Managing Diversity: A Comment

Abstract

The comment points to ‘managing diversity’ programs within business organizations as built upon an inherently weak structure. I argue that without a moral imperative, (a sense of ‘should’, or ‘ought’, derived from principles and beliefs regarding the treatment of human beings), the diversity programs will fail in their effort to build more competitively successful organizations. Three theoretical views of diversity are considered. It is pointed out that these representative views do not acknowledge the innate weakness of typical diversity management programs.

This commentary claims to predict not only the likely failure of the programs themselves, but also that the programs will by design cause deeper and wider dis-ease within the organization.