The Diversity Movement – Is it Trite?, conclusion and transition

When Justice Powell opened up the door to factors other than race being relevant at to achieve diversity (see post on August 26, 2007) consultants raced through with their something-for-everyone approach. So we hear groups talking about their diversity in a manner that is nothing more that their individual personality differences – one likes baseball, not football; one grew up in a town and the other grew up in a mid-size city; one likes cats and the other dogs and on and on. One of the more popular diversity issues has to do with the “generational personality.

The generational personality is a view that the era into which one was born greatly affects and separates people. Baby Boomers are the most talked-about “generation.” This is deceptive because at one level it can sound like an interesting and relevant discussion about the difference between young people and middle age people. But that misreads the thesis. The point the advocates are making is that people born between certain arbitrarily set years gain a common personality that links them and that they carry throughout their life cycle. So, young people don’t mature into old people; rather, baby boomers take a trait – usually the example of supposed defiance of authority is conjured up - through life whereas the generation that proceeds (or follows) them might be more accommodating toward authority throughout the life cycle. Regardless of the merits of this unproven theory, the consultants hustling this notion claim that “It is Diversity management at its most challenging. The obvious markers of race and sex have less clear impact on differences and signal less in the way of differential treatment than do generational differences.” Source: Ron Zemke, Claire Raines and Bob Filipczak, Generations at Work (New York: American Management Association, 2000), p. 25.

The generational personality approach usually requires its promoters to twist reality. At the National Labor-Management Conference of 2006, Commissioners from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service presented a workshop designed to help participants recognize the strengths and obstacles of their own age group (Traditionalists, Boomers, Xers and Millennials in dealing with others. Their promotional material has this come-on: “Can’t we all just get along? Well frankly, no.”
Source: http://www.fmcs.gov/internet/itemDetail.asp?categoryID=238&itemID=17866

This is nonsense. The generational personality literature written as late as 2000 defines these four groups as four generations with the “Traditionalists” typically World War II veterans. These four groups do not co-exist in the modern workplace because the war veterans would need to be 80 at the youngest. Even if the FMCS staff presented these generatons slightly changed from other varieties (Different presenters of the Gernational Personality theory change the years in a quite facile manner), Traditionalists would be born before 1946 but still young enough to be working in 2006, a dwindling slice of the workforce with alleged different needs that managers need to take into account from those born in 1947. Second, it is insulting to workers and managers to assume that they need to understand this generational personality pseudo-social science to get along. Finally, it is insulting to the Diversity movement to link this oddity to the purpose of Diversity.

A more bizarre example of denying reality is the claim of Ron Zemke and his writing partners in Generations at Work. This book published in 2000 by the American Management Association makes the claim, more than once, that the American population shrank in the two hundred years or so before 1946 due to the hardship of life and the Civil War and the Depression of the 1930’s. Source: Zemke, et al , p. 14, 64. The population in the 1790 census was about 5 Million. It has grown in every decade. I have written on this topic elsewhere. Source: Jim Pruitt, Training January 2002. This criticism of a book published by the AMA is not hair splitting.

The Generational Personality theory is trite and it helps make the Diversity Movement trite because it can entice managers and workers into talking about non-threatening issues like the varying entertainment tastes of Baby Boomers and Millennials and thereby allows them to assert that they are committed to diversity. It reduces the need for hard choices and hard coversations about race, ethnicity and gender. It is not surprising that consultants would exploit this opening and it is not surprising that people would find it easier to talk about this topic than race relations. It is surprising (at least to me) that African Americans have allowed this notion to trivialize the Diversity Movement.

The point of the next posts is that this type of triviality leads to stereotyping people.