E124 – Critical Perspectives on Diversity in organisations (w/ Tom Calvard)

and James.

Hello. This is James, and this is Jane, and here we are again today with another episode of a world of work. Who are we speaking to today, Jane, and what are we speaking

about? Oh, James, I'm really excited. Sorry that sounded really excited, didn't it, so we are talking to Tom Calvard. He is a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh business school, and we're going to be talking to him about diversity and inclusion, specifically taking a critical perspective. And I think it's going to be a really interesting conversation. Yeah,

me too, super looking forward to it. Let's get into it and see what we say. Okay, here we are in the main body of today's podcast, and we've got a really exciting day lined up for us. We've got a great guest. We've got Tom Calvard, who's a senior lecturer in organizational studies and Human Resource Management at the University of Edinburgh business school up here in Edinburgh. So somebody local, which is fantastic, and we're going to be speaking about diversity and inclusion, and specifically, some of the problems in the ways that some of the theory is spoken about and acted on an organization. So again, a subject that's that's dear to both Jane and my own heart in this so very much. Looking forward to it before we jump into the actual content and explore you know this in a bit more detail. Tom, would you be able to introduce yourself to the audience and say a bit about yourself and your background and the areas that you're working on and interested in? Sure,

thanks James, and thanks Jane for having me on the podcast today. It's a real pleasure. I, as James said, you've said there, I sort of based currently at University of Edinburgh, but I started out in psychology at University of Liverpool a long time ago, and then I carried on my studies in occupational and organizational psychology before Edinburgh, I was at London School of Economics earlier in my academic career, and today I'm in the organization Studies Group at University of Edinburgh Business School, where I blend research and teaching interests, as we're talking about today, partly in diversity and inclusion, also in a few other areas around technology, change, management and ethics as well. And most recently, I've, I've been working on a book which is Now, thankfully recently been published by Rutledge, entitled critical perspectives on diversity in organizations. And I continue, I'm continuing to work on projects relating to specific topics within that whether it's LGBTQ employees disabled employees, or employees with different ethnic backgrounds, working in different contexts as well. So I have a variety of ongoing diversity and inclusion research projects. And yeah, that's pretty much me. I'm currently coming to the end of the term as program director for the Masters MSC program in human resource management we have at University of Edinburgh as well.

Brilliant. Well, that's an excellent summary and a really interesting background. And we listeners know we have a bit of a pre chat before we start these. And we didn't touch base on University of Liverpool. I actually went to University of Liverpool, and that's where I did my stuff, so I potentially had some crossover there. We can pick up afterwards. Anyway, back to the DNI piece. If we think about diversity and inclusion, when, when you think about it, you mentioned a couple of strands in your conversation, but when you think and when you talk about diversity and inclusion, what varieties and what diversity do you think about when you're exploring the subject in your research and your work?

Yes, it's a great sort of introductory question, because obviously there are so many and as I was describing my background there, I came into it quite indirectly. So sort of while I was doing my PhD, I was looking at team working, and I was looking at what is still a very interesting topic to me, but quite difficult to write about, in some ways, is empathy. And I was looking at empathy and perspective taking as well, which is a very closely related concept to empathy. You know, the classic idea of standing in someone else's shoes or trying to see the world through their eyes and obviously diversity and inclusion comes up in a vague way in relation to all sorts of other topics, indirectly. And so I started making these connections with empathy and teams perspective, taking in diverse teams. And I probably started off with quite a. Tame or peripheral forms of diversity, like sort of what people's functional backgrounds were, and then that, you know, you quickly start looking at demographics, and then you really get into the heart of things like race and gender as well. So, but, but, I mean, the the diversity and inclusion space today, and this is what, what can be annoying when you're writing a book, you end up using the word diverse too much. But obviously there is diverse differences within that, and I'm sure that's something that may well come up again in the kind of discussion we're having today, because some of the strands that I mentioned, like working on disability, for example, in in organizations, it's such a specific form of diversity that some, sometimes in other quarters, doesn't really get mentioned at all. So you know. But then, if you look at the equality legislation we now have, I think it's nine or 10. I should know if it's nine or 10. I think it's nine, actually, but protected characteristics, and so, you know, we have all these protected characteristics, and all of those are important topics when it comes to diversity and inclusion, I think. And so often, you know, you start your conversation around some sort of version of that. But then I think you you have to drill down a bit more into what aspects of DNI you're going to look at and in what ways brilliant.

I like the reference you had there to empathy at the beginning. It reminded me of something totally tangential and off script, which is, if you apparently, if you look at the sort of contagion of yawning within people, particularly, you know, for dog yawns, people will yawn, but the frequency that's linked, to some extent, the level of empathy that that person holds, more generally, that's a good echo. I'm pleased to hear that everyone agrees with that. So I just think that's interesting.

