Globalizing Diversity? An examination of the Expansiveness and Scope of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Offices in Universities Worldwide

• In Event: Focusing on practice and leadership in university offices and initiatives (II)

Proposal

Much of the literature on organizational developments in academia presupposes the ascendancy of universities as organizational actors (Krücken & Meier, 2006; Ramirez, 2010; Ramirez & Christensen, 2013). Throughout much of their history, universities were associations of professors and students linked in a guildlike fashion with little by way of a distinctive and differentiated organizational backbone (Clark, 2006). With the advent of the age of nationalism, universities were increasingly linked to national cultures and imagined to be the primary vehicles through which these cultures were conserved and transmitted (Readings, 1996). Much of the earlier literature emphasized the primacy of historical legacies and their enduring influence on universities circumscribed by national boundaries. More recent studies, however, recognize transnational influences on universities. They sometimes celebrate transnational influences as blueprints for upgrading universities (Clark, 1998). Other times, they critique these external pressures on universities and the demise of valued distinctiveness (Mazza et al., 2008). What is evident is that universities, in varying degrees, are subjected to transnational standards in addition to their historical legacies. In organizational parlance, university routes are influenced by their organizational roots and the changing rules of the game in the organizational fields within which they are situated.

This paper begins from the premise that global organizational expansion has become a significant dynamic in our world (Bromley & Meyer, 2015; Meyer & Bromley, 2013). What this means is that all sorts of problems are imagined as requiring solutions that involve a lot of “getting organized.” This further means that all sorts of entities are imagined as having expanded capacities to organize successfully. The latter has been analyzed as the social construction of agency (Meyer & Jepperson, 2000). These cultural beliefs have facilitated the rise of goal-oriented entities with strategies for attaining these goals and differentiated structures to facilitate their attainment, that is, organizational actors. Further, organizational actors are posited to be more likely to emerge in a cultural milieu that facilitates an activist and optimistic orientation (Lee & Ramirez, 2023).

Institutionalized efforts to embed diversity at the campus level have been documented in recent years at universities around the world (Baltaru, 2018; Cross, 2004; Kuwamura, 2009; Langholz, 2014; Oertel, 2018, Lee & Ramirez, 2023), and research on the cultural meaning and scope of diversity across different higher education systems continues to evolve (Pineda & Mishra 2022).
Despite a rich literature on the emergence and impact of diversity initiatives on the experiences of underrepresented individuals in US higher education (Antonio et al., 2004;
Bensimon, 2004; Bowman et al., 2016), there is limited knowledge of the presence, framework, and efforts of diversity initiatives in higher education globally.

To this end, an original dataset of a sample of 500 globally oriented universities worldwide is utilized to trace the expansiveness and scope of “diversity-related offices” globally. Following Gavrila et al. (2023), this paper uses the term “diversity-related offices” (DROs) to indicate persistent organizational structures which signal a university’s institutional commitment to diversity, understood broadly, to accommodate wider variations in the nomenclature and scope of such offices around the world. This paper hypothesizes that the presence of diversity offices in universities worldwide are influenced by internal characteristics of universities (e.g., type of university, founding year, resources) and external changing organizational environment such as social movements, legal frameworks, policy decisions, cultural norms, and historical legacies.

Preliminary results find that DROs are most prevalent in countries that have historical legacies of slavery, discrimination, colonization, and apartheid such as the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Unsurprisingly, indigenous groups took the forefront of diversity missions in universities in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Universities in these nations had robust support systems for First Nations, ensuring high retention rates and prioritizing mental health through initiatives like the Indigenous Trauma Recovery Program. Likewise, universities in South Africa have extensive offices of transformation that emphasize anti-colonial epistemologies and efforts to transform education by diversifying curricula. Outside universities in these countries, notions of diversity, equity, and inclusion are mostly framed regarding gender equity in Western Europe.

There is a low prevalence of established DROs in Latin America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and North Africa, and Asia. However, findings suggest that student groups at Latin American universities are flourishing with anti-racism and anti-homophobia initiatives. This bottom-up presence of diversity-related activities contrasts with those in Asia and Middle Eastern universities, where there is minimal presence of diversity-related initiatives and efforts, whether student or university-initiated. Previous studies of diversity offices in the US context (Kelly, 2010) showed how contemporary diversity offices become established often in response to or in conjunction with student organizations or cultural centers. Thus, this paper posits that these efforts may be precursors to a rise of diversity-related offices outside the Western context. When universities in non-Western contexts do have diversity-related activities such as task forces for gender equity or activities and programs around multiculturalism, findings suggest that these universities adopt language around diversity, equity, and inclusion commonly found in American universities.

Author

• Seungah Lee, NYU Abu Dhabi