Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pfd)

Critical scholars and societal movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #Metoo have been calling for radical transformations to organizations in order to disrupt the way they structurally reproduce inequality and to make them more equitable, diverse, and inclusive (Benschop & Lewis, 2025; Dar et al., 2021; Mir & Zanoni, 2021; Plotnikof et al., 2022; Woods et al., 2022; Zanoni & Van Laer, 2024). While organizations have responded to this call by implementing various Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) programs, they regularly act as a smokescreen behind which inequalities are reproduced (Bogaers et al., 2024; Bourabain, 2021, 2024; Nkomo et al., 2019). 

The lack of radical change despite decades of EDI practice and research has resulted in growing doubt regarding not only the willingness of mainstream organizations to truly organize in an equitable and inclusive way, but also their ability to do so given their embeddedness in a capitalist system that fundamentally depends on the reproduction of interlocking systems of oppression (Armstrong, 2025; Burchiellaro, 2021; Zanoni & Van Laer, 2024). This doubt has only been reinforced by the reinvigorated backlash against, for example, EDI, anti-racism, intersectionality, feminism, and LGBTQI+-rights, which aims at maintaining the status quo and presents even minor steps toward more equity, diversity, and inclusion as “woke ideology,” “identity politics,” or “reverse discrimination” (Bleijenbergh, 2018; Dar et al., 2021; Ng et al., 2025).

Against the backdrop of this growing doubt about and backlash against EDI, this sub-theme aims to explore the possibility of radical transformation toward more equitable, diverse, and inclusive organizations. While critical scholars and activists might advocate for the radical transformation, dismantling, and/or rebuilding of organizations, it remains unclear how this process of transformation could be organized or which strategies might enable it to occur. Moreover, even if we know how radical transformation could occur, it is not entirely clear what truly equitable, diverse, and inclusive organizations might look like, or whether they can exist in oppressive and exploitative contexts. 

A first source of inspiration to understand and envision the potential of transformations is different types of radical social movements or alternative organizations (e.g., cooperatives, collectives, or commons) that aim to prefigure and experiment with transformative forms of organizing. While even in these organizations reproductions of inequalities might occur, they can nevertheless make not only the possibility and direction, but also the difficulties, of transformation visible (Bendl et al., 2025; Zanoni et al., 2017; Zanoni & Van Laer, 2024). However, we might also draw inspiration from “tempered radicalism” (Meyerson & Scully, 1995) and seemingly less radical transformations in mainstream organizations that might set in motion movements toward a new way of organizing. 

A second source of inspiration is traditions of freedom dreaming (Kelley, 2002), abolitionist visions, and decolonial practices, as outlined in critical race and decolonial thought, that demand a fundamental reorientation toward “life-affirming institutions” (Gilmore, 2022) and practices of “world-making” beyond colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal logics. They foreground imagination, collective care, epistemic plurality, and the creation of spaces where marginalized ways of knowing and organizing can guide institutional life. Together with alternative methodologies (such as participatory and art-based methods) and other radical frameworks (e.g., from queer theory, radical feminism, or critical disability studies), such approaches can enable scholars to develop new conceptual pathways to understanding change and transformation and illuminate how we might think, dream, and design organizational futures grounded in justice and inclusion. 

While these frameworks might help us imagine alternative futures of organizing that are liberatory, inclusive, and just, they also compel us to reflect on epistemic (in)justice and the (im)possibility of activist praxis in EDI research. Envisioning alternatives and transforming organizations requires knowledge production that itself does not reflect these same inequalities. From an epistemic justice perspective, our knowledge production is based on onto-epistemological assumptions that privilege certain forms of knowing and oppress others (Bell et al., 2020; Ibarra-Colado, 2006; McDonald, 2017). For example, decolonial scholars have conceptualized this as the coloniality of knowledge: the historical and ongoing dominance of Eurocentric ways of knowing that present themselves as universal, objective, and superior (Mignolo, 2009; Quijano & Ennis, 2000). Ensuring epistemic justice enables the acknowledgment that the research process, especially with marginalized communities, may appear to be very extractive rather than relational in its approach (Hoorani & Mahajan, 2023). Addressing epistemic oppression, then, is not simply a matter of diversifying resources; it is a call to transform ethics, politics, and relationalities of research (Bell et al., 2020; Chowdhury, 2022). 