Well, it's surprising. It does. It's surprising it doesn't get talked about more, and particularly this idea of perspective taking, which is sort of languishing in my PhD a little bit from a long time ago, but I did, I did write and got quite it's a very psychological topic as well. There's a lot of great psychology evidence there. And actually, you know, in terms of diversity training, when you have diversity training that actually uses perspective taking interventions and techniques, that's where some of the best evidence is, you know, for actually changing people's attitudes and behavior, or at least, the evidence on perspective taking types of exercises is much stronger than on some of the more popular interventions in organizations, like unconscious bias training, for example, which is a bit of a, you know, bit of a prominent one and a bit of a controversial one. At the moment, you see a lot about unconscious bias training, but nobody really talking as much, anywhere near as much about, like, perspective taking and empathy based approaches? Yeah, really

interesting. I'd love to jump onto that in a second, if we just step back for a little second and think a little bit more about you and your interest in this. What's your driver behind being interested in this subject? What is it about the diversity and inclusion world that has drawn you to it or led you to be active in it as an important area?

Yeah, so I talk about this in my book, in the sort of introduction, a little a little bit, because you have to, you sometimes have to stop, stop and think about it, because it has, it has evolved, as I say, with my PhD, it was very gradual and indirect. I was kind of interested in in teams and and different points of view within within teams. And you have to bear in mind that was, you know, about 15 years ago now. And so it was before, you know, other things that have happened since around gender and race in the 21st century, perhaps. But it's, it's an evolving thing for me. You know, each project can be looking at a very different group of people, a very different set of issues. So it's evolved depending on the kind of participants in my research, the people that I've maybe been interviewing or drawn to doing research with, and absolutely the people on the research side who I've collaborated with as well. So you know, if some if you're working with another academic and they're very angry about something, ironically, that's usually a great starting point for a research project. So often it's been listening to people that I've that I've been collaborating with as researchers, or people in organizations that I've been interviewing and participating with, but because I research other things, I'm always kind of sort of scrambling for a common thread to my research, because I do look at organizational change and ethics and technology and other kind of sort of complex forces in organizations. That have psychological and social impacts on people. I guess I've always been interested in the idea that organizations struggle to deal with different boundaries, different viewpoints, and how they kind of make sense of those. And so diversity feeds into that sort of sense that you know that there are complex forces beyond organizations that kind of organizations have to sort of try and pay attention to and make sense of. But when I started my PhD, I also had my mind blown by this idea that there was so much sort of disagreement in the world and people just fundamental. There was a lot of psychology studies in the 1970s and probably before that as well, where you would have people watch the same piece of footage, watch the same football match, and have completely different versions of what they'd seen. So I was very interested in all these different points of view and how at odds with one another they could be. And so what do you do with all that difference? How do you organize it? How do you make sense of it? And probably from that quite indirect, privileged beginning into those sorts of interests I've become increasingly engaged with, probably what's more familiar to people at the moment, which is, you know, to do with social justice, to do with activism, to do with inequality. And I think, you know, in the 21st century, there's been so much that's that's happened there, even in the last few years. So it's evolved a lot, I think, but that that's maybe some insight into how it's, how it's evolved for me. Anyway, yeah, it's fascinating. And it crosses

over into, you know, sense of self and philosophy and reality and all this, you know, our constant effort as individuals to make sense of this confusing thing that is our existence and how that shapes the interactions that we have, and the fact that work sits within this systemic, interwoven mesh of individuals in the world. So I completely, completely get where you're coming from with this. If we you touched a little bit there on some of the approaches to DNI that we see within some of our organizations, and you spoke about things like unconscious bias training, and you also talked a little bit about some of the more empathy based interventions that you see, I guess, if we're going to sort of prod this, if we're going to prod, you know, a typical or conventional approach to DNA at the minute, what do you think some of the challenges are around the ways that we as organizations and people working in this space look to address the issue of diversity or lack of inclusion in our organizations? What are we doing wrong? Or what's not so great about what we're doing? Yeah,

