Transcending Barriers:
Diversity Management and Innovative Employer Strategies
- By Dr Alan Bruce
A Paper Delivered to the ‘Access and Diversity: A New Vision of Work’ Conference hosted by the Equal at Work Project and the Dublin Employment Pact on September 25, 2003 at Croke Park Conference Centre.
THE CONTEXT OF DIVERSITY
For contemporary industry, the issue of diversity has become a pressing one for a number of connected reasons. In this, industry is partly reflecting the demographic, social and cultural changes of its wider surrounding politico-economic environment. It is also reflecting the powerful challenges and struggles in the organization, structure and control of work and labour conditions which have existed since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
The current social context of diversity is concerned with the composition of the workforce in terms of multiple elements of identity: race, religion, gender, language or nationality for example. The nature of the modern labour market displays both increased complexity and diversity emerging from powerful social forces and population movements. These are linked to forced migration, regional impoverishment and the changing nature of work itself due to technological advances and improvement. It is also concerned with the implications of legislation and human relations practice. These touch on issues regarding diversity in regard to rights, ethical practice, conflict resolution and promotion of equal opportunities.
The labour market therefore manifests the changes in work practice that have been conditioned, on the one hand, by the process of globalization and, on the other, by the enactment of equality-based legislation in various jurisdictions.
Equal status for all (and particularly for those who have been traditionally excluded by reason of prejudice or discrimination) poses a set of challenges for social institutions apart from the labour market. This has become particularly noticeable in the European context where there is an extensive tradition of labour-related legislation in the various Member States. The added impact of European Union rules produces a strong emphasis on common standards both to affirm rights and to regulate workforce conditions.
Managing Diversity is today a key issue in management and personnel practice. It emerges from profound socio-economic labour market changes in the Western or developed world over the past forty years. From the time of the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) in the United States, American industry began to experience the impact of a changing workforce – and a workforce with enshrined rights regarding anti-discrimination. These workers came from traditionally excluded sectors as well as from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds. Subsequently, the entry of significant numbers of women workers and employees with disabilities brought about additional challenges to work practices and structures. In the US (and, by extension, European) context, these had frequently been based on a static, white, male image of the ‘traditional’ labour force.
Both European and American concepts of diversity management in labour market contexts have a number of shared concerns. These include:
- Best practice in the human resources development function
- Maximization of the potential of new and existing labour market participant categories
- Reduction of social and economic cost in dealing with diverse labour groups
- Conformity to national or transnational legislative requirements
- Tapping into the creativity latent in diverse and non-standard work groups and perspectives
- Innovative responses to inclusion, design and differentiated market sectors.
In European terms, management of diversity has been centrally linked to the enforcement of principles of equality among citizens and the prohibition of discrimination on a wide range of specified grounds. While legislation varies significantly between all Member States, in most there remains a gap between the legal prohibition of discrimination and the actual outcomes for traditionally disadvantaged groups. In all countries, legal proof of discrimination tends to be very difficult.
The dramatic changes in employment and economic performance in recent years need to be related to profound changes in social structure and demographic composition. A significant danger has been identified in the fact that European rights are in fact increasingly restricted. They are sometimes seen to be available only to European citizens and not to the millions of external workers, refugees and asylum seekers who have arrived in Europe in ever greater numbers. The extension of notions of equality of rights of participation, citizenship and access beyond gender to all citizens (and indeed non-citizens) is now a fundamental question of European social policy. It also goes to the core of what is expected in practical applied programmes for the management of diversity at micro-economic and local level as well as at that of national (or supra-national) levels.
Managing diversity in the context of fundamental social rights is an area of profound importance for both employers and policy makers. The Supiot Report identified key areas where progress needed to be made in the context of European employment policy. These are:
- Reinforcement of the right of free movement of labour and extension of that right to non-Union nationals legally resident in the European Union. Fundamental rights should not be based on nationality but on legally performed work.
- Resolution of the issue of trade union rights at Union level.
- The need for a European framework for information and consultation for companies operating in the single market.
- Recognition of the role of non-governmental organizations in the formulation and implementation of Union social policy.
- Pursuit of action at Union level to combat discrimination, especially on the grounds of race.
- Implementation of the fundamental principle of adaptation of work to the needs of the worker, particularly in the context of working time.
