Examining Diversity In Management Scholarship - Is There A Problem?

Authors:

Keywords: DEI, diversity, race, gender, interstectionality, status, stigma

Abstract: Diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) is a field of research that, despite its 50-year history, remains at the margins of management scholarship. If the field of management is to contribute influential research on topics such as bias and discrimination, which have significant organizational and societal relevance, it is imperative to address the issue of the marginalization of DEI research, and how it may be perpetuated in the power structures of academia. We draw on status, stigma, homophily, representative bureaucracy and self-group distancing perspectives to explain and pose predictions on the factors that contribute to the marginalization of research. We examine race, gender and intersectional diversity of authors of articles on DEI topics, as well as in journal leadership teams, at 14 top-tier Management journals over a 20-year timespan, from 2001 to 2021, across five timepoints. We find that DEI research is more likely to be conducted by equity-deserving scholars. While the careers of equity-deserving scholars do not appear to be limited by their choice of research topic, this is not the case for white men who engage in DEI research. The results did not show that more diverse journal leadership influences the amount of DEI research that is published. We discuss the implications of our findings in terms of the advancement of DEI theories.