and this is a, it's there's a sort of a tragic element to this, in terms of, you know, where, where minorities feel really let down. But there's also a sort of mischievous element, and it's a juicy topic. There's a lot of critical perspectives on potentially, where organizations go wrong and why they go wrong. And it's, you know, something that the book project i i worked on that I've mentioned is, you know, the title was critical perspectives. And so in each chapter of that book, I was, I was kind of, potentially, not, sort of condemning everything that organizations do, not not that at all, but but certainly opening up things that might be missing or that don't get emphasized at all. I think let me try and break it down into a few potential problems. I think one problem is hypocrisy, for example, that's a topic I find very interesting in its own right, actually, but that organizations, they do something but, and they pat themselves on the back for it. But actually it's, it's quite rhetorical, or it's, it's quite inadequate in relation to other things that the organization is doing, or perhaps its overall strategy or or other things that have happened in the organization. So I think hypocrisy is, is what is one problem that, you know, there's a there's a lot of talk at the moment about being woke, for example, and obviously businesses are quite ambivalent, but then a lot of them sort of jump on that bandwagon trying to sort of get a quick win maybe, or do something that will distinguish them in that way. And I just don't think that's a good idea. I think it, you know, it's really you risk all these problems of getting a backlash to what you're doing, or or an element of hypocrisy, or maybe just that you're taking a bit of a band aid kind of solution to something that's almost quite disrespectful, given that it's such a systemic, serious problem. And maybe these are things we'll come back to when we look at practice again as well, but also just putting the minority who's in. Inclusion you're trying to address at the heart of the design and implementation of what you're trying to do. It sounds so incredibly obvious, but a lot of stuff in disability, for example, isn't disability LED or disability first. It's, you know, not necessarily designed for those people, by those people, with those people. And if I could maybe just make one more point on this, I think we touched on it at the beginning, when we're chatting about the topic, but just trying not to talk about diversity too broadly, so that it's almost like a smoke screen. Now, title of my book has diversity in it, and it mentions diversity a lot, but I'm often at pains to to get really specific about context and examples. So I think you've really got to take a look at your context and not not try and do everything in a sort of generic wishy washy sort of way, but to actually dig down into some specific issues. And of course, things like Black Lives Matter have forced organizations to do that. They forced them not to hide behind a broad diversity label, but to actually talk specifically about race. So yeah, those are some, some general thoughts on that. I think that's

that's really helpful. I've got a bit of a sort of build question on that. Just something that was in my mind while you were speaking a little while ago, I read about an organization in the States. I think they were called Better Angels, or better angels, going back to an Abraham Lincoln quote, talking about overcoming some of the separatism that we had, that the US had as a nation after the Civil War. But this organization looks at basically dealing with political separation within groups, and some of the interventions that they use feel very much in the empathy type of space. So what they'll do is they'd get a group of Democrats and Republicans together, and they'd get them to and I'd get them to do things like tell the story of the other person. So, you know, really sitting in you'd say, getting a Democrat to sit in the mindset of a Republican for a little while and then say, well, this is who I am as a Republican. And then they'd get things like, you know, as a Democrat, what do you think some of the views that are held about you by the Republicans are, and what's for germ of truth and who you are in there, what's for reality of what you want to be, and really trying to get people to jump into that different perspective. And what I've said is that when it comes to this depolarization, that getting people to look at things from those different perspectives and really connect with the other people. That's been a helpful approach. Is that something? But do you see anything akin to that? That's sort of like a family therapy approach? This is me well out of my comfort zone, by the way, but my sense is that's a sort of family therapy approach to de radical or depolarization. Do you see those types of things in the DNI space at all? No,

not really. It's the short answer. Again, there's been this huge focus on unconscious bias training, whether or not it's people critiquing it or sort of maybe advocating for ways of improving how it's delivered. There's been so much focus on that that a lot of other approaches get short shrift, I think. And another example of this is supplier programs, which I was planning to mention at some point, but going to another organization who whose real purpose is to supply minorities from disadvantaged backgrounds or some particular representational issue, and they can help you kind of build a pipeline or recruit people. Maybe it's more of a US term, actually supplier programs, but it might be, you know, people who've been in prison or been in the armed forces, or even just people who do happen to come from a particular background. And I think sometimes those approaches can be a bit more genuine and lead to more genuine kind of improvement of representation and inclusion. But sometimes it's these big stories we see in the media about, you know, Starbucks sending everyone on unconscious bias training for the afternoon, because there's been an incident that seemed to get the most attention. To go back to your point about perspective taking. There isn't as much businessy organizational research or mention of this stuff as you say. It's quite therapeutic. A lot of it comes from sort of experimental psychology. But I think the evidence we do have is quite convincing that that it leads to leads to more genuine, sustained changes in inclusion, promoting behaviors. I've seen it occasionally in sort of corporate branding, where, I think is it Carlsberg or some lager or beer drinks manufacturer, probably not the only company to do this. They've had kind of advertising campaigns where. They've sat customers or or stakeholders in front of the camera who are from completely different, polarized perspectives, and kind of created a sort of safe space for them to, you know, try and understand one another, not always totally successfully, even on camera, but with some modest measure of success, and they've used it as a sort of marketing tool, but I think organizations could be doing a lot more in that space.