Managing diversity can be seen, at a minimum, as a tool to enable employers to adapt to challenges posed by differentiated workforces where expectations and levels of communication may even be sources of potential conflict. In a wider context, managing diversity may be seen as a powerful resource to benefit from the change processes and to tap into levels of creativity and potential produced by radical departures from past certainties.
CHANGE, GLOBALIZATION AND THE FOUR GREEN FIELDS
Discussion of change has become almost a cliché in the Irish context. The transformation of a largely rural and agrarian society, with a self-perception of racial and cultural homogeneity, into a complex and multi-ethnic post-modern melting pot at the cutting edge of technological advance, is one of the great myths of contemporary Irish public discourse. Like all myths it does encompass some surface truths while explaining little about the underlying reasons of historical fact and economic realities.
The change process in Irish society is similar to that experienced by all societies undergoing the dual processes of industrialization and integration into a world market economy. That this process had commenced several centuries previously with the impact of colonization, expropriation and plantation does add originality to the Irish experience - especially in a specifically European context.
It means also that Irish social diversity is not a new phenomenon. The fracture lines of Irish identity are both complex and laced with the potential for significant violence. From the standpoint of the twilight days of the Celtic Tiger, it may be difficult to envisage that the norm for Irish society for many centuries has been one of violence and contentious fragmentation with little if any shared sense of unity or common purpose. The sense of a settled, cohesive society moving through the standard European phases of state formation, balanced economic growth and enhanced civic enlightenment has not been Ireland’s lot.
The traumatic course of Irish history has meant that change has usually been accompanied by deep resistance or panicked sectoral clutching to often meager economic gains. While the specificity of Irish history does not negate broad economic trends and developments, it lends a unique perspective to legacies of difference and disadvantage in the process of economic transformation.
In attempting to understand the present and future contours of Irish diversity it is essential to appreciate that Ireland has been at once more complex and less cohesive than normally assumed by its economic policy commentators.
The depiction of Ireland as a homogeneous and uniform cultural polity is a recent one. It has its origins in the settlements achieved by the Land League, the pervasive cultural influence of the Roman Catholic Church in the post-Famine era and the inert conservatism of the two States which emerged from the Partition settlement. The trauma of the last thirty years has been as much linked to social change, urbanization, inequality and cultural identities as it has to movements for or against political unification.
For our purposes, the key point is that Ireland has never been a uniform or agreed socio-political entity. The nature of Irish society has been a fragmented, divided and polyglot one. In its very fibres, Ireland has been a laboratory of diversity. Its cultural mosaic has encompassed layers of identity not to be expected in a remote offshore island. Its discontinuities and divisions have however been the source of extraordinary creativity and interplay, where no one culture (Celtic, Gaelic, Danish, Norman French, English, Scottish, Flemish, Jewish or Huguenot) has had a monopoly of Irishness.
This diverse Ireland is presently grappling with the revelations of its seedy underside and the extensive networks of denial and cover-up in its educational, social, institutional and commercial spheres. The uncertainty and shock stemming from disclosures about the litanies of abuse have had as much to do with locating responsibility as loss of faith in the traditional self-image of a caring and supportive society.
A clear sense of these past realities is essential to grasp the contours of the present and the possibilities for inclusion in the future. In its economic aspect, Irish society remained on the periphery of economic development for many decades after formal independence in the South. Such industry as existed functioned behind protectionist walls while the haemorrhage of emigration exported millions of citizens who could find neither jobs nor status in their own country.
The reversal of these trends is relatively recent. The memory of their impact is however potent. Economic development, the creation of jobs and the reversal of emigration have been due to a variety of factors. The positive roles played by enhanced education, social partnership, improved accountability and community development need to be acknowledged. On the other hand the fact that all these improvements were also largely reactions to external stimuli and pressures pinpoints the often subsidiary and derivative nature of Irish social and economic policy formulation.
Ireland exists now, both de jure and de facto, as part of a wider world. Its trends and characteristics mirror those of other societies. Its challenges and opportunities echo those of other nations undergoing similar processes of social transformation. As it once exported its own people, Irish society now receives those exported from the killing fields and slums of the underdeveloped world.
