Promoting Diversity and Combatting Discrimination in Research Organizations: A Practitioner’s Guide

Abstract

The essay is addressed to practitioners in research management and from academic leadership. It describes which measures can contribute to creating an inclusive climate for research teams and preventing and effectively dealing with discrimination. The practical recommendations consider the policy and organizational levels, as well as the individual perspective of research managers. Following a series of basic recommendations, six lessons learned are formulated, derived from the contributions to the edited collection on "Diversity and Discrimination in Research Organizations."

Invisible, unmanageable, and inevitable: Online abuse as inequality in the academic workplace.

“…Workplace bullying and harassment have been identified as persistent problems in academia across geographical and national contexts (Conco et al, 2021; Meriläinen et al, 2019; Striebing, 2023) that reproduce inequalities within the academic workplace (Täuber et al, 2022). Online abuse extends and exacerbates these problems, given that it is often perpetrated by online strangers and members of the public who are not affiliated with the institutional community and therefore are not subject to its codes of conduct and antiharassment policies.…”

Diversity and Internationalisation: A New Core Competence for Research Managers?

“…While these definitions have a place, we prefer definitions that conceptually spring from 'diversity', as this focus on initiatives trying to ameliorate the negative effects of discrimination and initiatives trying to capitalise on the benefits of heterogeneous groups (Striebing et al, 2022) while still taking contextual nuances including power and status into account (van Dijk & Van Engen, 2013;van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007). The authors would suggest a definition that is less static and would apply van Dijk et al (2017) when defining research on diversity as needing to take into account that '… members of different social groups are likely to be perceived and approached differently because of their membership in a given social category [...] and, in part as a consequence, may behave differently ' (p. 518).…”