Editorial 29.2: Inclusivity and innovation

Inclusivity and innovationWilkinson and Pickett stated that equal societies "are better to live in . . .and better for everyone" (cited from Djerf-Pierre, 2011, p. 43).Equal societies are based on inclusivity or a situation where "everyone feels welcome, valued, and respected, no matter who they are or where they come from" (Ricee, 2022, n.p.).While inclusivity is a value in itself and should not be monetized, it is not surprising that inclusivity also brings about benefits to workplaces because inclusive workplaces are more innovative due to a diversity of perspectives that foster creativity and innovation.On top of that, inclusive workplaces result in enhanced problem-solving and decision-making, enhanced employee engagement, increased productivity, increased organizational reputation (Miller, 2023), etc. Meng andNeill (2021) argued that everyone needs to be treated equally and with respect and have their voices heard because research shows that practitioners of diverse origins often feel unheard, unsupported and not appreciated, which calls for more inclusive leadership and diversity in the communication industry.In the first editorial I wrote, after the first two years of editorship (Topi c, 2022), I argued that Corporate Communications: An International Journal (CCIJ) has always been at the forefront of CSR, crisis and general corporate communication scholarship but that we expanded our scholarship to include equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) scholarship (in the USA, the term used is DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion)) and that we will continue to publish works that innovate corporate communication field, as academic journals should be open to all authors and inclusive in their approaches to publishing.Therefore, authors from marketing communication, media and several other areas were invited to submit their articles and consider CCIJ as a venue for publishing their work so that all elements of corporate communication are covered by the journal.A lot of work has been published on gender equality, particularly that of women in public relations, advertising and media.In public relations, scholars have argued since the 1980s that women face discrimination in the communication industries (Aldoory and Toth, 2002;Toth and Grunig, 1993) and that when one issue gets resolved, another one arises, thus opening the question of whether women are facing perpetual discrimination in mass communication industries (Tench et al., 2017), with other studies arguing that the discrimination of women has reached a full circle with the same issues from the 1980s returning to the agenda after the 2010s (Topi c et al., 2020).Tindall and Waters (2013) also argued that gay men see public relations as a welcoming profession, but they also face the so-called "lavender ceiling" by serving as someone who needs to educate others on what it means to be gay, while other studies also argued that gay men face work harassment (Waters, 2013) due to the industry often operating under heteronormative assumptions (Edwards and L'Etang, 2013).The standard practitioner is traditionally white, able-bodied and heterosexual (Aldoory, 1998;Tindall, 2013).Race is an even bigger problem in public relations and corporate communication, with some authors calling for organizations to include race in their corporate responsibility policies to tackle social injustice and make a difference (Logan, 2021).In advertising and media, a similar situation occurred with scholars reporting heteronormativity and gendered discrimination including a strong sense of masculinity within organizational practice and women, for example, having to be one of the boys to succeed and progress in their careers whilst others fall behind (Topi c, 2021a(Topi c, , 2023;;Mills, 2014;Thompson-Whiteside et al., 2020).In the past three years, CCIJ has increased the publication of EDI/DEI topics by publishing works in a wider area of equality such as gender quotas (Lefley and Janecek, 2023, Hamplov a et al., 2022), female journalists and their leadership experiences