Chair: Severin Hornung, Franziska Kößler, Maha Yomn Sbaa, Sandiso Bazana, Chiara Corvino, Parisa Dashtipour, Edina Dóci, Luca P. Vecchio, Matthijs Bal
Date: May 21st, 2025
Time: 9:00 – 16:00 (Full-day session)
Price: 80 EUR
Capacity: 50 People
Workshop Annotation:
Integrating the conference theme with trends in socially and ecologically engaged scholarship, this varied and thought-provoking full-day workshop focuses on leveraging ethics and diversity for transforming workplaces and society. The underlying critical and holistic conception of ethics and diversity emphasizes social (inequality, injustice, marginalized groups, segregation) and ecological issues (climate change, environmental protection, academic activism). The workshop constructively challenges current approaches to these topics in work organizations as well as unsustainable, unjust, and unhealthy conditions in academia (e.g., competition, precariousness, burnout), self-reflexively developing alternatives. Interrogating the ethical basis of work and organizational psychology, we problematize prioritization of productivity and performance as well as corrosive consequences of advocating for moral-ethical issues, such as worker health and well-being or environmental sustainability, based on their instrumentality for economic outcomes. Drawing on examples from the literature, we argue that moral grounding of work and organizational psychology in managerial and neoliberal thought traditions is problematic. Together with participants, we reflect on ethical foundations of the discipline while imagining alternatives. Similarly, we critically interrogate (lacking) diversity with regard to geographical concentration of knowledge production and ideological hegemony of the Global North, including ethnocentric theorizing and continued dominance of WEIRD (white, educated, industrialized, rich, “democratic”) samples. This homogeneity fosters the generalization of assumptions and concepts from privileged knowledge workers (e.g., playful work design, engagement, thriving), despite limited suitability for the hardship and suffering of other groups of workers, especially the majority in the Global South. We self-reflexively discuss to what extent work and organizational psychology as a field facilitates or impedes demographic, social, and intellectual diversity, equity, and inclusion (e.g., promotion, publication, funding). Our goal is to revive the critical core of ethics and diversity, which have been transformed into empty signifiers or rhetorical figures. Reinvigorating their critical meaning, we highlight potentials of these concepts to transform workplaces and the discipline of work and organizational psychology to benefit all, including the majority of the people and the planet. The workshop will explore how critical perspectives can be translated into concrete research practices and interventions for genuine workplace transformation. This is the third “FoWOP day”, an engaging full-day workshop, first held 2019 in Turin and continued 2023 in Katowice. Previous editions have introduced sections of the network and imagined different futures for the discipline. The “Future of Work and Organizational Psychology” initiative is an international, informal, inclusive, non-hierarchical network of scholars founded 2018 at an EAWOP Small Group Meeting in Breda. Its members organize numerous activities, such as conference tracks, panel discussions, symposia, collaborative articles, special issues, and regular online and in-person meetings. This open network includes a steering committee and is loosely structured in interest-groups and task forces (e.g., climate change, vision and values). It maintains a website, newsletter, and mailing list. We encourage workshop participants to develop and discuss ideas for projects and activities to be pursued collaboratively within FoWOP as well as on how to expand and strengthen the network, with the goal of promoting a critical approach to research within the scientific community.
Learning Objectives:
- The workshop will be divided into four sessions, in each of which participants will receive short inputs by designated speakers, covering topics relevant for ethics and diversity from a critical perspective.
- These inputs will be followed by moderated small-group activities, like analyzing problems, developing solutions, and discussions, results of which are presented in the whole group.
- In addition, there will be an opening session introducing FoWOP and an interactive closing session, gathering feedback and planning follow-up activities.
- As part of the workshop, participants are invited to develop ideas for projects and activities that can be further pursued collaboratively within the FoWOP network.
- Participants will get to know the values of the FoWOP network, being diverse, personal, imaginative, forward-thinking, non-hierarchical, highly participatory, action-oriented, and engaging.
Benefits of Participating:
- Scholars and practitioners from all subject areas and in all career stages are welcome. We especially hope to attract early-career academics to broaden their views regarding the diversity and heterogeneity of perspectives within work and organizational psychology.
