2023 Division PDW Program: Call for Submissions

PDW Chair: Sujana Adapa, UNE Business School 

The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) division, formerly known as Gender and Diversity in Organizations (GDO) division, cordially invites proposals for Professional Development Workshops (PDW) to be held at the 2023 Academy of Management meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. PDW sessions may take place Friday, 4 August 2023 and Saturday, 5 August 2023 during the Annual Meeting.

The theme for this year’s Academy of Management meeting is “Putting the Worker Front and Center,” which is relevant in today’s fiercely competitive environment, with ever-changing global human capital trends mapping continued post-pandemic workplace adjustments. Moreover, the uncertainty around the future of work in a highly digitised and transparent world calls for workers’ voices to be at the forefront, eliciting the need to close the persistent skills gap and the ability to build trusted relationships. Furthermore, the ever-increasing changes to the nature, type and extent of work and workplaces demands that workers and organizations pay closer attention to the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion in order to foster societal justice and equality. The utmost importance of workers, work and organizations cannot be emphasized more as their mismanagement contributes to disconnection, exclusion, inequality, biases and stereotypes leading to precarious employment and unacceptable organizational practices.  We welcome PDWs that expand our thinking, fostering the changes and contemplation of new possibilities. The aim of the PDW program is to provide experiences that promote the personal and professional development of our members – enhancing our members’ knowledge and skills with respect to research, teaching, and practice in the DEI domain. 

The interactive nature of PDWs offers opportunities to energize participants through deep engagement and can even culminate into actionable plans for promoting scholarly and practical activities. Given our division’s longstanding interest in the topic area, we encourage you to think broadly about how the design of a PDW can advance our conversations related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Researchers have been investigating how the post-pandemic environment affect some demographics more than others and how the meaning of work has changed remarkably for workers, leading to uncertainty of future of work. Therefore, we need more scholarly academic work to unpack the unknown to deeply understand the issues that contribute to worker disengagement, organizational dynamics, workplace incivilities and horrendous inequalities. PDWs are a great place to start such important conversations and connect researchers with a wide range of stakeholders, such as managers, business organizations, and the wider society. PDW proposals should be innovative, interactive, inclusive, integrative (fostering connections), developmental, valuable, and provocative. PDWs provide an opportunity to experiment with new ideas and approaches that do not fit within the confines of the regular program, so proposers are encouraged to be bold in workshop design. 

The DEI division is committed to extending our reach – socially, culturally, geographically and across different roles. We welcome proposals designed to facilitate connections and collaborations between our members around the globe. Submissions with an interdisciplinary focus that could be relevant for sponsorship between multiple divisions are especially welcome. 

PDW proposals must be submitted through the Academy of Management’s electronic Submission Center. The Submission Center will open in early December 2022, and the deadline for submissions is Tuesday, 10  January 2023 at 17:00 ET (GMT-5/UTC-5). Earlier submissions are encouraged. If you have questions or would like to discuss a potential workshop idea, please contact the GDO Division’s PDW Chair,  Sujana Adapa.