New Article: Organizational Justice: A path forward for diversity, equity, and inclusion work

Posted by Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) on July 22, 2025

The sociopolitical landscape around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practice has shifted momentously in the past few years. Backlash threatens to fully upend efforts to address systemic inequities in our nation’s two largest social institutions—work and school. After recent executive orders and federal actions, leaders across industries and sectors are asking how to continue DEI work, or if it’s even possible.

In this moment of uncertainty, leaders have a chance to move DEI work forward by refocusing on organizational justice. First developed in the late 1980s and 1990s and later shaped with an eye toward application, organizational justice is a framework that focuses on fair treatment through equitable structures, policies, and processes. In the context of DEI, this approach recognizes that while organizational justice and social justice share core values, they differ in both scope and strategy. Efforts grounded in organizational justice can and usually should account for broader societal inequities, but their main goal is to ensure fairness within the organization itself. Because of that, tactics that drive social change in public or activist spaces don’t always work the same way inside institutions, and in some cases, they may even backfire.

Read more.