A post-conference workshop on Leadership, Diversity and Inclusion

Workshop on Leadership, Diversity and Inclusion

Call for abstracts

Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, December 16, 2014, 12:00-22:00

- a post-conference workshop to the 13th Studying Leadership Conference

Keynote speakers:
Professor Patrice Buzzanell (Purdue University)
Professor Mustafa Özbilgin (Brunel University London)

Workshop aim and goals:
The workshop is organized by the Group for Diversity Research at CBS and sponsored by special funds at CBS from the department of Intercultural Communication and Management, Department of Organization, and Department of Management, Politics, and Philosophy to foster research on diversity.

The goal of the workshop is explorative in nature and aims at strengthening the ties between CBS diversity and leadership scholars and international collaborators. In terms of output, the workshop organizers plan to develop a special issue on ‘Inclusive Leadership’ as well as an edited volume on Gendered Leadership.

It is one of the aims of the workshop to help develop contributions for these two outlets; participating in the workshop does not ensure papers a place in either research outlet, however, and the review process will remain under the complete supervision of the respective journals’ chief-editors and book series editors.

Schedule and plan
Time: Tuesday, December 16; 12:00-22:00
Place: Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark

The workshop on Leadership, Diversity and Inclusion is as a post-conference event following the conclusion of the 13th International Studying Leadership Conference at 12:00. Being registered for the 13th Studying Leadership conference is not a precondition for taking part in the post-conference workshop. We also invite all conference participants with interest in the theme of diversity and inclusion to submit an abstract for the workshop.
The workshop will consist of both plenary parts and roundtable work in smaller groups. The workshop also includes a dinner event sponsored by CBS during which the keynote speakers will hold their speeches.

Submission details
Abstracts of approximately 1500 words (Times New Roman 12, single spaced, no header, footers or track changes) are invited by October 15th, 2014 with decisions on acceptance to be made by workshop organizers within 10 days. All abstracts will be peer reviewed. Contributors may choose to draw on material from a wide range of empirical spheres, theoretical perspectives and methodological orientations. Papers can be theoretical or theoretically informed empirical work. We welcome papers from any national context.

New and young scholars with 'work in progress' are also welcomed. In the case of co-authored papers, one person should be identified as the corresponding author. Abstracts should be emailed to: Sara Louise Muhr (slm.ioa@cbs.dk) and Florence Villesèche (fv.int@cbs.dk). The document should include contact details including author names, institutional
affiliation, and e-mail address.

We acknowledge the explorative nature of the workshop but at the same time wish to emphasize the importance of taking the papers forward to make the research outputs planned a reality. We therefore welcome full papers to be submitted before December 1st, however this is not a prerequisite for taking part in the workshop.

Workshop Registration
Workshop registration is subjected to a small fee of DKK 100 (approx. 15 €)
Note that no funding, fee waiver, travel or other bursaries are offered for attendance of the workshop.

Important deadlines
Abstract submission: October 15th
Notice of acceptance: October 25th
Registration to the workshop: November 10th
Full paper submission (encouraged): December 1st

Workshop Organizers
Patrice Buzzanell, Purdue University (buzzanel@purdue.edu), Sara Louise Muhr, CBS (slm.ioa@cbs.dk), Robyn Remke, CBS (rr.ikl@cbs.dk), Annette Risberg, CBS (ari.ikl@cbs.dk), Laurence Romani, Stockholm School of Economics (Laurence.Romani@hhs.se), Lynn Roseberry, CBS (lr.mpp@cbs.dk) and Florence Villesèche, CBS (fv.int@cbs.dk).

Background
The 13th international Studying Leadership conference has this year called for papers related to the theme of ‘Relevance and Rigour in Leadership Research and Practice’ (please visit the conference website at www.islc2014.cbs.dk for information about the general call).

In connection to the conference, the Group for Diversity Research at CBS organizes a post-conference workshop on ‘Leadership, Diversity and Inclusion’ and invites both conference participants and other researchers to submit an abstract of their current work on the topic.

