WELCOME: AN INTRODUCTION TO DIVERSITY PRAXIS
From the editorial advisory board

A. Why a journal on diversity as praxis?

Diversity Praxis is a platform to dialogue on issues surrounding human diversity and multiculturalism in the workplace, in our schools, and in our healthcare institutions. It addresses the need to bring together progressive voices who seek to inform their diversity and human resource practice with a new progressive paradigm and critical new theory. The word critical used in this journal is not meant to imply judgment or negativity, but rather it is more like a spotlight focused on improving what is in the ‘now’ in search of safe spaces for emancipation, freedom and autonomy in what ‘can be’. Critical in this sense means to seek out social justice in present forms of oppression, marginalization, discrimination, or mis-utilization. With that in mind, we view ‘diversity as representation’ to not be the goal, but rather a starting point in our journey towards vitality. Vitality embraces social justice, ethics, individual autonomy, critical multiculturalism and balance. These terms and others will be discussed below in our language section and throughout the journal. A fuller exploration of this language of hope, care, dialogue, ethics and trust can be found in our book Diversity Beyond The Numbers; Business Vitality, Ethics & Identity in the 21st Century, written by the executive editor, Gary Y. Adkins, and published by GDI Press.

Diversity Management is in need of a new paradigm. In fact, the expression ‘managing diversity’ is problematic, in that it is patronizing and it pathologizes differences. By saying ‘managing diversity’, it appears that we are saying if diversity, defined as human variety and differences, needs managing, then there is something inherently problematic, wrong or dangerous with diversity. Specifically, the implied suggestion is that diversity in people requires a special managing. The current paradigm of ‘managing diversity’ is a modernist methodology based on social engineering, on an early civil rights orientation and is oftentimes reduced to representation strategies.

Managing is defined as control, handling, directing or administering. Yet, if, as most businesses say, we currently view human variety, difference, and diversity as a positive, then we are really needing to manage for diversity. We must manage the context at work to allow diversity to flourish, contribute and prosper. So the first issue is with our language, in that we should be speaking of optimizing diversity, not handling it, managing it or controlling it like some pathogen lying in wait to destroy the business. This optimization is at the crux of a new diversity paradigm.

Secondly, we need a new paradigm because the world is changing so rapidly. We oftentimes hear people refer to ‘white water’ change whereby the world has become a much more uncertain and anxious place for many. This has led to unforeseen reactions and identity militancy. This identity militancy is the posturing of a single identity (say religion or ethnicity) in opposition to others. Globally, this assertive identity militancy, whether manifested in the fragmenting of countries by ethnicities or by growing religious fundamentalism and acts of intolerance, is a by-product of what some call the post-industrial service world, or the post modern landscape. Just look at the former Yugoslavia, or currently in Spain, in Indonesia and of course 9/11. The old diversity paradigm steeped in US notions of race and civil rights is just not up to the task of understanding rising fundamentalist identities, notions of theo-diversity (religious diversity) or hybrid identities that are entering and manifesting themselves in the workplace. Called multiculturalism in academic and media circles, this rising complexity surrounding diversity calls for a new form of understanding (a new theory) with a corresponding new application (practice). The fact of diversity is indisputable (from Workforce 2000 and 2020 studies to the census reports) but the approach we take to this multiculturalism is highly contested.

To contend with these new and unfamiliar challenges (from terror, war, identity assertiveness and global fragmentation), we need a post industrial or post modern diversity praxis. Praxis is the intersection of theory and practice into application within a feedback loop for continuous learning. Our praxis must help instill organizational adaptability and flexibility in the face of rapid changes (technological or social). For example, as Serbs and Croats battle at home, and if these old tensions arise in the workplace, then what does an American manager do when he/she can’t ‘see race’? Given our history, the U.S. is race obsessed, yet the rest of the world, given their histories, is culture/ethnicity/religion obsessed. Education and training on the subtleties and complexities of human diversity must move beyond EEO categories if we are to help organizational adaptability, resilience and flexibility along. At the root of adaptability is human creativity, best served by diverse and abundant human perspectives generating new ideas and processes. In the absence of creativity we have conformity and group think, the stuff of the Challenger and now the Columbia disasters. Yet, when creativity runs amok, we have chaos. The balance between chaos and rigidity (conformity) is to pursue an ethics based pluralism called vitality.

Thirdly, although the basic business case for diversity remains sound, the theory behind it and hence its praxis is in need of updating. Praxis involves doing the research while doing the work. It is application informed by theory. Conversely, mere practice is simply technique and the static application of an old set of ideas and tools not updated for a world swimming in newness. We need to build a bridge between the exciting new research done in the academy (colleges and universities, think tanks and institutes) and the HR/practitioner world.

