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Vivian Anette Lagesen, Julie Katrine Flikke, Martine Sletten, Knut Holtan Sørensen
This article examines how Norwegian universities implement gender equality and diversity policies through a Bakhtinian dialogical lens. Using document analysis of action plans from four major universities and interviews with 19 department heads and research group leaders, we trace how authoritative voices from external policymakers are transformed as they move from institutional plans to local implementation. The study reveals a fundamental shift from top‐down policy transmission to distributed dialogical sense‐making. While university action plans echo external directives by adopting expansive diversity definitions, they paradoxically create “authoritative polyphony,” messages too diffuse to enable meaningful local response. Our analysis identifies three patterns of local engagement: active resistance, where leaders contest institutional messages based on situated knowledge; interpretative paralysis, where unclear directives create obligation without actionable understanding; and creative transformations, where leaders reframe diversity through personal experiences and academic identities. When institutional guidance proves insufficient, local leaders draw upon two primary interpretative resources: embodied knowledge of inclusion and exclusion from personal experiences, and scholarly frameworks that reframe diversity through academic lenses. This process creates what we term “dialogical delegation,” a tacit transfer of interpretative authority from institutions to individuals without corresponding support. The findings demonstrate how “doing diversity” becomes an active dialogical process where authentic diversity strategies emerge through countless individual interpretative acts rather than centralised planning. This reveals both the limitations of broad institutional diversity policies and the emergence of alternative governance forms where meaning‐making authority becomes distributed across organisational hierarchies, with significant implications for policy implementation theory and diversity governance.