Thanks for that. I think I'm also going to just mention to the audience that we did an episode with I think it was Emma Walker from autocon, who is probably the closest we've spoken to an organization that's a little bit like the supplier model you talk about, and they work with corporate organizations to place consultants, autistic consultants, and they it was really interesting conversation, and probably picks up some of, hopefully, the issues that you've just shared. And the other thing I was just going to add, James and I have talked quite, I think, candidly on the podcast about organizations hoping for an answer in training. And I think one of the things we see in unconscious bias, certainly talking to some of the guests we've had before, is that that sort of hope that an organization can just pay for training course and it'll fix the problem they've got, rather than understanding sort of the types of interventions and the time before and after and how those things will work out. So it made me smile when you said that, because it's something we've talked about a couple of times. I want to, I'm just going to move us on a little bit. You talk in your book about something, you use the phrase moving beyond the business case, I think. And I was wondering if you just start by explaining a little bit about what you mean by the business

case. Yeah, that's a big question. Actually, it's fascinating because it's like, yeah, how do you define it? So I think it's probably one of the most the chapters of the book that stands out the most, because it is such a well used phrase. And I I talk about, you know, well, for me, I think there's a narrow way of defining it, which is, particularly what I'm suggesting we need to move beyond, which is, you know, trying to prove some concrete, almost scientific link between diversity and some financial measure of organizational performance, so sales, revenues, profit, whatever, whatever it is, there's been an inordinate amount of attention in the 1990s onwards on that it's it's been A sort of obsession, I think, in some of the research and practice around diversity management. And then I think there's a broader, more indirect version, which I have much less of an issue with, actually, but it's almost like you're not really talking about the business case anymore, which is just that it's, it's good for the organization diversity in all sorts of indirect ways, through, you know, customer relationships, stakeholder relationships, the reputation of an organization and its long term kind of sustainability. But the problem I have is, is this, I just don't think it's a particularly appropriate or fruitful starting point to start out by obsessing over trying to prove that diversity is good for a business financially. Some people have written that, you know, this is a bit of a futile quest and and then in that chapter of the book, I get into other, what I call other cases for diversity, the legal case, the moral and ethical case for addressing diversity. And there may well be other variations on these kind of arguments around the case for addressing it, for social for social justice, because if you look at diversity performance, and you and I pity anyone who would try to do some sort of evidence based review of the business case, because you'll find all sorts of things. You know, you'll find curvilinear patterns where hardly any diversity is bad, but too much diversity is also bad. What do you do with that? What do you do with that kind of evidence? And you'll find a lot of research that maybe just doesn't find any relationship that diversity is under the conditions and the measurements used and the design of the research. It's neither good nor bad in this particular version of the relationship that they're that they're trying to test. So I think all this like, is diversity good for business? Is it good for business? I think that's what we we need to move beyond but of course, you will still see, you know, vast amounts of of PR case studies and consulting work trying to celebrate that. But for me, it feels a little bit 1990s it feels a bit dismissive of of some of the issues that are really going on?

Well, you've managed to pick a topic that James and, I suspect, semi famed for ranting about. So I think I was really interested when I was reading what you said about it. Because I think, I think there's been a real shift in, if you go back really early industrial, you know, at least there was a, there was some. Kind of idea that businesses were meant to be good for their community and were were there to provide work and provide goods and whatever else services they were doing. And I think there's been a really reductive approach to the way organizations exist. And I think I think when you when you played the business case, I think you're effectively saying it's okay to ignore all the other cases. I think that's what you do when you play to your senior, your shareholders and to your board by playing to the business case. Constantly, you're saying, the only thing that matters is our financial success as an organization. And that scares the heck out of me. But on that, what that I mean? It's easy for me to have that opinion. The bit I don't know is, how do we how do we get people to think beyond that very narrow world idea about why they should be engaging diversity, education, how do we get them to move beyond the idea of the business case? Yes,

