial and ethnic identity, religious and spiritual identity, sexual orientation, and social and economic status, for example—are complex, multiple, and intersecting. These relationships are further complicated, as Smith asserts, when we add workplace layers such as institutional identity and culture, power and privilege, micro-aggressions, tokenism, and firm beliefs and arguments on what constitutes critical mass. This is the essence of Part 1. Readers who are not convinced by the arguments made in Part I should read Parts 2, 3, and 4 for additional information. Part 2 offers an inclusive and differentiated framework for diversity in higher education. Smith begins the discussion of her framework by drawing a thought-provoking parallel between diversity and technology, where she posits that we must move the diversity discourse from one that is perceived as "narrow and static" to one that is an "institutional imperative" (p. 47). In this section, she conceptualizes her framework with a view of the institution's mission at the center with other issues connected to it—such as campus climate, inter-group relations, access and success, education and scholarship, and "institutional viability and vitality" (p. 64). She also summarizes and reviews diversity in higher education for the past 40 years, taking a look at the growth in higher education institutions by sector, student enrollment data, graduate and professional school data, the gender gap, faculty demographics, demographic changes by race and gender, administrative demographics, emerging issues with counting, disaggregation, unknown students, the achievement gap, and the age-old question that plagues and challenges traditional admissions indicators, "What counts as merit?" Part 3 begins with identifying talent in the academy, where she argues convincingly from the research for faculty diversity, enumerates troubles with the hiring process, examines the conditions for faculty hiring and retention, and discusses what counts as excellence. In addition, phenomena such as the problem with incremental (single-hire) search processes, the decentralization and siloing of faculty hiring, cluster hiring, over-scrutiny and bias in the search process, special hires, and legal issues are presented thoughtfully and discussed with careful attention to how we identify and sometimes unintentionally thwart faculty talent, hiring, and advancement in higher education. Part 3 also pays attention and adds to the growing body of...

Diversity's Promise for Higher Education: Making it Work (review)

Diversity's Promise for Higher Education: Making it Work (review)

Outsiders within the Academy: Strategies for Resistance and Mentoring African American Women

We, African American women professionals in higher education, make visible the continued presence of race and gender oppression, and the hegemony that supports systems of oppression the academy (Dillard, 2000; Patton, 2004ab). Race and gender differences in patterns of employment, rank, and personal experiences academic units are illustrative of the interlocking nature of race and gender oppression that have multiple influences (Combs, 2003; Wright Myers, 2002), including pathways to doctorate studies, institutional hiring practices, tenure and promotion processes, organizational behavior, and professional relationships. Further, Black women are more likely to report organizational barriers to advancement and have more negative views of academic or departmental climates. They also are less likely to indicate that their scholarship is valued, that they are respected by their colleagues, and that they are viewed as legitimate scholars compared to White women, men of color, or White men (Thomas & Hollenshead, 2001).Because career advancement and greater retention rates are among the most reported benefits of mentoring, mentoring is one form of resistance to systems of oppression, organizational barriers, and other negative dynamics experienced by Black women faculty. Mentoring also reduces social isolation and helps one to manage different academic roles (Bova, 2000; Holmes, Land, & Hinton-Hudson, 2007), making it one of the most viable coping and resistance strategies. Yet, a discussion of mentoring without acknowledging the intersections of race and gender, their implications predominately White institutions, and forms of resistance would not address fully the needs of Black women in the academy, beckoning the use of a cultural-inclusive approach to working with African American women in the academy.Therefore, to frame the current discussion on mentoring, we use core themes of Black Feminist Thought (Hill Collins, 1986; 1991) to situate Black women faculty in the academy. Part of our framework includes three sites of tension and resistance: (a) the Mammy-Sapphire continuum of existence, (b) inequality without reverence to credentials, expertise, and professional experiences, and (c) White privilege that dismisses the intersecting realities of racism and sexism. We then suggest a model of peer mentoring that allows for the careful integration of the socio-political tensions, such as race and gender as critical factors when mentoring African American women faculty (Benishek, Bieschke, Park, & Slattery, 2004). Inside the current article, we offer a few biographical narratives to place a face on the issues presented.Black Feminist Thought: Articulating the Outsider WithinPatton (2004a) argues that rather than the university being a place to explore diversity and to embrace diversity, universities often become complicitous in domination and oppression (p. 190). The fracturing between the politics, language, and practices of liberal universities is the uncomfortable nexus inhabited by Black women, which positions us as the academy (Dillard, 2000; Patton, 2004ab). Patricia Hill Collins (1986), in her classic essay on learning from the outsider within, argues that African American women scholars have the potential to use insight from their experiences at the intersections of race, gender, and class to ask new research questions, and to bring a new lens that reflects a Black woman's standpoint. Consistent with the promise of diversity and inclusion, Black women in higher education have the potential to challenge, innovate, and make evident that which was unseen by conventional disciplinary lens. Hill Collins (1986), however, acknowledges the status of outsider academe is inherently problematic if there are no transformations in institutions in which are a part of, and if the meanings assigned to Black women faculty remain unchanged. Thus, African American women as outsiders within the academy is a metaphor that not only evokes transformative promise but also exclusion, isolation, and subordination where one's work and contributions are viewed as less valued, less critical, and less deserving of compensation and recognition. …

Book Review: Thomas, R. R., Jr. (2006). Building on the Promise of Diversity: How We Can Move to the Next Level in Our Workplaces, Our Communities, and Our Society. New York: American Management Association

Book Review: Thomas, R. R., Jr. (2006). Building on the Promise of Diversity: How We Can Move to the Next Level in Our Workplaces, Our Communities, and Our Society. New York: American Management Association

Building on the Promise of Diversity: How We can Move to the Next Level in Our Workplaces, Our Communities, and Our Society

Building on the Promise of Diversity: How We can Move to the Next Level in Our Workplaces, Our Communities, and Our Society

Building on the Promise of Diversity

Building on the Promise of Diversity

Unfinished Business: The Diversity Promise

Unfinished Business: The Diversity Promise

Passion and politics in women's studies in the nineties

This article first summarizes the origins and aims of Women's Studies—its “Idea Power” — which led to the impressive worldwide expansion of Women's Studies in the last twenty years as the educational arm of the Women's Liberation Movement. Then it discusses the “Woman Power” in Women's Studies and its promise of diversity followed by its subject matter, which is equally diverse and is conceptualized from revisionary to visionary and revisionary/visionary standpoints. Next are mentioned some obstacles to feminist vision and sisterhood, such as the libertarian ideology informing the theory and praxis of Gender Studies and post-structuralist discourse/deconstructionist epistemology. I contend that whilst there is much cause for celebrating the achievements of Women's Studies, there is also cause for concern with this latest resurgence of fragmented and disconnected theory, which mirrors similar developments in reproductive and genetic engineering. The article ends with some strategies of how Women's Studies might avoid colluding with compartmentalized frameworks and move “passionately forward” into the nineties and beyond.