Dionne Pohler is an assistant professor at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources at the University of Toronto. Dionne’s ongoing research seeks to understand how the design and implementation of different governance arrangements in interdependent social systems affect outcomes for different stakeholders. Previous research explored the impact of strategy, employment systems, human resource practices, and unions on employee and organizational outcomes, and her most current completed project examined multinational companies’ compliance with employment laws in Ontario. Dionne’s projects with the Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE) at Rotman include an examination of the causes of the gender wage gap in organizations and society.
Dionne is also a Filene research fellow, and a fellow in Co-operative Strategy and Governance with the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives at the University of Saskatchewan, where she previously held positions at both the Edwards School of Business and the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy. Ongoing projects with Filene and the Co-op Centre include understanding the political economy of governance successes and failures, particularly in the Canadian credit union system and co-op federations. Dionne is also a Vice-Chair of the Government of Canada’s Employment Equity Act Review Task Force.
As part of a desire to make her research useful to the communities she studies, Dionne helped develop a co-operative model of economic and social development in Western Canadian rural and Indigenous communities as one of the co-investigators on the Co-operative Innovation Project (CIP). CIP required extensive stakeholder outreach and engagement and eventually led to the creation of a non-profit organization, Co-operatives First, dedicated to working with rural and Indigenous communities to address the needs identified by community members. Dionne was a founding board member of Co-operatives First.
Learn more about Dionne and her research in the video below from our “Meet a Fellow” series.