a really good question. Obviously, the business cases you sort of alluded to there. It's a It's not unique to diversity. And so my idea of a narrow and a broad business case comes also from corporate social responsibility and how diversity and inclusion is a part of that. I mean, I guess one way to go is to look at this broader version of the business case, because even some very critical perspectives would say, you can't just trash the business case, right? You have to, you have to kind of work with it, to try and challenge it from within. It's, you know, because otherwise you will get a backlash from people who are trying to run a business with limited resources, and they want to sort of stay away from societal issues that they don't see as within the purview of their of their business. So I alluded to Black Lives Matter earlier, and me too, and things like that. And I think when it when you know when these things happen, and it has, like a big ripple effect on on stakeholders and a sense of real crisis, I think exposing people to the seriousness of those kinds of things is quite is one way to maybe shock people into into really engaging with it more, and just expose them. And then I suppose there are more benign ways, perhaps or less immediate ways that I look at in other chapters of the book, which is looking maybe at the history of the business context that somebody is coming from looking at issues of multiculturalism in the different locations of the business, and just trying to broaden the horizon a bit to show, to show that the biggest stakeholder, stakeholder picture, I guess, one more suggestion, which is quite big when you get away from trying to statistically or scientifically prove the business case, if you take a different, more qualitative direction, which is something I make quite a lot of in the in the book, you get this one. I think it's a wonderful phrase, although it perhaps is a little bit overused in in qualitative evidence, which is you start to look at the lived experience of people, and this is why it's so great when you interview people, because their voice comes through. They're not just a demographic figure. And they talk about, you know, what a day in the life of their organization as a minority is really like? And I think when you expose people to that you can't really unsee it. Once you've seen it, it's quite hard. Depending on how it's presented, it's quite hard to unsee that. And so I think we've probably got a long way to go, but I think exposing people to this business society relationship in as many ways as we can will hopefully broaden the idea of the business case until it until it comes into contact with some of these other cases.

Yeah, something struck me as you were talking, and I, I'm going to ask and you, it may not be something that you necessarily have a strong opinion on, but we talked at the very beginning about protective characteristics, which are enshrined in law, certainly in the UK and obviously the US has got significant education around around this topic as well. What do you think about how we decide, or how we decide what's going to help us move forward most? About the difference between things that will be require legal compliance versus changing behaviors and winning hearts and minds. Because I I always think about when I think of progressive or what would be perceived, certainly as, in the last 20 years or so, as progressive issues, I always see that debate between, do we need to, do we need to go down the road of convincing our society that need to change their laws and their regulations, or do we need to get everyone to change from the inside and win hearts and minds?

Yeah, I do have an answer to this. I don't know again whether you agree. I'm a bit of a notorious fence sitter on this kind of stuff. But there are, there are definitely people on on both sides of that debate. There are some very and I think with good reason in. In some of the ways they put it across, there are some very critical voices that say there's nowhere near enough progress being achieved without more punitive legislation or more tightly strict, regular regulation and fast and you know, we do see that echoed in things like climate change as well. You know, it's very urgent societal issues. But then, as you've alluded to in your question, there's this other side as well, which is that, you know, lots of heavy regulation is, is not, you know, necessarily going to to address the sort of informal, cultural, institutional aspects of it, of it, either. So I've wrestled with this a lot. I think maybe to dodge the question slightly, I would say that I think law, law and regulation have a bit of an image problem. You know, they are seen as a bit, you know, the kind of boring things that organizations find costly. They find them like red tape. But, and I think that, I think that's a great shame, because a lot of the things that get legislated for and then sort of consolidated and maybe forgotten about slightly, actually contain a lot of important information. So if you look at the 2010 Equality Act, and it's there's some good discussion in HR, people who are interested in employment law, for example, who really revisit that, and they look at the different types of discrimination and the things that are included in that legislation. And a lot of it is giving case examples. It's talking about boundaries of acceptable or unacceptable behavior. It gives you clues of things that can be very costly for the business. So I think you know, actually looking at law and regulation just for learning purposes and for trying to try to introduce some more genuine reflection is, is quite a useful thing to do. But I don't have a magic answer on how hard or soft the regulation should be, and I do tend to sit on the fence a little bit I think, you know, we talked about supplier programs before, I think kind of stakeholders need to put pressure on each other and work together to try and create a more equitable space for their industry and their and their sector, and to try and push each other to do that. Because I think heavy handed regulation on its own. You know, I'm not necessarily sure that's going to work. I don't think a complete absence of regulation works either. And so I do sit on the fence a little bit. I think we need regulation that's flexible, smart, engaging, and that stakeholders can work together on, including governments, of course, and trade unions and other stakeholders as well.

Yeah, and I, I think you should, from my perspective on a very much a one person perspective, I think you should sit on that fence hard. Because actually, I, you know, having seen some of the changes in the sector that I'm from, nonprofit sport, I just don't think you can do one without the other. And I also think if you go too hard on one without one, in contrast with the other. I just, I think you end up with a problem either way. So, yeah, we will. We celebrate fences, particularly if they're doing it with sort of confidence and they're wearing it proudly. I guess I just wanted to ask your thoughts about you. Obviously, you sit in quite a unique place and that you're an academic, but it's with a very practical subject that we can observe organizations and businesses all the time. And from your perspective, where does di diversity and inclusion work need to go, in practical terms, next? What? What do they need to do to better achieve the goals? Because since I know there has been progress, and there clearly has, we can see that from from lots of the the ways our societies work now, but at the same time, some of the problems within di and some of the specific either protected characteristics, or some of the specific industries, there is a really sticky problem there where they're really not seeing a shift. And I guess, what

do you think they need to do?

