Why Certification Now?

Why a Professional Certification for Diversity and Intercultural Practitioners: The Fiduciary Question for Professionals

by Gary Y. Adkins
Executive Director, Programs and Content
Global Diversity Institute

While attending the SIETAR* USA conference in Bloomington in November of 2004, I gave a presentation and held discussions with many participants regarding the professionalization, setting of standards and certification of practitioners. We also looked at the difference between interculturalists and diversity practitioners. The terms boiled down to a fuzzy distinction that overlapped. I proposed, at a special workshop on the topic, that the terms break down as follows: 'Multiculturalism' is used primarily in academia as a platform for scholarly inquiry and research on issues of pluralism, identity and expanding democracy; 'Diversity' is used primarily in professional and business circles to include the unique distinctions between individuals based on social markers such as race and gender (see below) and originated in civil rights legislation, including affirmative action policies; and 'Interculturalism' originated in government circles (the State Department and the UN) for diplomats and professionals who worked towards cultural mutual understanding, communications and collaboration. All three have created respective and sometimes overlapping bodies of knowledge, all in need of cross fertilization and knowledge management. That is the crux of this article and of the vision of the Global Diversity Institute.

The word professional is loosely defined, originally referring to the classic occupations of medicine, law, and clergy. Typically, according to W. Sullivan, professional work has 3 features: (i) specialized training in a field of codified knowledge usually acquired by formal education and apprenticeship, (ii) public recognition of a certain autonomy on the part of the community of practitioners to regulate their own standards of practice, and (iii) a commitment to provide service to the public that goes beyond the economic welfare of the practitioner¹. Are we, in the field of intercultural and Diversity-HR consulting, living up to this?

As Sullivan has argued , the term professional used in everyday language suggests high praise, whereas saying unprofessional sounds as if it is a 'charge' or allegation. For that reason many people desire and compete for the symbolic power of the designated word professional while simultaneously requiring the professional practitioner to adhere to demanding standards of competence and public service. When professional organizations/groups fail to hold their members accountable to these standards, charges of malpractice can emerge, and we end up in court. Again, what is the diversity and intercultural practitioner's professional organization and is it holding members up to such standards of professionalism? Is there some 'evidence' that a practitioner can provide to a client that 'proves' her/his competence and high standards of work?

As farming gave way to manufacturing and now manufacturing has given way to services and information work, the jobs classified as professional and or managerial have become more important and more numerous. The need for expertise and coordination has become more essential. The complexity of modern life and global organizations has made us all far more interdependent than in the past - we depend on the vast number of skills and capacities integrated across people and professions. Skilled professionals have become indispensable to modern society, furnishing the specific skills that are basic to the operation of the complex worlds of industry, government, education, health care, and law. In addition, therapy and social service professionals such as interculturalists help others negotiate that complexity as they aid many in seeking direction and assistance amid the harshness of modern life. There is an assumed compact of reciprocal trust between practitioners and the publics they serve, and sometimes it is made explicit through licensing or certification. This is our fiduciary responsibility.

Professional work carries with it social and individual value. Sullivan, again, argues that "by infusing occupations with a sense of calling, professions contribute to the wider civic order. the ethical spirit of civic life can be manifested and given content in professional work. the more shared commitment to the good society and good life (morals, ethics) then the more value it receives from society. It is in the spirit of vocation that the professions lie.³

The GDI certification in diversity and ethical pluralism (CEDP^**) seeks to afford diversity/intercultural and human resource practitioners with Sullivan's features through a new progressive critical paradigm and professional institution. The word critical used here 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, autonomy, and justice in what 'can be'. Critical in this sense means to seek out and disrupt social injustice in the present forms of oppression, marginalization, discrimination, or mis-utilization. The intercultural and diversity practitioner has an ethical and fiduciary responsibility to the organizations and societies that we serve to educate and facilitate for these improvements. With that in mind, we do not view 'diversity as representation' to be the goal, but rather it is a starting point in a journey towards vitality. Vitality embraces intercultural social justice, ethics, individual autonomy, and critical multiculturalism.

In our efforts to create and develop certified champions to advocate for and nurture social justice issues, interculturalism, and ethical citizenship, we, although not exclusively, look to the workplace as the strongest leverage point for the efficacy of our work. Workplace diversity is not only a wellspring for organizational creativity, energy and innovation. It is the foremost potential source for the autonomous critical thinking and civic toleration skills that are vital to both businesses and the societies we live within. Once they leave formal schooling, where do most adults turn to improve upon and increase understanding and intercultural interaction skills? Work is the primary venue where adults spend most of their out-of-home lives. Work is where socialization and education continues after primary schooling.

Globalization is proving to be a two-edged sword. The cutting edge benefits of lower-priced, high quality products and broader options for materials and resources are counterpointed with the ragged edge of relentless disenchantment and increased anxieties brought about by being required to exist in an incessantly shifting landscape with a constantly expanding world of faces, voices, and ideas. Educational and socialization processes, largely designed for a less precarious, more homogeneous world that is fast disappearing, fail to equip the vast majority with effective skills in confronting this disenchantment and anxiety constructively. This failure leads to renewed conflicts as issues of citizenship and justice become distorted. Continuous education and professional development for the pursuit of voice, communicative competencies, and constitutional citizenship skills grounded in ethics and justice have become critical, at work and at home.

Crucially, there is a disheartening inadequacy in the resources, tools, advice, and literature available to those internal and external professionals, (HR, Senior Management, Diversity and Intercultural Champions, community leaders/facilitators, outside consultants), who are struggling with these new and increasingly complex diversity and cultural issues as they arise in the workplace and in society. This speaks to our professional needs. Who is taking care of the professional practitioner as they try to keep up in this fast changing world?

