Laura has studied Sociology, International Development Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Vienna and did her PhD within an interdisciplinary research group funded by the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy in Munich. In her PhD thesis she investigated practices of diversity management and their consequences for organizational dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. During her research stays at the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School (DK), the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University (US) and the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt University Berlin (DE) she was also part of vibrant interdisciplinary research contexts.

Laura’s core research interest revolves around different forms of organizing and how they act as both preservers of the status quo and potential drivers of social change: “Currently, I am particularly interested in the unintended side-effects of organizing and how they can induce social change. Too often we take the individual actor as a ‘natural’ starting point of change attempts but organizing is much more than the sum of involved actors.” She explores this larger issue in several streams of research. Three of them are introduced subsequently:

In the first project, Laura investigates how the organizing of work (task division, task allocation etc.) affects the creation of inclusivity in an airport security company. Based on ethnographic field data, she collaborates with Dide van Eck, Maddy Janssens (both Catholic University of Leuven, BE) and Marieke van den Brink (Radboud University, NL). The analysis shows, for instance, that the principle of task rotation (e.g., the security agents take turns in working in different posts) prevents group-based segregation and makes the interdependencies among the individual tasks that are necessary to accomplish a smooth security check-in visible and meaningful for the security agents. Thus, more egalitarian relationships develop among the workforce even though it is sociodemographically highly heterogeneous. With the focus on task division and task allocation, the study approaches organizational inclusivity as a phenomenon resulting from specific forms of organizing. Thereby it questions – de-centers – the relevance of individual attitudes and values which currently dominate the literature on organizational inclusion. In a nutshell: “What we see is that in order to create more inclusive organizational contexts we don’t have to wait until the people have changed but we can start with changing forms of organizing and the people will follow”.

In the second research project, Laura investigates, together with Leonhard Dobusch (Universität Innsbruck, AT), why online communities who describe themselves as ‘open’ (e.g., Wikipedia) are nevertheless characterized by persistent inequalities and exclusions. They find that an openness approach that explicitly neglects the need for diversity-affirmative policies undermines the hopes of freedom and equality that have been attached to the internet since its emergence: “We find that ‘open’ online communities often misinterpret openness as the absence of formal regulations. Thereby, however, they end up implementing and reproducing larger social inequalities already in place.” As a consequence, in order to create ‘inclusive’ openness (e.g., in terms of enabling a maximum of different voices), openness depends on forms of closure (e.g., implementing rules of il-/legitimate communication and thereby excluding certain statements and ways of communicating). For the practice of openness this means to shift the focus from the assumption of generalizable openness per se towards specific forms of openness related to certain contexts that are accompanied by, or even depending on, specific forms of closure.

In her third research project, Laura investigates whether and how practices of climate-smart and inclusive organizing are related to each other and under what circumstances this relationship might unfold as conflictual or synergetic: “We see that companies are increasingly engaging with measures to reduce their carbon footprint or establish more inclusive organizational contexts. But what is completely under-researched is how climate-smart and inclusive organizational measures interact with each other and may even develop synergetic potential.” The climate crisis calls for a fundamental transformation of dominant forms of working and living which also likely affects privileged and disadvantaged groups differently. Consequently, it is important to analyze the opportunities and limits of organizational climate action in their interaction with the creation of inclusivity in organizations and beyond.

Laura is convinced that intriguing research is the cherry on the cake of working in academia, but the cake means nothing when you cannot share it: “For me it is not only important to engage in continuous exchange with colleagues who care about same research topics but also to get students enthusiastic about them. What helps in this regard is to treat the students as potential researchers from day one.”