Yeah, so I possibly mentioned some of these things briefly earlier, but I think James was asking about practices. So I think one, one standard starting point is you sort of have this long laundry list, as I sometimes call it, of diversity and inclusion practices. You know that we're doing this, we're doing that. We're doing unconscious bias training. We have a committee. We have a role. We have and that, to me, is quite an uninspiring starting point. I think it's necessary and it's important. But again, I think it's about, you know, the design and implementation of what you're trying to do. I think part of the answer is context. And again, I talk about this a lot in the book, like, if you're, you mentioned non profit sport there. I mean, that's a fascinating context that engages me. I want to know, like, what's going on in that context. I don't just want to talk about diversity generally. And so I have a chapter in the book, for example, on institutions. And so there you're, it's like, what's the institutional. Role of your context. You know, if you're in a police organization, there's, you know, a unique context there with decades of issues with institutional racism, you probably better, you know, be look, definitely be looking at that. And then, and then it may be that other contexts are completely different. So I think get into your your context, and don't try and do everything all at once or in a generic way. I think we've touched on another issue, which is Don't, don't go in too heavily, on, on, on a sort of one note approach, and often that will be the business case. So if you come in trying to get some sort of quick win on the business case. I think you you really risk getting people's backs up a bit. They're a bit wary. They feel it's superficial, it's rhetorical. There's only lip service being paid to diversity and inclusion. And as I also mentioned, put the put the put the minority at the heart of what you're doing. I think sometimes there's a point about, you know, the majority needs to be involved as well and sort of sponsoring whatever change it is, but, but have have the minority voice at the heart of what you're doing and really listen to the specific lived experiences of the people you're you're trying to help, and again, two examples of this in my own research are disabled people you know, who are working and they they're often not involved in the design of disability policies, which are often written in quite a bureaucratic or or a way that just has no recognition of the sort of disabling influences on their employment. And another one is LGBTQ inclusion, which obviously, you know, it's a tricky acronym, and I've been doing some research with bisexual employees, so just the B in the LGBTQ plus acronym, and you know, for them, a lot of the the approaches in DNI are sort of woefully inadequate, and they are delivered by people, often in quite a homophobic way or in a way that is is totally superficial and inappropriate. So I think a lot of what I recommend or discuss or advise is, is getting past kind of superficial approaches that, even as they're being designed and implemented, aren't particularly inclusive.

I guess, just to follow up questions that that I was thinking about is, I know that you, you also teach on you mentioned the HR aspect of organizations, and I guess I just wanted to know, what do you think the biggest sort of question stroke problems are for HR people working in organizations who are HR managers or practitioners around DNI, what like, what are consistently, the things you hear from the practitioners in the HR world that are saying, Look, this is what's stopping us from being able to do better work in this space. It's a really good question, and I've probably spent

a fair amount of time going straight to the minority employees rather than HR, per se, I think sometimes HR gets a bit of a tough time of it, because they're not, you know, if it's a large organization, they're maybe not in the picture very directly. You know, there's a policy, or there's maybe some separate people working on diversity and inclusion initiatives. I guess probably that, if I had to pick, like, one main thing, it's, which is common to many areas of HR and diversity and inclusion is no exception. It's, it's sort of how they, they cascade the right kind of HR in partnership with the employees. They through the line manager relationship, right? So this is such a common cliche and in HR discussions that you know, there's, there's a problem with bad line management in terms of translating policy or or, you know, employees are still having negative experiences because the HR isn't being translated very adequately by their by their manager. So you get this kind of there's a search for maybe where things have gone wrong in these connections between HR line managers and employ employees in the in the organization, I don't, I don't, I don't bash HR, but I think sometimes they don't come, you know, they don't come across very clearly in the diversity and inclusion picture. It just depends on the on the context. And again, I'd go back to this stakeholder point. You know, sometimes it's being picked up by the employees themselves. Sometimes there are dedicated DNI positions out with HR. And sometimes, of course, there's, there's huge trade union agendas and investments in diversity and inclusion agendas. So. So again, I think you've got to, you know, it's quite dispersed. So I think HR are kind of maybe playing a particular role, but they, they maybe need to get out of their silo. And I have a chat chapter in the in the book on sort of struggles for change. And I think it's, it's that there's lots of pockets of activity going on, sometimes in HR, sometimes disconnected from HR, and so it's trying to to join the dots with, with, with some of those. And of course, some of it now is spilling over into activism and people getting involved in in political grassroots movements within, maybe slightly within, but also beyond their organizations. So I think the challenge HR has got is kind of not just writing policies, but kind of plugging into that, that bigger conversation and that bigger landscape. There's

