Adkins, Gary Y., Diversity Beyond the Numbers:
Business Vitality, Ethics and Identity In the 21st Century,
2003 GDI Press. Long Beach, CA.
Review by Dr. George
F. Simons,
SIETAR Europa Communications Committee.
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.
Dr. George Simons is the creator of the DIVERSOPHY
® series of intercultural games and a co-editor
of Global Competence. 50 Training Activities for Succeeding
in International Business. He has a doctorate from
Claremont College where he researched the applications
of humanistic psychology to small group learning experiences.
