Managing Hope After Affirmative Action

May 30, 2017

What “Diversity of Thought” Reveals About the Disappearing Corporate Ladder

In 2013, Sheryl Sandberg took the media by storm with the publication of her book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Many in the diversity management profession applauded her, despite critiques by intersectional feminist scholars that her purported universal advice offered an exclusively wealthy-white-woman perspective. Regardless, Lean In captured the mission of the last thirty years of diversity management: the promotion of upward mobility for women and people of color in business. More specifically, it centered self-fashioning techniques, such as professional development, as critical for economic and social inclusion. In addition to reproducing notions of individualism, hard work, and perseverance, these practices also reproduce an image of the corporation as stable, and in the process of desegregation. This is a false image: In a time where corporations are fractured, virtual, and multinational, professional development practices foster a racialized and gendered illusion of the corporate ladder.

Since the 1980s, business researchers have argued that including women and persons of color in the corporate workplace is a business imperative. They use words like talent, potential, optimization, productivity, and innovation to emphasize that under financial capitalism organizations need to have a flexible workforce. Recently, in a New York Times Best-Seller, economist Mohamed El-Erian (2016) builds on the work of Scott Page (2007) who used mathematical models to advocate for the productivity of “diversity of thought.” He does so to urge workplaces, the government, and even families to embrace a diversity of thought and perspectives to fuel economic growth at a time when markets are volatile and uncertain. “Diversity of thought,” El-Erian argues, provides a greater capacity for financial problem solving and adaptability.  

At least in the United States, “diversity” is historically symbolic to suggest racialized and gendered differences. For instance, while conducting fieldwork research in 2016 I was tasked to write a report on the demographic constitution of corporate leadership of some multinational corporations. This “leadership” I was assessing were company decision-makers: Senior Vice Presidents, CEOs, and board members. After presenting my conclusions to the founder of the diversity firm, he explained its significance, stating, “Before you and I were born there were Black people jobs, Latino people jobs, White people jobs, and White men jobs. And then they said there would be equal opportunity, but there wasn’t.” In effect, management scholars, think tanks, and research institutions, including Catalyst and Diversity Inc. have published extensively on racial and gendered workplace segmentation. These diversity experts use the American Census and biographical data to reveal— and problematize—the largely white-male executive leadership as promoting group-think tendencies and lacking innovation. By discursively and practically linking economic concerns with racial categories, they challenge what I term, “corporate segregation.”

This work occurs in tandem with economists and management scholars who frame the value of diversity in business adaptability, creating conflict between personal and pragmatic business approaches. For instance, late in 2012 Apple made headlines when they claimed that they were committed to diversity and inclusion, and published photographs of their exclusively white-male executives who had training in a variety of disciplines including the arts, humanities, and engineering. After an unforgiving social media fury, Apple promoted a Black woman to head of HR, and added a white woman—previously Burberry’s CEO—to their C-Suite. Many companies learned that day that while “diversity of thought” is a trendy word that can suggest corporations are doing ethical work, diversity is also an historical and political construct. When “diversity of thought” is used to describe better decision-making in the corporation, it reveals the C-Suite as symbolic of the unfulfilled aspirations of the Civil Rights Movement.

While business discourses on “diversity of thought” promise organizations the adaptability necessary to conduct business in uncertain markets, perpetually-emergent management techniques aim to create flexible employees. Diversity conferences, workshops, and networking events executives impart business wisdom to potential and current employees who seek employment and promotion. In a state-wide diversity conference I attended, which had over 500 attendees, executive panelists advised employees to learn to “fall fast” and do “a little bit of everything”; they further advised, “If someone asks you to do something, just do it.” These lessons were repeated regularly across diversity panels and events, which largely focus on promotion strategies. It is tragic that at a time when on a day-to-day the corporation is, as Karen Ho argues, “governed by short-term stock prices,” that the corporation draws productively on a ready and flexible workforce that is also hopeful for economic and social inclusion. This, in effect, suggests an emergent form of racialized and gendered violence.  

An unstable corporation creates new structural barriers for employment opportunities. For instance, when discussing generational differences in the workplace, senior professionals tend to depict Millennials as “impatient” and “entitled,” wanting to be rewarded without putting in the work. In one particular workshop, a consultant responded to these accusations by explaining that Millennials were an overly educated generation workforce, and that they simply need intellectual stimulation. If there were no opportunities for promotion, she suggested, “Give them more lateral responsibility.” Topics like crippling student debt and first-generation students financially supporting multiple households were rarely entertained. Given the lack of mechanisms for vertical movement, including the dismantling of affirmative action processes, tolerance and capacity for lateral mobility within and across workplaces define workers’ flexibility. Such work silences the corporations’ responsibility for producing job instability and stagnating wages.

Thus, rather than the “jungle gym” that Sheryl Sandberg depicts as the new corporate ladder, the corporation has structured workers to be flexible, to be in a persistent state of readiness, anticipation, and more tragically—hopefulness. While the case study I have presented here takes place within corporations, we see such trends towards professionalism and leadership development well beyond them: in academia, in non-profit organizations, and governmental institutions. The proliferation of such business discourses is all but inevitable. Insofar as professional development discourses are preparing us to become good corporate subjects, I suggest that we resist it. The path towards social and economic inclusion is not made through attempts at becoming better employees, but through creating better institutions.

Cite as: Arciniega, Luzilda Carrillo. 2017. “Managing Hope after Affirmative Action.” Anthropology News website, May 30, 2017. doi: 10.1111/AN.444