NO JUSTIFICATION FOR DIVERSITY IS BEST*

Two articles highlight an apparent conflict in understanding issues of (neuro)diversity within the scope of enterprise and its flourishing. In a well cited 2017 article in the Harvard Business Review, Austin and Pisano wrote specifically about neurodiversity as a competitive advantage. They suggest, in part, that organisational (neuro)diversity programs that recruit and place each person in a context that maximizes her or his contributions to a business, will implicitly provide a competitive edge. This is the ‘business case’ for (neuro)diversity. However, more recently, Georgeac and Rattan write in a 2022 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology article that the business case for diversity may be backfiring. Based on their research, Georgeac and Rattan suggest that despite the positivity of the message about the benefits for enterprise in pursuing diversity initiatives, the idea of a ‘business case’ for diversity risks invoking a counter-productive social identity threat. Taken out of context, as the later article has in a recent social media posts (LinkedIn, 25/10/22), the generalisation of a study that embraces identity in the case of LGBTQ+ individuals, STEM women, and African Americans, with the complexities of broadly defined neurodiversity, is at least problematic. It is illustrative of a general problem with identity concepts that are assumed to hold implicit yet overlooked positive traits which must be harnessed in some way, to the general benefit of enterprise within a ‘good’, compassionate social-economy.

????Despite the two articles I have referred to both addressing diversity in the corporate/enterprise sense of promoting corporate health (and profitability), they are un-related. Certainly, the later article makes no reference to neurodiversity, nor are the earlier article’s authors cited in any way. And while the earlier article has its roots in the study of business and management, the later is concerned more directly with social psychology. Here, the idea of a social identity threat concerns whether an individual perceives that their individual identity is threatened and devalued or respected and affirmed within a given social group setting (such as a business). Nevertheless, while not referencing neurodiversity, Georgeac and Rattan’s invocation of social identity threat can reasonably be extended to understand (for example) that some (neuro)diversity recruiting initiatives—signalled by an explicit ‘business case’ and/or recruiting program—might well signal to potential neurodivergent applicants that, rather than offering a respectful an affirmative employment, this is an organisation that, ordinarily would be threatening and de-valuing to the neurodivergent, to the extent that they are taking necessary action to improve matters, but that they may not be there yet. Otherwise, why signal with a business case?

?????The issue with any identity concept is that it immediately sets up others as not of that identity. Any suggestion of privileging any single identity (concept) as inherently possessing certain implicitly positive traits, implies that the other’s not so identified are in some way deficient. This ‘othering’ of some individuals in comparison with others who may be identified as a focus for some attention sets conditions for tension and conflict and, as the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas would have noted, violence. The problem with concepts, as I see it, is that any concept is only a generalised abstraction of the material reality we face in our daily lives. If we focus on the concept—for example, if we focus on promoting a certain flavour of diversity—this can only ever lead us to identify with a concept based on that which is immediately and easily determinable at a surface level.

????I recall, as a young Air Force Officer, visiting a Naval establishment. I walked into a room—all of us in civilian clothes, all male—and yet everything stopped. All looked at me—a point of difference in the room. I did not belong. If one moustachioed person stands in room with everyone either clean shaven or with a full beard, there is an immediate need for that one to identify (or be identified) as different, as moustachioed. I did not belong. My identity as an Air Force Officer emerged in stark contrast to my others: a room full of Naval officers. ?Yet if I, as an autistic person, walk into a room with a veritable rainbow of varied individuals, I am not identified as autistic. On the surface, the easily determined dimensions of my being that are immediately apparent to others, do not separate my identity from them in any fundamental way. It is only at a deeper level, in my interactions with those others that my difference in being can be identified. Our problem is, then, how useful is any conceptual sense of identity when we truly wish to look at a diverse society? The issue is further complicated if we attempt to consider that vast potential of intersectionality’s between the growing range of conceptual identities.

????There is nothing inherently good or bad about any concept. Even the concept of good has its own negative: its othering of that which is not ‘good’. Since a judgment of what is good tends to the subjective, the identification of the good always does violence to that which isn’t good: its other. And this violence is a particular concern if the judgement of what is good, is in any sense flawed. As such, there is nothing inherently good or bad about any conceptual identity. In this sense, the value of any employee or manager’s identity—howsoever labelled—as being inherently good or bad in the sense of a definable contribution to a given business case is fundamentally flawed. In the case of divergent thinking, it is simply not possible to determine, on the basis of an abstract, generalised concept of a certain neurodivergent identity, that any individual’s contribution to the bottom line of a business is inherently good or bad for productivity or profitability. What we require, I suggest, is to move beyond the systemic practice of applying identity labels. I do not, however, suggest that identity labels to not have a purpose. Rather, in the social setting of a business or other organisational enterprise, context is everything.

????In my (non)conceptual world, I am interested in the shaping of context. I argue that if we can shape the context, new forms of meaningful identity can emerge. More appropriately, we can integrate what I call the pre-ontic nature of our emergent, diverse being into our socio-economic organisations in the best, most efficient and most productive way, without our being in any way remarkable, beyond our identity as a valuable member of our socio-economic grouping.

????I recently had the opportunity to practice this (non)conceptual approach in teaching a class of 2nd year undergraduate students about business, creativity and entrepreneurship, without actually teaching entrepreneurship. Rather, I taught about the context of enterprise in which new forms of enterprising identity emerge. For a class with relatively little idea about their future careers (with 72% unfocussed and with no expression of creativity) the impact of teaching context rather than concept led to a marked difference in levels of career indecision (with 87% referencing some future work focus with creativity). From no initial expressions of interest in entrepreneurship, with most (62%) identifying as dreamers, a significant proportion (36%) expressed a desire to identify as an entrepreneur in the future. But this identity was in no sense othered those others in the class who were able to better identify with alternative forms of work. In essence, teaching context rather than concept allowed individual students to best identify their own roles in that context. To have taught the concept of entrepreneurship would have risked alienating those who had such no interest. A diverse range of individuals must be respected in all its diversity and this suggests that can be no justification for diversity based on conceptual identity.????

?????Together with my business partner Gemma Barstow , at Spectrum First Professional Ltd. we are carrying this approach through to developing and launching our enterprise coaching and mentoring services to support neurodivergent individuals, particularly those who identify as autistic or ADHD. Our focus is not on the concept of their neurodivergent identity. Rather our focus is on the context of their work. This should better appeal to the socio-economic organisation, in that there is no false expectation established by some limited sense of an abstract notion of what certain (neuro)diverse thinking might bring to the corporate table. The focus is on the individual in the context of their work and workplace, in which their identity as this or that neurodivergent person is systemically irrelevant. There should be no justification for diversity; the only justification should be to provide opportunity and the support to excel, to those who both desire and are best suited to any given level of socio-economic contribution.

????* I give credit for the title of this piece to a section heading in a Forbes article by Kim Elsesser, which covered the cited work of Georgeac and Rattan.