Search results

Universities are large, complex and highly hierarchical organisations with deeply engrained gendered values, norms and practices. This chapter reflects on the experiences of two universities in initiating structural change towards gender equality as supported by the TARGET project. A common aspect thereby is the lack of a national policy in higher education and research providing specific support for implementing gender equality policies. The process of audit, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the first gender equality plan (GEP) in each of these universities was conceived as a first step in a long journey, providing a framework for engaging different institutional actors and fostering reflexive, evidence-based policy making. The analysis deals with reflexivity and resistance and seeks to draw lessons from bottom-up and top-down experiences of GEP implementation. It is the result of shared reflection between the GEP ‘implementers’ in the two universities and the team who provided support and acted as ‘critical friends’.

Gender equality plans (GEPs) are currently the preferred approach to initiate structural change towards gender equality in research organisations. In order to achieve structural change, GEPs have to be more than just a formally adopted institutional policy. Effective GEPs lead to a transformation of gendered practices and thus to structural change. This chapter presents the innovative approach developed for an H2020 structural change project and its theoretical background. We argue that due to the dual logic, which characterises academic organisations, the organisational logic and the academic logic, change is a complex endeavour. To deal with this complexity, one of the main functions of a GEP is to provide space and initiate reflexivity at an individual as well as at an institutional level. A theory of change approach supports reflexivity in all stages of a GEP as it ensures that basic assumptions of the institutional change process are questioned and reflected on by the different stakeholder groups involved in the implementation.

Research-funding organisations (RFOs) and research-performing organisations (RPOs) are in a privileged position to significantly reshape the research and innovation landscape – not only by implementing gender equality plans (GEPs) as institutions but also in terms of the relationship and potential impact of these plans on the institutional context in which they are embedded. This paper reflects on the content and methodology of the GEP implementation at two RFOs and one non-university RPOs. Grounded in the knowledge base of each organisation, the analysis provides insights and expert feedback in order to understand to what extent and under which conditions GEPs are a systematic and comprehensive policy in promoting structural change that has a high potential impact on research policy definition and funding. Reviewing the internal assessment phase, the preliminary steps in the design process as well as the implementation and monitoring phase, the analysis detects both the strengths and challenges or resistance connected to external and internal factors as well as the specific strategies that small organisations employ to promote and sustain organisational and cultural change.

One of the urgent questions in the field of diversity is the knowledge about effective diversity practices. This paper aims to advance our knowledge on organizational change toward diversity by combining concepts from diversity studies and organizational learning.

By employing a social practice approach to organizational learning, the author will be able to go beyond individual learning experiences of diversity practices but see how members negotiate the diversity knowledge and how they integrate their new knowledge in their day-to-day organizational norms and practices. The analysis draws on data collected during a longitudinal case study in a financial service organization in the Netherlands.

This study showed how collective learning practices took place but were insufficiently anchored in a collective memory. Change agents have the task to build “new” memory on diversity policies and gender inequality as well as to use organizational memory to enable diversity policies and practices to be implemented. The inability to create a community of practice impeded the change agenda.

Future research could expand our knowledge on collective memory of knowledge on diversity further and focus on the way employees make use of this memory while doing diversity.

The current literature often tends to analyze the effectiveness of diversity practices as linear processes, which is insufficient to capture the complexity of a change process characterized with layers of negotiated and politicized forms of access to resources. The author would argue for more future work on nonlinear and process-based perspectives on organizational change.

The contribution is to the literature on diversity practices by showing how the lack of collective memory to “store” individual learning in the organization has proven to be a major problem in the management of diversity.