Type: Research Seminar
Level: Master
ECTS: 6 Credits
Language: English
Class: Weekly (more info below), Monday 10-12 h in room CH 33.1.91
Concept
This master seminar examines diversity management in higher education from an organizational perspective. Universities increasingly address equality, diversity, inclusion, and anti-discrimination through formal offices, strategies, complaint procedures, leadership structures, and support services, yet research shows that implementation remains uneven across institutions and often lacks systematic evaluation. Existing work highlights that higher education institutions frequently adopt diversity and anti-discrimination measures, but evidence on how these policies are translated into organizational practice remains limited, especially beyond narrow intervention settings and beyond gender-focused approaches.
The seminar therefore combines a theoretical introduction to diversity management in higher education with a practical introduction to qualitative organizational research. Students will learn how universities organize diversity-related responsibilities, how equality and anti-discrimination actors define their roles, and how such practices can be studied empirically through semi-structured interviews and document analysis. In qualitative organizational research, interviews provide access to professional interpretations, responsibilities, and implementation experiences, while document analysis helps reconstruct formal structures, policies, and publicly communicated priorities.
The course is designed as a weekly seminar. In the first part, students develop an understanding of key concepts, diversity dimensions, and current debates on diversity management in higher education. In the second part, they learn how to identify a focused research problem, search and review relevant academic literature, derive analytical themes, and develop a semi-structured interview guide. In the final phase, students conduct and analyze a qualitative study centered on organizational actors such as equality offices, diversity units, anti-discrimination offices, or comparable administrative and governance actors. Research on universities increasingly argues for systemic approaches to EDI that connect organizational structures, leadership, measurement, and institutional culture, which makes such an organizational focus particularly relevant.
