Margaret Page

Dreaming fairness and re-imagining equality and diversity through participative aesthetic inquiry

This article presents the findings of a participative action research project into how arts-based inquiry can revitalise equality and diversity organisational practices. We demonstrate that the arts-based methodologies introduced enabled participants to explore the meanings they brought to equality and diversity work, by creating a liminal space for learning. We illustrate our findings through an exploration of how participants engaged with the inquiry, the learning about equality and diversity that took place in the workshops and the challenges and opportunities of translating this into change practice in the workplace. The article’s originality lies in its analysis of poetic writings, dreams and visual artefacts created in the context of participative inquiry. Engaging with tacit knowledge extended understanding of the contribution that arts-based, aesthetic inquiry can bring to organisational practice, and more specifically towards restoring the transformative potential of organisational practices to promote equality and diversity.

A visual inquiry into ethics and change

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the practices and findings of a visual inquiry developed by the co‐authors with students in a Business School in the south west of England. The authors are interested in how students engaged with the visual as a practice of inquiry and how this contributed to their development of a critical approach to the concept of ethics in business organisations.Design/methodology/approach – Students visited an exhibition shown as part of the 100 days countdown to the COP15 UN climate change conference, and constructed visual representation of questions and dilemmas related to ethical business practice. The analysis focuses on student presentations, and the discussions that these provoked on the relationship between “business” and “ethical practice”.Findings – Doing co‐inquiry with visual images enabled many students to engage more proactively with ethical dilemmas; to attend to deeply felt values that they were not accustomed to bring into the rule bound environment...

Why not teach “diversity” to public sector managers?

Purpose – 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.Design/methodology/approach – 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 tha...

Two to the power of three: An exploration of metaphor for sense making in (women's) collaborative inquiry

This paper explores how working with metaphors provides a way to explore under the surface dynamics embedded in the practice and processes of collaborative inquiry. We argue that metaphors are a form of presentational knowing and provide a bridge between experiential knowing and propositional knowing. We have surfaced an exploration of horizontal (sibling) and vertical relations using retrospective inquiry. This paper demonstrates the reality, messiness and politics of collaborative research inquiry processes, which tend to be understudied and under-theorized. We are concerned to affirm the value of collaborative inquiry, and at the same time, break some taboos and myths concerning the practice of this form of inquiry, in particular, between and among women. We hope that our work will provide an impetus to further research in this territory.

The good, the not so good and the ugly: gender equality, equal pay and austerity in English local government

Drawing on theories of responsive and reflexive legislation and gender mainstreaming, this article examines the implementation of the gender equality duty and the Single Status Agreement in five English local authorities between 2008 and 2010. Both of these initiatives coincided with the global financial crisis. The data highlights how organizational restructuring following budget cuts resulted in the separation of these two important initiatives between equality and human resource management teams, preventing the duty from reaching the high expectations of the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Women and Work Commission. The reliance on equal pay legislation and the failure to use the gender equality duty missed an opportunity to move away from adversarial forms of legislation and towards more responsive forms of regulation of pay equality.

Relatedness, co-inquiring and imagination: mimetic images of recovery

The purpose of this paper is to explore the methodological challenges of developing a shared academic-student discourse of recovery with undergraduate students in their final year at a British business school. We reflect on the meaning of recovery and how it was negotiated and constructed by the relation established between students and academics, by analysing the visual- and text-based materials they produced and the discussions provoked by these materials using symmetric ethnology and content analysis. The main finding is that students tended to reflect on the real, particularly the social, by creating copies and replicas; we as academics, engaged with this practice with ambivalence. The article concludes that this as an attempt to manage what is felt to be unmanageable, echoing what some authors consider to be a contemporary practice of social justification (Boltanski and Thevenot, 1991) and others consider to be a well established cultural practice (Taussig, 1993). The paper contributes (1) to a better understanding of how relatedness and reflexive inquiry become essential for when teaching and that is linked with academics being able to be openly related with students and their situation; (2) to a better understanding of recovery and how it can be co constructed by academics and students through a share narrative; (3) to a methodology for the analysis of text and images, and its appropriateness for the study of ways in which imagination of the future may be co-constructed; (4) and to an understanding of mimetic objects, replicas and copies. The paper suggests that this approach could have practical implications when applying co inquiry approaches of learning, the understanding of institutional and academic meaning of replication and relatedness in academic context of economic crisis. We conclude that academic relatedness and students-tutors engagement is constructed differently when re considering replication as a way of learning. Preference for copying and pasting found texts and images, rather than creating, served as a way of managing the unknown and of constructing recovery through a process of ‘mimeting’.