The Work-Force (People)

In this section, Diversity Praxis addresses the contextual issues facing businesses and individuals today. These range from globalization, rapid change, uncertainty, anxiety, and alienation. We will be regularly discussing issues of reorganization, immigration, and multiculturalism.

DIVERSITY AND IDENTITY
People at work

When we speak of human diversity, we are speaking of the uniqueness' that each and every one of us have. Diversity, taken from the sciences to signify variety, means that each individual has different and unique identities that can contribute varied perspectives and multiple approaches to work. These identities are formed at the individual, group and organizational levels. It is an inclusive term to embrace all identities and identity groups including age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, abilities, cognitive and religious diversity, linguistic and job position diversity and related identities that people use to make meaning in their lives and at work. For example, I am a white male, middle age, educated, non-religious with no evident disabilities and raised abroad. These are a sampling of my varied identities that provide me with varied perspectives and approaches to how I work, make meaning in the world and infuse my creativity. They are part of the tapestry that makes me unique.

Embedded in this definition of diversity is the term identity. It is to identity that the crux of how best to understand human diversity can be made clear. Our identity, or identities to be more precise, is how we make meaning out of life. Identity gives us a sense of who we are and it shapes how we relate to others and to the world we live in. It is a process we use to construct meaning on the basis of culture or another related attribute. It is the source of meaning and experience we use to make distinctions between the self and others, the "we" and the "they" or the I and the you. Asking 'what am I for and whom am I with' forms identities. It is also who and what I am against or what I feel is against me that defines the "other", a potential rival or perhaps an enemy. The answer to the question of who or what is the "other" depends on our social context, or our social relationships. Our identities are constructed socially within the web of relationships we find ourselves within. Generally speaking, which identity is salient depends on which one is being questioned, socially, in a given moment. Our identities, and hence our diversity, is both time and place dependent.

Yet, as Amy Gutman has written in her recent book, Identity in Democracy, when people are identified as black or white, male or female, Irish, Arabic, Catholic, Jew or Muslim, they can be stereotyped by race, gender, ethnicity, religion, ability, etc and denied a certain individuality that comes of their own distinctive character and movement from one identity-affiliation to another. When individuals themselves self-identify racially, ethnically, or religiously, etc as a consequence of being identified with groups by society, they then oftentimes develop hostilities towards other groups or superiority towards them, vying with one another and sacrificing justice or peace. For an organization, as for society, this becomes a source of non-productive conflict. Although people do identity with others based on social markers, no single group identity or even all group identities taken together comprehend the whole of a person, though a commonly shared identification around any of the above characteristics often leads to a group identity. My being male, for example, does not comprehend the totality and uniqueness of who I am and what I am able to contribute. Hence, the harmful danger exists of reducing one into a label or category.

One's salient, primary identity is the one that is being addressed at any given time (questioned or attacked). Our secondary identities lie dormant, just waiting to be addressed, yet always in dialogue with our primary identity, the self that is made public in a given relationship and situation. Ours is a plurality of identities, a diversity of selves that is in dialogue with each other and with the outside world. This is both a source of our creative freedom as well as a source of our anxieties. For example, we feel captive to others' evaluations and judgments of our worth, our competences and of our ability. This makes us vulnerable. Do I belong or am I good enough are questions that haunt our being-in-the-world.

One solution is for us to form proactive identities that usher in an empowered sense of participating in the world, of being the author of one's life and future that resists the negative forces that seek to marginalize or reduce us. Proactive identities energize a positive politic to give us voice for our desires, to our art of living as a particular and unique being. For example, if I give voice to my gender on behalf of feminism's project to dismantle patriarchy's subjugation of women, then it is a proactive identity. To declare my gender at the expense of another, to exclude, eliminate or denigrate another as in sexism, is reactive. When we name ourselves instead of being named or categorized by another's power, then our proactive identity serves to transform my existence. It is a creative act of cultural translation from one that a dominant power uses to denigrate, exclude or marginalize me to one that is involved in my own empowerment. To declare that I am a person of color and not a colored person is a creative and empowering act. Identities and identity formation is a complex process.

Understanding the very fluidity and complexity of people's identities at work, in relationships that matter on the job, and with all of their identity formations, including the proactive and the reactive ones, enables practitioners (e.g. HR) to contest discrimination or oppression as a workplace process instead of as a simplistic perpetrator-victim circumstance. When we speak of organizational dynamics in terms of complex adaptive systems, then understanding organizational people as complex adaptive systems themselves, of fluctuating identities and not of diversity labels and inert essences, will enable HR and diversity professionals to not only diagnose workplace situations more clearly, but also to build authentic stakeholder relations more easily. When we manage the context instead of the person while simultaneously focusing in on identities in relationships with others, then we are contributing to the system's resilience and adaptability in the face of relentless change. We can ask what else is needed for my marketing team to effectively collaborate with the laboratories instead of looking out for the problem person.