Leadership is a broad concept and its definition is disputed; this had led to the development of a large literature drawing on multiple disciplines taking interest in various definitions of it, and studying it from different paradigms in order to understand what leadership is. This is an important question that clearly deserves research attention; however, from a practice perspective, it appears even more important to address the effects of
leadership, its workings, whom it affects, and why leadership still is a relevant concept today.

In recent years, we have witnessed the development of a body of literature on gender and leadership and responsible/ethical leadership as well as a growing field on inclusive leadership. However, Leadership, Diversity and Inclusion are most often treated as separate research fields, with studies of diversity and inclusion being considered as part of diversity management rather than leadership studies. Special issues about leadership tend to oversee the importance of diversity and inclusion (except for in journals with specific focus on the topic as for example Gender, Work and Organization which in 2012 had a special issue on Gendered Leadership), and leadership outlets tend to consider diversity and inclusion as peripheral to the field.

The grounding of leadership studies in “great (white) man” stories and case studies and the operation of such myths in gendered societies and organizations (Martin and Collinson, 2002) have led to the seemingly neutral
idea that one-man leadership is a universal notion and ideal. Such a perspective excludes reflections on the mutual influence of diversity and leadership. Yet, issues of diversity and inclusion are increasingly becoming a
part of leadership practice (see e.g. Romani and Holgersson, forthcoming) as an adaptation to organizational and societal realities, as an outcome of deliberate change processes, or of stakeholder pressures. This relevance of considering diversity and inclusion in leadership studies, then, can be addressed from different angles.

To start with, we can talk about diversity in leaders, i.e. who the leaders are or who they are expected to be. A number of contributions have addressed gender in leadership in the streams of literature taking interest in TMTs, boards and senior managerial positions (Wang and Kelan, 2012), but also gendered leadership (Billing and Alvesson, 2000), i.e. how expectations of who can be a leader impede demographical diversity in leadership (Muhr, 2012; Muhr and Sullivan, 2013). However, this topic deserves further attention, in addition to the need to develop studies of ethnicity/race in leadership, and the largely absent intersection with class and cultural hegemony.

Is a diverse leader only someone who appears to embody diversity?
How is such diversity embodied and performed?
What are the images and narratives of leadership held by different social groups, and are they changing?
How are leaders coming from the periphery included in the organization’s center?
What is the role of organizational artifacts such and social networks in this?

Then, who leaders are is too often considered to be a clear proxy for how they lead, in line with social identity theory (Buzzanell, Meisenbachm and Remke, 2008; Jonsen, Mazewski and Schneider, 2010).

Are diverse leaders necessary leading diversely?
What does diverse leadership mean?
What is expected from demographically diverse leaders regarding diversity and inclusion policies?

This leads us to open for questions about leadership of diversity.

The goal of diversity management is generally considered to be the attraction and integration of “diverse” employees, often with the expectation of positive business outcomes (Olsen and Martins, 2012; Risberg and
Søderberg, 2008; Risberg, Beauregard and Sander, 2012). What is the role of leaders and leadership in this process? How can diversity not only be managed, but also led? Is inclusion always a movement from periphery
to center, and can diverse leadership reverse this? Finally, we also invite reflections on where and how leadership operates in practice. Leadership in a diversity of contexts (countries/regions but also different industries and types of organizations) and leadership of a more or less diverse employee population deserve further attention from academia. Indeed, institutional-level phenomena and the interplay with other levels of analysis can help get a better understanding of leadership and its (lack of) diversity (Cook and Glass, 2013), and contribute to answering calls for research adopting an emic approach (Tatli and Özbilgin, 2012).

With this call, we wish to direct attention to the relevance of diversity and inclusion within leadership studies and invite abstract submissions of rigorous research on diversity and inclusion, which has relevance for leadership practice. The above reflections and questions are only indicative, and submission can expand or deviate from these starting considerations.