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Equality and diversity are generally positioned as special interests, marginal to the mainstream of social policy teaching and learning. The purpose of this paper is to make the case for shifting equality and diversity out of the margins and into the centre of education for mid career public managers, and offers practical methods for doing so.

The current EU policy framework requires public services to go beyond eliminating discrimination, and to promote equality. The paper suggests that while this offers great opportunities for advancing the cause of social justice, the cultures that predominate in public policy may lead to loss and failure. Academic research and experience demonstrate that these changes are highly complex, touching on issues that are integral to our sense of who we are, and how we relate to each other as educators and students, and as enforcers, beneficiaries and implementers of these policies. The paper touches on deeply held emotions, showing that more exploration of appropriate pedagogical methods is needed.

The paper finds that only by raising issues of equality and diversity to mainstream social policy teaching and learning is there likely to be a shift in thinking and commitment that will encourage integration of equality measures within management and leadership of public.

The paper offers three dimensions of pedagogy for enabling public service managers to engage with diversity and the equality agenda within educational contexts, and offers three illustrations of pedagogic processes that support this learning.

While prior research has emphasized the importance of diversity management for the betterment of future workforce, the role of managerial actors in leading the diversity management movement has not been substantiated. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of managers in practicing diversity management and the extent to which inclusive leadership affects employee performance.

The study draws on a large survey data (n=415,696) with a representative sample of employees in federal government in the USA.

The quantitative results show that diversity policy alone predicts performance less strongly for employees of racial minority than for whites. In contrast, the study finds that inclusive leadership predicts performance more strongly for nonwhites.

The embodied approach to diversity management proposed in this paper expands the understanding of diversity management research by exploring the interaction effect between diversity policy and diversity leadership.

The paper is unique in proposing an interaction effect between diversity policy and diversity leadership in managing diversity.

Previous studies in the literature surprisingly neglected to take into account the role of leader behavior in managing diversity. As the study shows the significant moderating role of diversity leadership in diversity management, organizational leaders are encouraged to critically assess and provide training for those team leaders and middle level managers to promote diversity in the workplace.

This is the first empirical study to distinguish and examine the relative impact of diversity policy and inclusive leadership on employee performance in the public sector.

Efforts to make the television landscape more equitable for people of color have been evident both within and outside the industry as early as the 1940s. These advancements made by individuals within broadcasting were an attempt to allow more people of color to get opportunities to prove themselves competent in front of and behind the scenes in broadcast television. While these early attempts were ultimately unsuccessful, they laid the groundwork for future diversity initiative efforts. The purpose of this chapter is to expose the landmark events that introduced changes in diversity policy that eventually resulted from diversity initiatives at NBC despite the racial barriers within its corporate structure. This chapter will show that the trajectory of these early events exhibits that the diversity initiatives seen today resulted from decades of pressure from the government, the press and outside citizen activist groups.

This purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which accreditation of public affairs programs can be a tool to advance social equity, diversity, and inclusion. The paper is presented in the context of the widespread acceptance of the importance of addressing social inequalities in Latin America and the critical role that public policy and public administration can have on advancing these goals.

International and national accreditation standards are compared using content analysis for their reference to social equity and diversity in their standards regarding faculty, students, curriculum content and learning outcomes. The research applies content analysis of key documents and thematic coding.

International accrediting agencies that focused explicitly on programs in public affairs place a much greater emphasis on social equity and diversity than their national counterparts which accredit a full range of programs and institutions. National accrediting agencies assert the value of diversity, but their standards and reporting requirements suggest otherwise.

The research suggests that international accreditation standards have the potential to advance social equity goals more effectively than national standards and that there is great potential to enhance this component of national accreditation standards. Implications for policymakers, accreditation professionals and scholars are identified.

The research is original in its focus on the role of accreditation in promoting social equity and its comparison of national and international standards. Although limited to Latin America and public affairs programs, the research provides a basis for examining similar patterns with respect to other disciplines and professions, and in other regions of the world.

This study aims to examine the effectiveness of three types of diversity policies in improving the numerical representation of ethnic minorities in organizations: the assignment of responsibility for the policy within the organization, tiebreak preferential treatment, i.e. selecting the ethnic minority candidate if the best applicants are equally qualified, and the formulation of target figures.

The dataset consists of 8,283 official reports of Dutch work organizations filed in 2001 and 2002 to comply with the Act Stimulation Labor Participation Minorities (Wet SAMEN). The research is embedded in the broader literature on the underlying motivations for diversity policies and on their potential “symbolic” character.

The analysis suggests that the three diversity policies and ethnic minority representation are correlated. However, the policies do not impact ethnic minority participation rates in the short run.

Future research should also include long‐term effects, actual implementation processes, and the effectiveness of these three policies in combination with other policies and in specific contexts.

Policymakers and strategic HRM practitioners should adopt a long time frame in trying to increase ethnic minority representation. In line with previous research, the study evaluates assigning responsibility within organizations most positively.

These “hard” policies are central to the debate on equal opportunities, employment equity, and ethnic diversity, but few large N effectiveness studies are available.

The purpose of this paper is to identify organisational good practice concerning equality, diversity and sexual orientation and consider the impact of the Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003.

The paper employs in‐depth interviews and a short survey with 154 lesbian, gay and bisexual people (LGB) and 60 interviews with management, trade union and LGB group representatives within 16 “good practice” case study organisations.

