Abid Talic _ Podcast_The Invisibility of EDI in Events MGMT

The podcast discusses the invisibility of equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) research in events management journals. The authors evaluated four leading journals to see how they represented EDI issues. They argued that EDI needs to be addressed in research to ensure fair treatment and respect for all. The authors found that EDI was not a primary focus of discussion in the journals and was more represented in the Western world. They recommended that academic research make a global impact by including EDI issues. Overall, the podcast emphasizes the importance of addressing EDI in research and its impact on society. Good morning, Abit Talic here, a remote online learner at the School of Hospitality Management at Iowa State University, pursuing a doctorate degree in Hospitality Management. My topic today of discussion on this podcast is the invisibility of equality, diversity, and inclusion research in events management journals. This is a research that was done and accepted in 2023, and the research is mainly focused on the representation of EDI, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion, in hospitality journals. Several years back, the events management in general as a research field has been critiqued for only being focused on operational and managerial concerns, and which included some critical analysis of power and presentation, but also not representing EDI to the extent that it should be represented. For that reason, authors have taken a task on to discuss this issue by actually taking a specific four leading journals in today's event management world to evaluate and to find out, indeed, how in-depth these EDI issues were represented in those journals. The main four journals that were discussed were event management, that were actually viewed were event management, Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events, then the second one was International Journal of Event and Festival Management, and the third one, a Journal of Convention in Venturism, and then also a Journal of Policy Research in Tourism. So these were four main, four main leading journals in today's events management world of research, and the authors started off by basically introducing the current stage of the management, events management journals industry, showing to us that this inequality and discrimination are still present in today's world, and aiming for the fact that things need to change. Right? We need to assure that all individuals or groups are treated fairly and with respect, and that all institutions, practices, and societies need to embrace this way of conducting business, which is actually embedded in 1948 United Nations basically policy on the human rights, as well as the European Convention on Human Rights in the UK, Equality Act, and European Union in 2010. Why this even became more important is that back in that second decade of 21st century, we've had issues such as the Black Lives Matters, Me Too, Time's Up, We the Fifteen, have shown that contemporary importance of EDI to everyday life and ongoing challenges and inclusion that are faced are basically putting the, placing the light on all of the institution and research fields to pay attention to this matter, and that hospitality industry and events management have the same responsibility to develop a body of knowledge around these issues, not only for the management and operations, but also to consideration of impacts and the roles of events in broader society, which is very, very important. Now, to prove their case, the authors created four, three main objectives or three main research questions to find out to what extent research papers published in these four leading events, specific journals, engage with this issue and the theories that are associated with EDI. Also, what was the dominant EDI issue that's discussed in these journals, and what EDI issues are not addressed, right? So this was really important, and they've taken the journals, 49 journals out of those four main publications, and prepped the territory of work for the research to begin. Where the paper begins is actually the discussion of EDI in relation to the events, events management. They are actually, they wanted to provide the argument as how does EDI really is integrated in the events management discussion, and especially after the Black Lives Matter movement, and how did those journals represented call for academia to do better in a job to in addressing inequality and justice. These discussions also not only were limited to those aspects, but also to the aspect of power and privilege within academic research, and everything was actually discussed, viewed from the points of different association events management across the world, and they also evaluated the fact what were the discussions that were actually part of the taking part in those associations, and to find out that a lot of forums were established that were tied to the expression of, expressions on the disruptions of power and oppression. It's a standard feature of any academic gathering of leisure and its related fields. Then they talk about scholarship that was in published work devoted to these discussions, and adding questions of power in our research and teaching. So all this, they were committed to recognizing the importance of power to an examinational event, and to review, and to also to review the current landscape of events management EDI research, so which was a great starting point. Now, the authors went on to discuss actually five main areas that are impacting EDI work today, and those five main areas are gender, sexuality, race, disability, and human rights, and so in order to address all these areas, they've had to really create specific research design and methods to do that. So they've taken the article from 2011 to 2021, and they focused on the journals where events is a solar core subject. In that systematic review of those articles, the comprehensive triadic report was taken to identify relevant articles for inclusion, and when they did that, the search was actually based on the following items, diversity, gender, race, sexuality, disability, social class, religion, and human rights. So what they did that, when they did that, they also were screening all papers for the gender and LGBT plus papers, general, but EDI related human rights papers related to the disability papers, and these articles were split in three different groups, and to actually cross-examine how each of these representations, how each of these subjects were represented, the sample of 49 articles was created, and findings of this research were actually that EDI, even though it was mentioned in some of the articles, was not taking a primary form of discussion, primary form of research, but rather was discussed in the context of the special issue, which is not certainly enough, and looking at the percentage, EDI was represented only basically from four points, starting with 1.7 percent representation, Journal of Conventional Events, Tourism, and the highest one was with the Journal of Policy Research with Tourism and Leisure Events at 8.3 percent, and so there was not, I guess, strong representation across any of these journals where the EDI were discussed to a high degree. Authors argue that this is not acceptable, and that along the same line, they also have discovered that EDI was more represented in the Western culture or Western world, just because of the many different reasons from the points of more advanced technologies, more advanced, you know, better social status of life and resources to be put forward for this type of research, and they argue that this needs to be stopped and really needs to become a global phenomenon where it's actually academic research needs to make that impact in showing that how important the EDI issue is all across the world. With those recommendations, authors go on to tell us that EDI doesn't have an alternative. It's a part of the world we live in, and its research areas needs to have a – make an impactful effort to make a change in order to include EDI issues in all the journals that they are working on and research that's being conducted to not only answer the call for equality and fairness and respect across the academia and hospitality events management, but also to impact society at large. This is a very unique and important research. I find it very impactful and definitely something that will stay on as a subject of discussion for many, many more years to come, and hopefully we'll see a change in publications that will be released in this decade and many, many, many more forward. Thank you so much for your time. It was a pleasure to present this podcast for you. For any questions, you may certainly reach out to me via email or call me on my phone. I'm very pleased to be taking part in this wonderful session. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.