Project Abstract
Social Justice in Organizational Change (SJOC) is an experiment with intellectual activism. Led by Assistant Professor Kimberly Scott, this project was created to engage scholars, practitioners, students, and agents of change in a collaborative effort to research and re-imagine how we might evolve the practice and study of organizational change to advance commitment to social justice. There are two goals of this project. First is to build a community who can support each other in efforts to promote equity and social justice in organizational change work. We share a commitment to collectivity, collaborative learning, and reflexivity. The second goal is to create knowledge that will foster these change efforts in our field. On our SJOC website, we are publishing An Inclusive Anthology. Before the end of the year, we hope to complete our first four chapters on the following topics: a critical review of the theoretical foundations of organizational change; exploring the systems approach to change; a critical reflection on AGILE with a social justice lens; and, transformational approaches to organizational change.
The SJOC community welcomes new contributors at any time. We invite you to join us if you are interested in exploring any of these questions: How might we critique, disrupt, and re-imagine organizational change to accelerate social justice? Where are racism and other forms of oppression implicitly baked into the dominant theories of organizational change we have been trained in? How might we embed equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice into all aspects of organizational change instead of treating Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) as a separate type of change? In what ways do our experiences with and understanding of DEIJ impact our study and practice of organizational change?
Investigator
Kimberly S. Scott
Kimberly S. Scott, PhD. (she/her) is the executive director of the Master’s and Executive Programs in Learning & Organizational Change (MSLOC/ELOC) at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy, where she also has appointments as Assistant Professor and Associate Dean for Innovation and Program Development. She draws on her undergraduate education in psychology, her doctoral studies in organizational behavior, and her early career experiences in management and consulting to study how people thrive at work and develop into effective leaders. Her research aims to improve workplace environments and practices that foster employee wellness, learning, and success. She also is interested in the narratives that adults create about their work lives, the meaning they draw from them, and the relationship with well-being.