Before the introduction of the (SO) Regulations (2003), progress concerning equality, diversity and sexual orientation was made based on social justice and/or business case arguments. The research shows that an inclusive organisational response can benefit both LGB employees and their employers. However, an “implementation gap” between equality/diversity policy and practice on sexual orientation was identified. The introduction of the law as a further driver to equality action in the sexual orientation area has been positive. However, LGB employees voiced concerns about the way in which organisations rely on LGB people to come forward with complaints before tackling problems. Thus, the protection provided by the (SO) Regulations 2003, although welcomed, was not seen as a panacea to tackling discrimination and harassment on grounds of sexual orientation in the workplace. LGB respondents looked to their organisation management to provide proactive leadership on equality/diversity issues and stop treating the sexual orientation strand as the “poor relation” within the organisational drive for equality and diversity.

The paper addresses the gap in knowledge regarding LGB people's perceptions of equality/diversity policy and practice within UK workplaces, providing information on good practice for employers, trade unions, government and LGB campaigning organisations.

This paper aims to shed light on the impact of personalized news media on the shared issue agenda that provides democracies with a set of topics that structure the public debate. The advent of personalized news media that use smart algorithms to tailor the news offer to the user challenges the established way of setting the agenda of such a common core of issues.

This paper tests the effects of personalized news use on perceived importance of these issues in the common core. In particular, the authors study whether personalized news use leads to a concentration at the top of the issue agenda or to a more diverse issue agenda with a long tail of topics.

Based on a cross-sectional survey of a representative population sample (n = 1,556), we find that personalized news use does not lead to a small common core in which few topics are discussed extensively, yet there is a relationship between personalized news use and a preference for less discussed topics. This is a result of a specific user profile of personalized news users: younger, more educated news users are more interested in topics at the fringes of the common core and also make more use of personalized news offers.

The results are discussed in the light of media diversity and recent advances in public sphere research.

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about algorithmic news dissemination. While, currently, much attention is reserved for the role of platforms as information gatekeepers in relationship to the news media, maybe their ability to enable or hinder the audience in discovering and distributing news content is part of what really characterizes their influence on the market place of ideas.

The purpose of this paper is to explore problematisations of urban diversity in urban and integration policies in Denmark and Sweden; the paper aims to show how such policies express social imaginaries about the self and the other and underlying assumptions of sameness that legitimise diverging ways of managing urban diversity and (re)organising the city.

Inspired by anthropology of policy and post-structural approaches to policy analysis, the authors approach urban and integration policies as cultural texts that are central to the organisation of cities and societies. With a comparative approach, the authors explore how visions of diversity take shape and develop over time in Swedish and Danish policies on urban development and integration.

Swedish policy constructs productiveness as crucial to the imagined national sameness, whereas Danish policy constructs cultural sameness as fundamental to the national self-image. By constructing the figure of “the unproductive”/“the non-Western” as the other, diverging from an imagined sameness, policies for organising the city through removing and “improving” urban diverse others are legitimised.

The authors add to previous research by focussing on the construction of the self as crucial in processes of othering and by highlighting how both nationalistic and colour-blind policy discourses construct myths of national sameness, which legitimise the governing of urban diversity. The authors highlight and de-naturalise assumptions and categorisations by showing how problem representations differ over time and between two neighbouring countries.

The chapter intervenes in the debate among scholars of legal impact about the extent to which law can change society. Reformers, aims are frustrated when targets of law respond with resistance to court decisions, especially where mechanisms to enforce case law are weak (Hall, 2010; Klarman, 2006; Rosenberg, 1991). Even when law’s targets abide by a law, however, other important studies have demonstrated that organizations can leverage ambiguous language to craft policies in compliance that further their aims (Barnes & Burke, 2006; Edelman, 2016; Lipson, 2001). This chapter examines a case in which a state constitutional provision banning affirmative action was written in relatively unambiguous language and one of its targets announced its intention to comply. Through extensive interviews with University officials, this chapter examines the University of Michigan’s use of financial, technological, and political resources to follow the language of the law while still blunting its impact. These findings suggest that to understand law’s impact on society, we need to reconceive compliance and not only take the clarity of the law and its enforcement mechanisms into account but also attend to the goals, resources, and practices of the groups it targets.

The paper begins from the premise that the efforts of the two regimes of Cameroon to manage ethnic diversity on the basis of a multicultural public policy, known as “balanced regional development”, constitutes an acute problem, exacerbating rather than attenuating the struggles that are often associated with ethnic diversity in postcolonial states in Africa. The purpose of the paper is to examine this public policy in the broader context of the inter‐linkages between ethnicity and politics in Cameroon.

The study rests on a two‐step methodology. First, the authors conducted a review of the conceptual literature around the state‐ethnicity diversity conundrum in postcolonial Africa, especially in terms of struggles for access to state resources and opportunities. Second, the authors used these conceptual insights to ground the historical and critical analysis of primary (newspaper articles, computed statistics from public records, national laws, long‐term unobtrusive observations of everyday inter‐ethnic struggles as a result of the authors' permanent stay in Cameroon) and secondary (local and international publications on the subject) sources.

While these measures of managing ethnic diversity in Cameroon's public sector‐related benefits, such as employment into the country's public service may, in themselves, not be the best approaches to the problem, the main finding of this study is that the greatest obstacle to their potential to yield any serious measure of national integration lies in the tendency for their politicization and capture by those ethnic groups that are more powerful.

The management of ethnic diversities in postcolonial states in Africa is a major development and social policy concern. While most scholars propose succinct analyses of the challenges these may pose for postcolonial nation‐building and conflict‐avoidance, through the notion of a constitutionally grounded “Human Resource Bank” an original policy solution is proposed in this paper that may suit the Cameroonian context and possibly beyond.