The symposium focuses on the relationship between organization, diversity, and digitization. This reveals a tension between the different concepts. Organizations are situated in and equally confronted with heterogeneous social conditions (Wilz 2002). This results in different, often interlocking approaches that indicate the necessity of negotiating diversity in and of the organization. Heterogeneity as a challenging condition starts with the productive need to process different perspectives and individuals. Approaches such as "diversity management" or "managing diversity" see diversity as a resource that needs to be managed for the benefit of the organization. For example, diversity has a productive effect in the context of innovation labs, where the variety of perspectives fosters the generation of new solutions (Schröer 2021). In this way, organizations can realize heterotopic places (Adler/Weber 2018) in order to temporarily suspend the contradictory logics of action inscribed in them. Other approaches address the organization in its interweaving with social power relations, which make the organizations themselves actors in the reproduction of social inequalities. Following the socially institutionalized norm that relations of inequality are illegitimate (Pasero 2003), here concepts of equity and inclusion that adopt a power- and structure-reflexive perspective on organizations become relevant.

Organizations operate in a field of tension between very different logics of action, which is also evident in the ongoing digital transformation. The widely funded interdisciplinary research in the field of digitization, for example, focuses primarily on the introduction of digital technology in production and management processes and the need for digital skills. The focus is on how digitality is changing work and organizational processes (Büchner 2018). Although the importance of organizations for digitization is repeatedly emphasized digitization is mostly neither tied back to the organization's own logic (Wendt 2021) nor sufficiently related to societal demands and the associated paradoxes.

Digitization and diversity also have a tense relationship. While the spread of the internet was initially associated with the hope that new technical possibilities would enable democratic forms of deliberative interaction, this optimism has since been empirically corrected. This is illustrated not only by the debate about digital divide, the self-referentiality of echo chambers or the spread of hate speech, but above all by the criticism that algorithms regularly stabilize relations of inequality and thus counteract claims to diversity (Bender et al. 2021). The increasing spread of artificial intelligence, in particular, is leading to the demand that the use of digital technology must comply with ethical principles and reveals new forms of learning (Truschkat/Bormann i.E.)

An organizational educational perspective therefore draws attention to the fact that advancing digitization not only creates new needs for knowledge generation and use, but also necessitates the negotiation of new organizational orders. An organizational educational approach offers the possibility to bring organization, diversity, and digitization into a relationship and to discuss related practices of action. The symposium will bring together current contributions that deal with the tense relationship between digital transformation and diversity in organizations and will discuss further organizational education theory and research perspectives in this topic area.

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