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Sage College DEI - Representation throughout Business Cases and Examples

From the Editor's Desk page

Representation throughout Business Cases and Examples

A Quantitative Exercise for Quality Results* 

By Lily Norton, Acquisitions Editor
November 2023

image of a group of diverse business owners

An important feature of many of Sage’s business textbooks are the examples and case studies that feature real companies and profile real people. Case studies are assigned by many instructors as a reading assignment, serving as a learning tool to connect real-world examples to the core content in our books. When considering diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, we make concerted efforts to provide examples that represent a diverse group of people, companies, places, and ideas. We know it’s important for students to see themselves in this material, as we want to inspire them to become the next generation of successful businesspeople.

Before working on the revision of a book, we always conduct a review of the current edition, and its examples and cases, to see if we are meeting the need for diverse representation. For one of our business textbooks, we tried a new method for analysis.

The Content Development Editor created a spreadsheet that listed all the business examples and the case studies throughout the current edition of the text, amounting to 135 companies and business owners. We then quantitatively analyzed the backgrounds of the people and types of companies represented. We determined the percentages of business owners based on gender and ethnic identity, and considered location of the companies within the United States as well as international locations outside the U.S.

It was very eye-opening to see these statistics. The numbers gave both the Sage editors and the authors new perspective for how to approach the revision of the book. It can be hard to assess the inclusive nature of a book qualitatively when reading through chapters over a long period of time, but this analysis allowed us to see it quantitatively all in one shot. In this case, we assessed that we had a great opportunity to diversify both the in-text examples and the cases throughout the book, but especially in the areas of gender and ethnicity. Thus, we tasked our whole team, including the authors, with researching the latest and greatest businesses and business owners in the field covered by this book, with the aim to bring in stories that will resonate with today’s diverse student population.

We then thought about all the different criteria that we could add to this analysis when evaluating the examples across all our business texts. We could consider the types of companies represented: Were they startups or large corporations? Were the companies more modern or more traditional? Were they recognizable, or more unfamiliar? Would students know these companies or individuals? Which regions of the United States were represented? Were the case studies showing success stories, or areas for improvement? Also, the text’s focus on sustainability and social impact led us to ask: Are these companies and business owners doing good for society? How could they do better? Some of our textbooks also connect case studies to specific United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Since taking on this strategy, not only are we seeing better content and examples, but our authors appreciate the exercise, and it helps them decide which examples are best to use when connecting to specific topics. As we develop new editions across the business list, we will continue working with our author teams to track the examples included, so we ultimately provide engaging and inclusive stories that will resonate with students today and foster important conversations in the classroom.

*Published 11/23. © 2023 Sage Publishing. All rights reserved. All other brand and product names are the property of their respective owners.