Like an organization in the fitness landscape, always renegotiating its position and competitiveness vis a vis its challengers, people exist on a fitness landscape as well (see article on stakeholder relations in this issue). Individual identities are constantly being renegotiated, changed, reshaped, and protected as a source of pleasure, desire, power, meaning, danger and wealth. They provide us with a way of understanding the interplay between our subjective experience and the objective world, usually organized around a primary identity or self. It is constructed from a diversity of influences that produce a diversity of behaviors. Our job is to insure healthy workplace influences within organizational vitality. As pointed out in Diversity Beyond The Numbers, we have found that individual creativity in an organization lies at the edge of personal and organizational chaos. We call this edge of chaos 'vitality'. People, as with systems (e.g. organizations), can react to the stressors of life (both external stimuli and internal psychological worldviews) by either retreating into rigidity and conformity or by racing towards fragmentation and personal chaos. By helping people to exist in vitality, at the edge of chaos, individuals are able to hold onto the ambiguities and paradoxes of life while containing the anxiety generated from stressful situations and constant change. They adapt to those stressors and hence they evolve and learn, bringing the organization along with them.

Unfortunately, people have found themselves operating in increasingly stressful environments. Often, we respond by withdrawing psychologically from the life of the organization as we construct, in our minds, the world we live in and work in. This world is dependent upon the ways of thinking that we share with each other. The healthier the exchange and relationships we have with others, the healthier the inner and outer world we construct. We then exhibit increased emotional and social competencies, hallmarks of vital organizations.

As Jurgen Habermas has pointed out, human dignity is connected to a relational symmetry, to individuals addressing one another intersubjectively for agreement and disagreement. Interpersonal relations of mutual respect in equalitarian dealings with one another allow for the playful vitality needed for creativity to blossom. This mutual respect represents the ethical platform that ensures pluralism's success. At work, as in life, we make sense of organizational life using a shared frame of reference and a shared way of seeing to allow human identity to emerge through the course of social externalization. The fluctuating self, our diverse identities, can only be stabilized within a network of undamaged relations of mutual recognition where dignity resides. This stabilized self is the proactive primary identity referred to earlier. Without it, we fragment and act out against perceived threats. Hence the call for building vital organizational workplaces and cultures that embrace the ethical and the moral project of equal good and equal justice for all becomes paramount. Conversely, if the workplace culture is inconsistent in its approach to exclusion, oppression or marginalization, then acting out behaviors (e.g. aggression) erupt. If racist statements and job segregation behaviors are selectively applied and allowed to occur, then one's willingness to psychologically engage at work is reduced. A proactive primary identity can transform itself into a reactive one, if not a fundamentalist one, exhibiting resentment and victim-hood behaviors.

People are made up of fluctuating identities, we cannot be reduced or stereotyped into a sole label such as race or gender, etc. Paradoxically, people simultaneously need recognition for their many identities such as the racial, the sexual, or the ethnic. This need for recognition demands that workplace cultures provide for a platform of mutuality, of mutual respect and accommodation if pluralism is to work on behalf of the 'just workplace' as well as on behalf of the innovative workplace. Innovation is the child of creativity, and creativity is the product of safe spaces of social justice and empowerment. As changing situations affect our environments whereby regional, national and international linkages within and between organizations proliferate more rapidly, then creativity itself is at risk as fear rises. For instance, more diversity in the organization in ways of perceiving and evaluating situations and in ways of behaving and acting exist alongside of proliferating linkages and rapid technological development. This leaves individuals with increased anxiety. This anxiety is a fear of losing one's security and of having to cope with faster and larger flows of information. The organization must contain this anxiety, build safer spaces for individuals to flourish in and facilitate the morphing of creative ideas into innovative acts. The individual, on the other hand, has the responsibility to further develop his/her own emotional and social competencies in the face of increasing complexity and uncertainty.

Because of this, at GDI we emphasize managing the workplace context for safe and vital spaces to be created. This allows for a stabilization of our fluctuating identities to occur that enables creativity to proliferate. Stabilization is not control, it is not the rigid picture of a collapsed identity nor is it the 'machine cog' organization-man of industrial hierarchical organizations. Rather it is that person described above, whose primary proactive identity organizes and makes meaning of the changes and relations at work to promote learning, fitness landscape co-evolution and emotional-social competencies through anxiety containment. This allows for a generosity of spirit to surface that builds authentic relations between stakeholders. Creativity can never be an individual process, it always involves interaction with others in a group and with the help others provide you to thrive in a changing fitness landscape. With strong ties between agents creativity grows in the mind as innovation occurs in behaviors to help along the resiliency and competitiveness of the group or the organization. Organizational learning, as Ralph Stacey reminds us, is the amplification and incorporation of individual and small group learning.

Understanding why people are different, how they utilize their different identities, and how they engage in dialogue and exploration based on their differences (identities) helps us to help people self reflect and to help organizations self-organize. We help people and organizations to amplify and self reflect during creative tension, on the use of unpredictability, and on the diversity of perspectives and approaches to work that fluctuating identities and vital workplace cultures have to offer. If identities are a reaction to something outside in dialogue with one's internal self, then acting solely in the name of identity instead of in the name of authorship means reacting against perceived attack. Rigid and chaotic organizational cultures promote reactive victims, not empowered creative actors. Safe spaces for creativity and vitality produce self-affirming actors that formulate oneself as a creator of the future and a bridge to that future. This bridge is the resilience and adaptability organizations need in an ever-changing world. Instead of an ethics of revenge, the stabilized fluctuating identities of the empowered self produces an ethic of generosity. Self-reflective identities, the stable self, knows that this is a social creation. This knowledge propels our understanding of the primacy of relatedness and the culture of vitality. We know that to manage the context for diversity and vitality is to facilitate complex adaptive learning within organizations.

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