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

Diversity (and Organizational) consultants are caught in an identity crisis. Since the introduction of the Managing Diversity paradigm (popularized by R. Thomas) in the 1980's, attempts to manage diversity have floundered, stalled, and in some cases, regressed. Businesses are still spending hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements (one fifth of all "small awards" are over $1 million; recent large awards ranged from $31 million against Olsten Health to $36 million against Mitsubishi Motors). Religious conflicts are on the rise (prayer time, witnessing against others at work, clothing, food, etc) as are language challenges (English as a second language). Simultaneously, the world has undergone profound changes from globalization, terrorism, ethnic and culture wars, to disruptive technologies and the dot com meltdown. Yet, diversity consultants still apply 1970's affirmative action based 'valuing diversity' techniques while adopting the 1980's professional language of 'managing diversity', resulting in professional identity problems and disabled practices. In fact, to date, attempted new "paradigms" to manage diversity (e.g.: ranging from HBR 74:5, 1996, & T&D 12, 2001) have not changed much at all. This has unfortunately led to the continued unconscious victimization of historically excluded people. Diversity consultants are seen as 'one note', touchy-feely, and unnecessary practitioners with personal agendas. Diversity Beyond the Numbers provides a needed way out of this vicious cycle. It suggests a new management and consulting practice based upon complexity science, identity theory and critical social theory that goes beyond the established Managing Diversity paradigm. It introduces the new methodology of Vitality Consulting, with an implementation plan centered on Ethical Pluralism to build high performance and inclusive business cultures. Diversity Beyond the Numbers will resolve consultants' identity crisis while it propels their practice.

Diversity Beyond the Numbers uses the author's experience of both internal corporate (AT&T) hiring and managing of diversity co nsultants as well as having consulted with large scale organizations for the last eight years as an independent consultant, drawing on a range of case studies, anecdotes and interviews. For example, one anecdote regards facilitating a confrontation between engineers when the 'lead' team member stated that he was hired to save souls, not engineer circuits while management became paralyzed over 1st amendment references and Biblical injunctions. In another, the author had his life threatened for teaching diversity concepts, since it was the Devil's work, causing the police to post undercover agents in the classes. It also draws upon the author's 30 years of civil rights and academic workas well as over 10 years of client trials (internal and external).

A Detailed TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I: BUILDING A NEW METHODOLOGY (VITALITY CONSULTING)



• Introduction to Part I: Why a New Diversity Praxis?
  
• Methodology & Parrehesia
  
• Terms and Concepts
  
• Critique and Construct: Context, Consilience and Creativity
  
• 3 "C"s and 4 "I"s of Innovation
  
  

  SECTION I. Foundations: The Business Case for Diversity

  
  Chapter 1: The Business Context
  
• Business Trends
  
• Social Trends
  
• Personal/Lifestyle Trends
  
  Chapter 2: The Business Case
• Employer of Choice: demographics, talent shortage, immigration, Safe space for creativity
  
• Provider of choice
  
• Stakeholder of choice
  
• Going Beyond Managing Diversity: acknowledging mistakes
  
  

  SECTION II. Moving Beyond The Crisis in Diversity Management to Vitality Consulting: A New Diversity Praxis

  
  Chapter 3: Organizational Dynamics: The Science of Complexity
  
• Organizational Chaotics and Complexity science - elements and literature review: Stacey, et. al.
  
• Paradigm shifts
  
• Dominant - Shadow systems
  
• Complex Adaptive Learning systems
  
• Causality, Control and Planning
  
• Primacy of Relatedness
  
• Fitness Landscape
  
• The Vitality - Chaos - Rigidity Organizational Model
  
  Chapter 4: Organizational People: Identity Theory
  
• Hybridity
  
• Fluctuating Identities
  
• Essentialism vs Social Construction: Dialogic relationships
  
• Relationships that Matter: Relatedness
  
• Primary Identity: Proactive vs Reactive Identities
  
• Fundamentalist Identities and Ressentiment: Suffering as Identity
  
  Chapter 5: Organizational Culture: Critical Social Theory (Bringing it all Together)
  
• Surfacing the Social Constellation
  
• Disrupt-Contextualize-Construct Methodology
  
• Diagnosis - using complexity & identity theories
  
• Evidence based disruption, contextualizing, power
  
• Conceptualizing, historicizing, deconstructing
  
• Chaos & Rigidity - disenchantment
  
• Constructing Vitality, enchantment
  
  

  PART II: APPLYING VITALITY CONSULTING TO WORK SITUATIONS
  (Disrupt-Contextualize-Construct)

• Introduction to Part II: From Disenchantment to Enchantment
  
  

  SECTION III. Workplace Disenchantment & the Twin Challenges of Chaos & Rigidity

  
  Chapter 6: Disrupting the Misuse of the Diversity Wheel - Critiquing Managing Diversity
  
• "But You're White!"
  
• The wheel, labels, borders and boundaries
  
• The wheel, conceptualizing vs categorizing
• Authenticity, politics of recognition, from Identities to Categories
  
• Metaphysics of Authenticity, energetics of generosity, ethics
  
• Victimization and ressentiment, marking language as 'race' (Latino)
  
  Chapter 7: Disrupting Organizational Nihilism, Legitimacy Crises, Business Communications and Anxiety
  
• Disembodied language games, saboteur & automaton
  
• Assimilation
  
• Legitimacy Crises: Trust
  
• CVA, EVA, PVA or No-VA: stakeholder balance & Integrity
  
• Anxiety Containment, Fear, Dread, Ontological security, stress
  
• Complexity at the personal level, fragmentation to vitality
  
• Diversity Vitality consulting: unearthing disenchantment without moralizing and creating victims, ressentiment
  
  

  SECTION IV. Workplace Enchantment: Vitality Solutions and Ethical Pluralism

  
  Chapter 8: Contextualizing the Diversity Wheel for Vitality Ð The Creative Power of Identity, Relationships and Knowledge
  
• Everyone is different, everyone is the same: Paradox
  
• Efficiency with Effectiveness
  
• Ethnocentrism, racism, disenchantment: contextualizing by example
  
• The rise of the Persecution Society: pathologizing differences
  
• Social construction of otherness, scapegoating, sin and sickness
  
• Race, Colorism, slavery as platform for scientific racism
  
• Applying contextualizing of race, to gender, sexuality, etc
  
• Using history to make history: dangers of culturism, return to rigidity
  
  Chapter 9: Constructing Organizational Vitality: The Grammar of Conduct, Ethics and Pluralism in A Constitutional Governance Project
  
• Getting to Ethical Pluralism, an overview
  
• The role of dialogue: a communicative project
  
• The Grammar of Conduct: Expectations and orientation
  
• Accountability - centrality and role
  
• Constitutional Project: justice, ethics, regulatory systems
  
• Challenges to business Constitutional Project with examples
  
  

  SECTION V: A New Praxis for an Old Method

  
  Chapter 10: A Brief Conclusion: New Uses for old techniques.
  
• Review
  
• Central Points
  
• Role of multicultural employee affinity groups, diversity councils, vitality assessments, educational interventions
  
• Metrics and change modeling
  
  

  End-Notes, Glossary & Bibliography