DIVERSITY: ORGANIZATION

Why promote diversity? University of Chicago: For diverse and competing perspectives, because these spur rigor and encourage better practices. Firestone Tires: For a corresponding diverse audience or community to be better served and represented (or more comfortable with their representation and service). Also, diversity is a moral good.

Diversity is better than the discrimination we now see as preceding it. The changing meaning of “better” no doubt plays a part in this accomplishment. Better means more appropriate and effective with less associated problems, which is not new. What better cannot mean is that what diversity protects might matter to anyone else. Is it possible a gay employee could ever hurt business? What about a white employee at a black run business? Officially, differences of race, class, and age are strictly harmless as these categories are superficial social constructs that have no real meaning. Harmlessness means that harms are not legally recognized, and are therefore someone else’s problem (eg psychological problems of vicious racists). This also means all protected categories of diversity must have zero impact, none positive and none negative.

Diversity systematizes a scheme of differentiation whose reactionary terms minimize problems. There need not be diversity by height or favorite color, which are trivial categories and not protected classes. There are uncertain cases that are not always categorical, such as weight or (dis)ability. The scheme of differentiation turns things that are different into differences between specimens, usually as a reaction to politicization of the topic by those who would be members of a class. Organizations don’t sit around inventing new categories; they add them when they must. This usually means they protect the old before the young, proud before ashamed, and organized before disorganized. Categories promise a language that can be leveraged to deal with specific situations (we hope to use rights), but often function as dimensions of variation from a normalized center (you are black and/or a woman, but there is nothing special about being both).

These dimensions of divergence all count as metrics of diversity, and any one of them can be used as evidence to the world that an organization is diverse. Liberal arts schools have geographical diversity (including lots of international students with money), which resolves the question of whether or not they are diverse before anyone discusses economic or racial diversity.

We can use diversity to justify something that is different and harmless to others. We cannot use it to champion something that is different but impacts others, unless that impact is expressed in terms of the promotion of diversity per se. We can also use diversity to defend a carefully engineered system of homogeneity.

Diversity in these ways is closely related to multiculturalism, and is another case of liberalism’s insistent openness working out a compromise. The concept, however, appears many other places.