B. The historical evolution of management approaches to diversity and multiculturalism.

After the U.S. civil rights movement helped usher in EEO/AA guidelines, businesses needed to move from culturally homogenous organizations to diverse ones. This meant not only recruiting historically excluded and marginalized Americans, but also managing the inevitable conflicts that would emerge on the job when two people who lived segregated lives were now forced to work side by side. The management paradigm of valuing diversity emerged to address this challenge. It sought to answer the question “why can’t we all just get along?” Valuing diversity is sensitivity-based training, although much of it was based in a new political correctness language that had a moralizing tone of blame and shame to it (“you are a …ist”). Political correctness is an orthodoxy where language becomes rigidified and frozen into a bipolar right and wrong. Its origins, in valuing diversity and the new identity movements of the 1960’s, had a noble intent. Originally meant to self represent and to reframe the words used in daily communications to reflect a sensitivity towards people historically marginalized and denigrated in U.S. history. Instead, it degenerated into ‘language wars’, an internal squabbling over the ‘absolutely correct’ words. Language, like people, evolves over time. Communities that were silenced in the past struggled to find inclusive words that communicate dignity as well as respect. When this process is ossified into an orthodoxy, though, it perversely has the opposite affect. It can shut down dialogue and create resentment on all sides. This struggle over language allowed for anti-PC rhetoric to camouflage resistance against diversity measures of any kind. Later on this took the form of ‘backlash’.

With the wrenching changes implemented in US businesses to catch up with Japan and other competitors who had perfected Total Quality Management (TQM) in the 1980s, the valuing diversity approach gave way to what is still being called the Managing Diversity or managing and valuing diversity (MVD) paradigm. This approach sought to redress the problem of exclusion by redefining diversity to include all people on the job, including straight white males. It also took the bold step forward of informing MVD with TQM tenets. It began to ask the question “What can we do to improve the quality of diversity at work?” MVD made sense in the modern industrial socio-economic world. TQM and MVD are industrial management approaches still focusing on social engineering of people as if they were machine parts. Today’s global, postindustrial and postmodern world demands a new perspective. The world is too complex, the variables between human intention and human action infinite, communications links too immediate, and the agents in the competitive business landscape are too multiple. All make the notion of management control, inherent in industrial approaches, quaint and out of date. Although MVD sought to adapt to the roaring 1990’s dot com phenomenon with the “leveraging diversity” approach by asking the question “what can diversity do for my business?”, it remained wedded to industrial notions of engineering people.

From managing, valuing and leveraging diversity, we now must move to optimizing diversity in multicultural business vitality. We now must ask how can the best practices of the preceding approaches be updated with the progress made in the social and physical sciences. Each successive diversity approach builds on the best practices of the previous, although the paradigmatic framework of optimizing diversity has shifted. We must do this while focusing on the business culture, and not on the individual victimized by oppression. Focusing on the context (culture) of the individual is liberating, whereas focusing on the individual can be oppressive (e.g. by pathologizing differences as deviant).

C. The language of diversity and management: from control to emergence

Our intention is to provide diversity and HR practitioners with a counter narrative to the social engineering business narrative of the last 100 years. We seek to provide practitioners with an organic language of inclusion and motion, of emergence and fluidity over the mechanical language of things, widgets, categories and numbers. This diversity praxis theory uses the language of humanist critical theory, of complexity science and of emancipatory social justice, including identity autonomy. So much of this language moves beyond managing diversity to managing the organization for diversity, from managing people to managing the context for people to thrive. This is the language of optimizing (human) diversity in an enchanted organization of workplace vitality. These theoretical principles orient our thinking and judgments as we make them. Our glossary will be updated regularly to help the practitioner absorb and utilize this new language of hope and possibility to counter the mechanistic and nihilistic language of diversity as numbers, things and cogs in a wheel.

The language of vitality and diversity praxis is not in opposition to the language of diversity management per se. Rather, we seek to expand on the discourse of diversity management to both sunder its relationship between diversity categories and the reifying damage done to people’s identities and secondly to generate a discourse that captures the notion of growth, evolution, emergence, hope and individuality. We will be speaking about the particularity of individual diversity within the social and institutional constellation of an organization. Hence the language of emancipation, of voice, ethics, values, reciprocity, respect, citizenship, and pluralism will be used instead of mere diversity EEO categories such as race, gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality, abilities, etc. We seek to contrast the language of ethno-group collectivity and authenticity to the care-solidarity, empathy and reciprocity of identities in dialogue. By focusing on empathy and solidarity, we highlight the dialogue needed to overcome injustice viewed as ethical violations in the workplace. The vitality workplace ‘moral point of view’ is embedded in its ethical code and explored discursively in its constitutional project. This entails communicative competencies if we are to be held responsible and the organization be held accountable.

Only the education and training of associates in the organization can ensure these communicative skills. In dialogue, only a language that allows for regular reinterpretation by fully autonomous people whose self -reflective and critical thinking is brought to play can we ensure participative inclusion. Acculturating employees should be a continuous process, thereby socializing the individual into h/her social space in the organization. Ideally, we want the socialized individual to reflect on how the workplace can be a better space – for all stakeholders. This self-reflection and its consequent behavior would preferably be an act of an ethically self controlled associate or citizen of the association. Each individual’s self reflection, from the associate to the consultant, would be seeking out emancipation, empowerment, heterogeneity and vitality on the one hand while disrupting conformity, marginalization or oppression on the other. This goal of justice in the workplace takes constant struggle, within the framework of dialogue and of a solid communicative practice. Rules, laws and codes don’t guarantee social justice, nor do ethical behaviors reflect values such as respect and dignity if they are merely written down in ‘codes of conduct’ or ethical statements. It takes work, socialization, exchange and communicative interpretation. This is a process of emergent facilitation and empowerment – the stuff of diversity praxis and vitality building.

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Journal Welcome
Praxis Model
Model Explanation
Work-World
Work-Place
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Literature Reviews
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Glossary of Terms