a lot of brilliant stuff. And I was going to go on and talk a little bit more about some of the sort of practicalities, but I think we've covered a lot of it. So I've got a couple of other things that I just want to touch on before I wrap us off. One thing that I did just want to touch on and get your thoughts on a little bit is when we speak about things like the legislation and regulation as tools to work within the changes to the equality and inclusion space. One of the things that I'm passionate about, and that I see is connected to, this is the entire world of responsible business. And I'm just wondering where you see that relationship, and where, where you see the role of business being, or the role of, you know, organizations being in helping to shape and shift some of this from, from that perspective, do you see more of a role of accountability sitting within organizational leaders to change for purpose of organization, to support this type of thing. More broadly. What's your view on that? No,

it's a tough one, because I think you get into this huge, quite bigger space of corporate social responsibility, and it's not you know, and I have some interest and experience with business ethics and corporate social responsibility. But I'm not, you know someone who spent their career looking at that. I'm always a bit bemused at how much research there is on corporate social responsibility, but it sometimes seems to be revisiting the same kind of tensions. And to use the dreaded word capitalism, I think a lot of it is around these tensions in capitalism. And so, you know, obviously there are fundamental, quite polarized points of view about what certain sectors of our economy are for. And, you know, the centrality of the profit motive has always been there. I think things are slowly changing. You know, there's a lot of talk about this kind of triple bottom line of you know, fulfilling your economic profit motive for your shareholders, but but also taking on social and environmental challenges as well. But often those things come into come into tension, and so it does go back in a way, to what we were talking about in relation to going beyond the business case, it is a it is a bit of a a bit of a struggle. And funnily enough, when you look at measures of Corporate Social Responsibility across all sorts of things, whether it's charity and philanthropy or climate change, diversity, inclusion is one of the easier ones that organizations can kind of get, get a tick in the box, you know, they can have a few women on their board, and they can, they can do that. Some of the other ones are much more societal. And I, you know, it's not something that all businesses will feel able or motivated to do on their own. And you, you get into these other spaces where you're talking about capitalism and you're talking about democracy as well, and you know, who's actually deciding what organizations are for and in whose interests they're being they're being run. I certainly think there's a lot of appetite for this in 21st century politics, you know, and it's a lot of grassroots appetite, and I think this is why we're seeing and even in the course of when I was writing this book, which was mind blowing compared to when I started out, you know, you had the me too, Revelations. You had the Black Lives Matter, revelations coming through. And that was after I started planning and writing the books. I was like, my god, you know. And I think some of that is, is a sign of what's to come, that there is this appetite for putting pressure on the business, society relationship, and we're also seeing it in the technology space as well. And that comes back to divert there's a whole different book. But you know, if we have algorithms and artificial intelligence, you know, in whose interests are they going to be run? Who's designing them? And we're already seeing this, this great work pointing out how technology can make gender and racial inequalities worse, even worse. Yeah, fascinating. I

just want to give a quick shout out to something well. So we're at this sort of conversation with something called the Better Business Act. If anyone's in a business and interested in being a bit more involved in this kind of stuff, a better business Act is a group looking to change and look to have UK companies act rewritten, so that it sort of embeds aspects about triple bottom line from articles of association onwards in UK legislation, which is just something to think about. I've got one other question I'm going to ask you, and again, it's not on script, so genuinely, we don't need to cover it if we don't want to. But I just want to explore a little bit closer to home, when we think about the role of the business school and creating leaders of a future that go out and shape our organizations. What do you think the role of a business school is, and how do you think business schools as an industry are doing in terms of shaping the, you know, the source minds that go into organizations to impact our sense of inclusivity and inclusion and diversity in those in those organizations?