As a seeming host of marginalized groups and subsets of society emerge from the shadows to claim their place as of right at the table of participatory citizenship, it is understandable that the custodians of the traditional myths may feel uneasy. They may well yearn for the days when those who knew their place worked and those who didn’t left. They may well shake their heads in puzzlement at the exotic and different groups who claim not only rights but also respect and no longer meekly accept in silent endurance.
The traditional depiction of Irish backwardness and underdevelopment has a strong parallel with contemporary depictions of social exclusion. Under every category employed, Irish society could be viewed in toto as a metaphor for under-privilege and disadvantage. The structural inequalities were built into a fragmented and discriminatory polity. As the decades of disadvantage unfolded in the twentieth century, Ireland seemed unable to emerge from the social, economic and cultural constraints that dragged it down. In such an environment Raymond Crotty, the chronicler of agricultural underdevelopment and inequality, could observe with a wry bitterness that Ireland had become simply unable to support as many people as cattle.
Decades of deprivation, emigration, political violence, sexism, unemployment and disadvantage are not overturned by a few years of prosperity. More importantly, the attitudes, practices, rationalizations and understandings of those decades persist, and persist profoundly, in the social and economic practices of modern Irish society. The specific nature of Irish social dislocation intersects and is organically connected to more widely recognized aspects of the process termed globalization. The globalizing process is pervasive. It means that no discussion on policy or strategy can be undertaken without a parallel international understanding and analysis.
The emergence of a focus on rights for minorities, the transformation of the demographic composition of the population and the sea-change around the role of women have, together with the sustained war in the north east, been the key features of Irish social development over the past three decades.
It is against this social backdrop that we need to look anew at work and economic activity. Employment is not divorced from its social context. Employment is not simply about job creation and maintenance. It is about the transformative power of work through the production and sale of goods and the distribution of the profits gained. It can also be about the maintenance – or change – of social relationships based on tolerance and equal acceptance.
WORK AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
Extensive cutbacks in the number of jobs in the industrially advanced developed countries, the changing nature of work and the stagnation of growth have provided the starting point for a number of sociological theories about the end of work. In 1995, Jeremy Rifkind could state with authority that we were on the road to “a near workless economy”. Traditional workers and industry are not, however, in decline. These elements are not disappearing from the world. Rather what is happening is that we are witnessing the world division of labour undergoing a set of dramatic changes. Traditional industrial production is more and more being transferred from the countries of the developed centre to those of the underdeveloped periphery.
The development of global corporations, the systematic pillage of natural resources and the existence of a peripheral minimally paid workforce producing a vast array of cheap goods for export underpin the current world economic order.
As in the case of Irish diversity, globalization is not new. It is the latest stage of a process that began with the age of explorations and the “opening” of the wider world to the impact of European expansion, commerce and colonization. The global supremacy of a market form of production and distribution means that we cannot view Irish economic development – or equality strategies – in isolation from wider international trends and issues. The ascendancy of Western countries is based not on any inherent superiority but on the material power of its science and technology that, like the market economy, are the products of its civilization.
These unresolved conflicts of economics, history and societies are the background to a deeper understanding of social inequality than can be assumed from more traditional versions of social change, divorced from context and history. With conflict over resources and identity as a starting point rather than result, we can develop a more accurate picture of the difficulties (as well as the challenges and opportunities) in addressing barriers to economic participation. This analysis helps us to locate issues around exclusion and inclusion in the proper framework of ownership and control - and access to the fruits of ownership and control.
In a globalized environment work is no longer a uniform progression of production and consumption but also an unfolding of a profound restructuring of all social, cultural, personal and ethnic relationships and understandings.
The profound upheavals at European and global levels of the past century have often been intimately connected with identity and/or the assertion of identity against assumed foes. The very project of the European Union itself has at its core an assumption of the need for Europe to assert its place in the world, although against what (or for what) remains unstated. The reality is that European identity is as fragmented as Irish identity and with as much baggage for its own citizens as for those countless millions who have been its colonial subjects.
The great risk to current levels of economic activity is that, failing an accurate analysis of how prosperity emerged and its contours of in-built inegalitarianism, no mechanism of understanding and redress will be present if circumstances change for the worse. Over-reliance on one particular sector (e.g. information technology) or facile economic analysis (trickle down wealth) can produce one-dimensional understanding.