This sub-theme invites debates on what radical transformation might look like, which pathway can help us get closer toward equity, diversity, and inclusion, how resistance to such transformations can be overcome, and what types of knowledge, academia, or academic work we need to help us get there.

We welcome theoretical as well as empirical papers, qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods which address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• How can organizations be transformed to become more just, inclusive, and equitable? And what are potential pathways to set in motion such transformations?

• How can we conceptualize “radical transformation” within organizations embedded in capitalist, colonial, patriarchal, ableist, cis-heteronormative contexts? 

• What would truly inclusive and equitable organizations look like? And what tensions arise when imagining such futures?

• What insights about justice-oriented organizing can be drawn from cooperatives, commons, collectives, and other alternative organizational forms? 

• How can management scholars practice epistemic justice in the design, conduct, and dissemination of  research?

• What becomes possible in the study of organizing transformation when research centers epistemologies historically sidelined in mainstream scholarship and adopts practices of knowledge co-production, reciprocity, and accountability?

• How can insights from critical race, decolonial, abolitionist, radical feminist, queer, critical disability, ... scholarship unsettle dominant assumptions in organizational theory and open space for imagining alternative futures of organizing? 

• How might internal and external change agents interact, reinforce, or challenge each other in processes of transformation? What is the role of tempered radicalism and incremental changes in a process of radical transformation?
   

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• Bendl, R., Fleischmann, A., & Schmidt, A. (2025). The (in)visibility of diversity in alternative organizations. Journal of Business Ethics, 196, 273–289.
• Benschop, Y., & Lewis, P. (2025). Not just one woman at a time: Re-radicalizing a feminist project at work in a postfeminist era. Human Relations, 78(7), 934–956.
• Bleijenbergh, I. (2018). Transformational change towards gender equality: An autobiographical reflection on resistance during participatory action research. Organization, 25(1), 131–138.
• Bogaers, S., Van Laer, K., & Zanoni, P. (2024). Conditional openness to racio-ethnic otherness: Exploring white employers’ ambivalent self-Other constructions in the everyday work of reproducing whiteness. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 40(4), Article 101364.
• Bourabain, D. (2021). Everyday sexism and racism in the ivory tower: The experiences of early career researchers on the intersection of gender and ethnicity in the academic workplace. Gender, Work & Organization, 28(1), 246–257.
• Bourabain, D. (2024). Racial and gender inequality as a (non) crisis: The discursive strategies of academic-managers in Belgian and Danish universities. Journal of Business Research, 178, Article 114659.
• Burchiellaro, O. (2021). Queering control and inclusion in the contemporary organization: On ‘LGBT-friendly control’ and the reproduction of (queer) value. Organization Studies, 42(5), 761–785.
• Chowdhury, R. (2022). Misrepresentation of marginalized groups: A critique of epistemic neocolonialism. Journal of Business Ethics, 186(3), 553–570.
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• Nkomo, S., Bell, M. P., Roberts, L. M., Joshi, A., & Thatcher, S. M. B. (2019). Diversity at a critical juncture: New theories for a complex phenomenon. Academy of Management Review, 44, 498–517.
• Plotnikof, M., Muhr, S. L., Holck, L., & Just, S. (2022). Repoliticizing diversity work? Exploring the performative potentials of norm-critical activism. Gender, Work & Organization, 29(2), 466–485.
• Quijano, A., & Ennis, M. (2000). Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), 533–580.
• Woods, D. R., Benschop, Y., & van den Brink, M. (2022). What is intersectional equality? A definition and goal of equality for organizations. Gender, Work & Organization, 29(1), 92–109.
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