Yeah, really, really on the nose question, because universities are organizations. And again, in my book, I talk about, you know, really just thinking as broadly as possible, that organizations include everything from sweatshops to corporate skyscrapers, is really and everything in between, you know. So there's not, not a monopoly on what an organization is, and we need to think about non traditional forms of organization. Universities aren't no exception. We're quite an unusual public, private, hybrid kind of institution. You know, some of what universities and business schools do is to, you know, to try and engage and create a special space for positive social change, but also a lot of what we do is pulled in other directions around student fees and the managerial processes of running a university in a business school. And there's a lot of controversy there too. There's a lot of lively debate. There. Are we doing enough, I definitely think not, I but I think there's a lot of great work going on now. There have been calls to decolonize business schools, so to stop teaching business solely in terms of white, Western European versions of of knowledge and the best way to to run businesses and economies. So there's been a lot of calls there, and there's been a call to imagine. And this is the final chapter of my book, actually, so it's a good question. Talk about, I talk about business education there, and I talk about, you know, how we need to help future generations of leaders and people studying business to imagine more diverse futures that you know work better. And part of that is, you know, when we have guest speakers, when we look at case studies, making those more inclusive and non traditional and challenging as well. And you know, not just teaching Harvard Business, Big Blue Chip kind of case studies about the business case for diversity, but actually looking at what nonprofits, cooperatives, trade unions, and all those other things and things that are going on in the global south and across supply chains as well, and really just opening up our curricular and our impact to those, to those sorts of those sorts of influences, and there are a lot of great scholars engaging with that, but there's a bit of a bit of a conflict there as well. In terms of the future of business schools, there's a lot at stake.

being pretty open about that. It feels like there's a lot at stake. It feels like it's a really privileged position to be in in the, you know, the shaping of the education of future leaders. So thanks for engaging that. I think just in the interest of time, we're going to draw the conversation to a close just before we finish up. Though, could you share a little bit with people about how they could learn more about you, learn a little bit more about your work, maybe where they could get the book and say a little bit more about the title of a book again as well.

Please. Yeah, thanks. So probably the best way to just get in touch with me is to look me up and email me at my University of Edinburgh business school email address. Google Tom Calvard, C, A, L, V, A, r, d. It's quite an unusual name, so find me relatively easily. The book was published by Rutledge at the end of 2020, right at the beginning of this year, spilling over into that as well. It's called critical perspectives on diversity in organizations. And you know it is, it is priced at an academic book price, but the e book price is much more reasonable also, as I'm a non profit type of person, that's the role I'm in to a large extent. I've also, for my sins, made a solo podcast where I discuss the each chapter of the book. And you know, that's absolutely free to access and listen to, and I've had, thankfully, some supportive and encouraging feedback on that, and that's available, I think, almost everywhere people can get. Podcast. So if you look for the title of the book or my name, you'll find that that podcast, which is instant and freely available as well. And yeah, you can find my research papers online through Google Scholar, through searching there as well, and not all of them, or as many as I'd like to be, but a fair few of them are open access, so even if you're not at a university, you can download the final PDF version absolutely freely and share it freely as well, which is a really nice thing to be able to say when you've published a piece of research these days. And yeah, and sometimes I blog and write for psychology and HR media as well. So you may see some pieces there. And I guess the other obligatory thing to say, or but please feel free to, is to follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn on social media. I think Twitter I'm at Tom Calvard, and then again, just searching for my name on LinkedIn will bring up my page on there as well,

fabulous, and we will share some most details when we release this podcast. So it's just time for me to say thank you that was really excellent. Thank you very much for taking the time and sharing your knowledge. Anna, thank you for me too. Thanks for having me. Thanks for all the great questions.

Okay, so that was our conversation with Tom, and you are back in the room with myself and Jane. Jane, did you have any takeaways you want to reflect on based on that conversation, or

so many, but I'm going to stick with the business case one, because I think it's really interesting, and I think I really liked the way Tom talked about I guess, I guess sometimes I get quite frustrated about the business case. And I think his point is really valid, that we need to wear that lightly, but also recognize that it's it's understandable how it's evolved, but we need to challenge it and look at all of the other cases. And I think he talked about the moral and ethical, but also the legal and and some of the community aspects of it. And I think, I think that's really important to think about how many different cases we can draw on in order to make the case.

Yeah, I think there's some some good stuff in there. I've got a couple I'm gonna actually sort of reflect back on just really briefly, each of them. The first one that I really liked was his referencing at the beginning to empathy and sort of empathy based aspects of interventions in this space that resonated with me, probably just because I connect with that type of stuff. Another thing he said was to do with interventions in organizations, and the importance of context, right? And the fact that there isn't really necessarily a one size fits all, and we need to understand the context of our organizations when looking to make really effective change. And the last point that I think is so simple, but it's missed so much is, if we're going to design an intervention for a group of people, whatever that, you know, strand of diversity happens to be, it's great if they can be involved in that process themselves, right? So we shouldn't necessarily impose these things on others, which I think links into, you know, to some extent, crossing over with that piece on empathy and that piece on context. So let people, you know, help understand what's right for them. So I guess those are my points. I