Managing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Public Service Organizations: A Liberatory Justice Approach

Managing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Public Service Organizations: A Liberatory Justice Approach is a textbook designed to facilitate critical and courageous conversations that recognize our differences, including our privileged and marginalized social identities, and engage readers in the principles and practice of solidarity to transform systems of oppression. Examining dimensions of race, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, and their intersectionality in the context of diverse, multigenerational organizations, this leading-edge new textbook redefines and reimagines the role of public service in fostering meaningful, authentic, sustainable, and transformative change.

While diversity is now a standard topic in books on public personnel and human resource management, authors Rashmi Chordiya and Meghna Sabharwal offer a deeper, nuanced, and reflective understanding of many of the systematic and often covert ways in which marginalized and minoritized groups can face barriers to full and equal participation in decision-making, access to resources, and opportunities for advancement and growth. Taking a holistic, liberatory public service approach, the book explores what it would mean if public service systems were reimagined, and goals aligned and transformed, to serve an “all means all” public.

Other unique features of this book include developing a nuanced understanding of trauma of oppression from neurobiological, sociological, and historical perspectives. This book supports the reader in exploring ways of cultivating individual and organizational competencies and capacities for envisioning and implementing trauma-informed, repair and healing-centered approaches to public service that compassionately center the margins. To encourage learner engagement and to connect theory to practice, this book offers several case studies. Each chapter contains a description of big ideas, big questions, and key concepts and teachings offered in that chapter, as well as chapter summaries and deep dive resources. Throughout the book, the authors offer boxed invitations to pause and use reflective prompts to engage readers with the core concepts and key teachings of the book. Managing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Public Service Organizations is required reading for all current and future public administrators and nonprofit leaders.

Rashmi Chordiya (She | Her) is an associate professor of public administration at Seattle University’s Department of Public Affairs and Nonprofit Leadership, USA. Her research focuses on bridging critical academic scholarship and social justice movement visions and theories to advance the theory and praxis of liberatory justice in public service. She approaches diversity and social justice work from an embodied lens that is traumainformed, repair and healing-centered, and compassionately centering the margins. Her peer-reviewed journal articles are published in prestigious public administration journals.

Meghna Sabharwal is a National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) Fellow and a professor in the public and nonprofit management program, as well as the Associate Provost of Faculty Success at the University of Texas at Dallas, USA. Her extensive research portfolio centers around public human resources management with a particular focus on workforce diversity, equity and inclusion, high skilled immigration, and comparative public human resources. She is the editor-in-chief of the Review of Public Personnel Administration. She is the recipient of several national and international awards.