Diversity Beyond the Numbers: Business Vitality, Ethics & Identity in the 21st Century

Rating:
Summary: Getting to the heart of the matter
Review: Gary Adkins is making the case for nothing less than revolutionizing the praxis of diversity in the USA and around the world. In the same stroke he claims to be opening a door to a realizable connection with the kind of local competence that interculturalists and global management consultants have been trying to deliver around the globe. Let's explore this claim.

What is wrong with diversity? In a word often used by Adkins, "reification." Reification is, on one hand, the industrialization and ultimately the digitization of flesh and blood people into measurable commodities. For diversity, this means the rigid categorization of people into legal and operational types or target populations: women, blacks, Hispanics, etc., etc., ultimately used as a matrix for deciding how they should be treated, and spoken about. It decides on the basis of identity what one deserves, and, even more importantly how one should conceive of and speak about him or herself.

The violence of such pigeonholing has been seen intuitively for a long time as stereotyping. Adkins follows the trail of Amin Maalouf (In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong/Les Identités meurtrières) in seeing that the key diversity problem not as one of labeling others, mistreating them and misleading them. Rather it is an internal question about identity formation. How flexible or rigid has our own sense of identity been formed and maintained in the groups we belong to? "All the massacres that have taken place in recent years, like most of the bloody wars, have been linked to complex and long-standing 'cases' of identity.'" There is always a history to how we choose our identities and part of that story is how others have been allowed to choose them for us.

Reification is the tendency to construct realities out of language so that they take on a life of their own. In the beginning the Elohim said, "Let there be light! And, there was light." (Genesis 1:3). George Bush tells USians "we are in unending war," claiming to rely on the same author. This phenomenon, though related to politics and religion is not restricted to them. It fits the broader US culture with its passion for control, whose chief tools today are language and media and sound bytes. Whether or not he or she holds office or has influence, the contemporary USian is expected to be able think or say something and have it become reality. You only have to believe...

But, not so fast. Our ability to construct reality (at least almost anything for ourselves) is matched by our ability to deconstruct realities at the speed of CNN. At the core of this is an important diversity "right to define ourselves" rather than to be defined by others. There is no dialogue here, and Adkins is right in following the lead of Maalouf in seeing that, in the midst of all this social construction and deconstruction, forming or negotiating identity is what is at stake in the diversity equation, not skin color, language, sex or belief.

At this moment the US is at war and engaged in the political process of elections. The temptation is to steer this review into an analysis of what it says about both these geopolitical events (much, much). But, having followed the problem of diversity as Adkins presents it, it is important to simply see his solution for what it is, a new focus on more effective ways of thinking and doing diversity that will ultimately take us not just to workplaces but of necessity to society and politics as well.

Beyond reification, Adkins points to three other forms of disenchantment in the workplace and his recommended procedures for meeting them: disembodied language, legitimacy and trust issues, and anxiety containment. In the last third of the book, he analyzes each of these for how it saps organizational energy and effectiveness and proceeds to suggest counter-steps toward organizational vitality and ethical pluralism, i.e., how to create, maintain and function with the real parameters of our people and the direction and goals of our organizational systems.

This book is an important document. It is also punishing to read. Adkins spends more than enough pages to document this transition of US diversity from a passion for justice to a boilerplate offering in the marketplace. After all, he will be promoting not just a new paradigm but a competing product.

Some of his complexity of expression is the necessary struggling with words required to establish the freedom and movement of new ideas. At the outset they necessarily circulate perilously close to the sucking black hole of accepted paradigms about diversity. In other places the text seems gratuitously pedantic. In effect it suffers from its own reification in language, a USian trend in such writing. Alas, Papa Hemingway is dead.

The book bears the imprint of the Global Diversity Institute, a non-profit directed by the author, so in effect, it is a self-published work. It suffers from poor layout, bad choices of typeface, and in short from the discipline which an objective outside editor might have brought to it. Despite the complexity of the content, the book gives the impression of having been thrown together in a hurry. The glossary is not a glossary in the traditional sense, but a reassertion of key concepts as Adkins intends them. In this way it is quite useful, less for understanding the concepts as commonly used, but more so for following the turns of the author's redefinitions of certain key issues. Footnotes are ample and well documented and there is a brief index.

A German colleague of mine read one sentence and closed the book, put off by the theoretical jargon as well as by the homemade layout. I had to explain the thesis and why it was important. Europeans, faced by diversity as a US product, subsidized and marketed by US corporations abroad and by consultancies and practitioners, will find an ally in Adkins as they seek to understand their own resistance to the US hype. One hopes that further publication of the ideas will make them more readily available and acceptable to the world's majority of non-native English speakers and the less philosophically driven. The gold is worth mining.



Rating:
Summary: Just what the diversity doctor ordered!
Review: Probably the best literary investment I have made in my 10 years of corporate diversity practice. 21st century leaders are beginning to comprehend a broader definition of workplace diversity that expands far beyond race and gender and with that revelation comes the disturbing realization that most organizations and the people within them are terribly handicapped as to how to make sense of it all. Diversity Beyond The Numbers builds a splendid and much needed case for a whole new praxis around diversity at work, putting to bed (at last) the tried but no longer true 70s and 80s approaches of "diversity awareness" and "diversity management" programs and initiatives.

Adkins is a savior to those of us in the business who attempt to gain the interested ear and engagement of key decision-makers in organizations today. His book is a hard-hitting resource we can use to help leaders in a daily struggle with complex issues that are stifling business performance. Diversity Beyond the Numbers replaces the traditional 'blame and shame' vernacular of the diversity paradigm with themes of 'creativity,' 'vitality' and even 'enchantment,' and does an excellent job in conveying the what, why and how of moving an organization into this new realm. This book is a must for all diversity practitioners who face an uphill climb in an effort to enlighten company management about the need to integrate the dreaded 'D' word into their current and future business strategy.