- Participants will be exposed to thought-provoking inputs, will find a safe space for exchanging and developing ideas, and become part of an open and supportive community offering inclusive activities and connections beyond this workshop.
- We encourage workshop participants to develop and discuss ideas for projects and activities to be pursued collaboratively within FoWOP as well as on how to expand and strengthen the network, with the goal of promoting a critical approach to research within the scientific community.
Target Audience:
The workshop is inclusive. Scholars and practitioners from all subject areas and in all career stages are welcome. We especially hope to attract early-career academics to broaden their views regarding the diversity and heterogeneity of perspectives within work and organizational psychology. Participants will be exposed to thought-provoking inputs, will find a safe space for exchanging and developing ideas, and become part of an open and supportive community offering inclusive activities and connections beyond this workshop.
Convenor Profiles:
Severin Hornung (severin.hornung@uibk.ac.at) is professor for applied psychology at the University of Innsbruck; long-standing EAWOP member; co-founder of FoWOP and Innsbruck Group on Critical Research in Work and Organizational Psychology (I-CROP); interested in the neoliberal degradation and socio-ecological transformation of work, economy, and society, problematizing ideology, power and control, social justice, and research ethics.
Franziska Kößler (franziska.koessler@leuphana.de) is an assistant professor for Psychology, in particular the Transformation of the World of Work, at Leuphana University Lüneburg (Germany). Her current main interests include social inequalities / inequities, diversity in workplaces, migration, and precarious employment, taking a critical multi-level perspective.
Maha Yomn Sbaa (mahayomn.sbaa2@unibo.it), is a PhD candidate in Work & Organizational Psychology at the University of Bologna. Her research interests span migration, decent work, and the experiences of economic migrants in Europe, with a focus on their perceptions of decent work and agency within precarious contexts. Her work also encompasses cross-cultural management, highlighting the importance of reciprocal cultural interactions and competencies between incoming migrants and host entities to create more inclusive and supportive workplaces.
Sandiso Bazana (s.bazana@ru.ac.za) is a Lecturer in Organization Psychology at Rhodes University in South Africa and a Research and Teaching Assistant and PhD student at Grenoble Ecole de Management in the Department of People, Organizations and Society. His research interests include worker subjectivity and the heterogeneity of postcolonial organizations, identity and race in organizations, and critical and postcolonial psychology.
Chiara Corvino (chiara.corvino1@unicatt.it) is Assistant Professor in Work and Organizational Psychology at the Faculty of Economics of the Catholic University of Milan. Her study activity is mainly focused on critical perspectives in work and organizational psychology; impact evaluation through dialogic and participatory methodologies; and organizational change in non-profit organizations.
Parisa Dashtipour (parisa.dashtipour@open.ac.uk) is a lecturer in Psychology at the Open University, UK. She has written on the ethics of critical work and organizational psychology. Her broad interest lies in the relationship between personal, subjective and psychic experience and social, political, organizational, and economic conditions. She is currently studying violence and the experience of domestic workers.
Edina Dóci (edina.doci@uclouvain.be) is associate professor at the Université catholique de Louvain and co-founder of the FoWOP network. Her research interests concern psychological inequalities within organizations, the psycho-social mechanisms of social change, the influence of ideology in workplace dynamics, and the psychology of organizing amidst the climate crisis.
Luca P. Vecchio (luca.vecchio@unimib.it) is associate professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca. He conducts research on the quality of working experiences, particularly in schooling and healthcare settings. More recently, his research interests have focused on the issue of sustainability in organizational contexts, with particular reference to environmental sustainability. In recent years, he has contributed to the development of an inter-university working group in Italy on critical perspectives in work and organizational psychology.
Matthijs Bal (mbal@lincoln.ac.uk) is professor of Responsible Management at the University of Lincoln, UK. He is a cofounder of the FoWOP network, which has been existing and thriving for 6 years. His main interests concern the absurdity of our contemporary world and workplaces, and how this absurdity is hypernormalized.