Besides academia and organizations such as SIETAR, there is no one place to go. Hence, GDI has been created to be a source and a repository for resources, tools, advice, and literature on praxial issues related to diversity, culture, justice and identity cutting across disciplines. Our partnership with the California State University's Center for Ethical leadership is an example of this, as is our (CEDP) certification offering. A growing partnership with SIETAR and other institutions can only add to a practitioner's arsenal.

Generally speaking, a professional career, as diversity and inter-culturalist consultants for example, begins with formal education, continues through substantial apprenticeship, clinically or in practice, and is tested and verified for certification by formal licensing procedures. Professional licensing and the granting of control over the recruitment and training of practitioners are, according to Sullivan, part of a social contract between the organized field and society. It can impart a strong sense of identity for the professional; the kind one can build a life around. Whether "providing counsel and care, curing illness, bringing justice, teaching and the pursuit of knowledge, designing and building for convenience and safety - these are activities that generate more than jobs and satisfaction for individuals. ...They create goods that at some time are essential for everyone, and important for society as a whole. They are activities that sustain public values."⁴ Purposes such as competent performance, dignity, justice and fellowship are in the end civic goods. They make possible a civil and meaningful public realm.⁵ Not unlike medical doctors, interculturalists have a fiduciary responsibility for social purposes. Without the willingness to uphold this contract with society, professional work ceases to be ethically 'good', for either the individual practitioner or for the public.⁶ The competition between professionals, such as diversity consultants in a tight labor market such as ours, is indeed why professional organizations exist, to temper market pressures and to ensure the ethical practice of each professional member.

A new paradigm is needed 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 fragmentation of countries by ethnicities or by growing religious fundamentalism and acts of intolerance, is a by-product of what some call the globalized post-industrial service world, or the post modern landscape.

The old diversity paradigm steeped in U.S. 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 and fractal identities that are emerging and manifesting themselves globally in the workplace. For example, the current U.S. based paradigm of 'managing diversity' is a modernist methodology based on social engineering, on an early civil rights orientation and is oftentimes reduced to representation-as-inclusion strategies vs. one of emancipation, voice/ empowerment and justice. Diversity Management is in need of an update just as it is in need of knowledge sharing between multicultural academicians and interculturalists.

Whether called multiculturalism in academic and media circles, or interculturalism in government and NGO circles, this rising complexity surrounding human diversity calls for a new form of understanding (theory) with a corresponding new application (practice). With that, professionals need training and education to certify their continued learning. The fact of diversity/multi/inter-culturalism is indisputable⁺, yet 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 to set professional standards, identify new and evolving competencies, and establish centers of excellence to interrelate our professional lives. When social tensions enter the workplace, creativity is disrupted. When workplace tensions are taken into communities, then social life is disrupted. This is the work of both interculturalists and diversity practitioners.

Our intention is to provide diversity and HR practitioners with both a counter narrative to the social engineering business narrative of the last 100 years and a counter practice that ensures vitality results. This provides practitioners with an organic language of inclusion and motion, of emergence and fluidity over the mechanical language of things, widgets, categories and numbers. This theoretical foundation uses the language of humanist critical theory, of complexity science and of emancipatory social justice, including identity autonomy. So much of this moves us beyond 'managing diversity' to managing social organizations for diversity, from managing people to managing the context for people to thrive. This is the language of optimizing (human) diversity in a pluralist society and in workplace vitality.

Learning a new language and a corresponding set of skills regarding human diversity necessarily generates a discourse that can move our intercultural and diversity practices. With CEDP certification we will be learning about individual particularity within social constellations in contrast to the simplistic language of ethno-group collectivity. In focusing on solidarity, empathy and the reciprocity of identities in dialogue, we highlight the reciprocal nature of dialogue needed to overcome injustice and ethical violations. This vitality moral point of view' is embedded in an ethical code and explored discursively within a constitutional project. It takes the best learnings from interculturalist practice, multiculturalist research, and diversity's lessons.

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. In organizations, as in cultures, acculturating and educating 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 (and life) can be a better place - for all stakeholders. Not unlike citizens of society, 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 if it is to impact both the places we work in and those in which we live. This is the stuff of diversity and inter-cultural praxis aiming at social vitality building.

To conclude, although the basic business case for diversity remains sound, the theory behind it, and hence its praxis, is out of date. 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 HR/practitioner world and the exciting new theoretical research done in the academy^***. A professional association delivering certification training while monitoring quality and competencies as it creates a 'home' for the professional and for society's trust in the professional is a solution⁷.

This is the challenge of organizations such as the CEL (Center for Ethical Leadership), GDI (the Global Diversity Institute) and SIETAR (Society of Intercultural Education Training and Research) when offering its members continuing education, conferences, training and perhaps now, certification. These are the issues confronting us as we address Sullivan's three features of a true professional.


NOTES

^* SIETAR-USA: Society of Intercultural Education Training and Research-USA
^1. William M. Sullivan, Work and Integrity; The Crisis and Promise of Professionalism in America, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco: 2005, pgs 36-40.
^2. Sullivan, ibid.
^3. Sullivan, op. cit.
^**Certified Ethical Diversity Practitioner
^4. Sullivan, op. cit.
^5. Sullivan, op. cit.
^6. Sullivan, op. cit.
⁺ multiple verifications from Workforce 2000 and 2020 studies to the census reports
^*** colleges and universities, think tanks and institutes
^7. For a history of diversity management approaches and the distinction between 'managing diversity' and 'optimizing diversity in vitality' Click Here to go to the relevant Journal of Diversity Praxis article.