Diversity
8
Moving From Diversity to MultiDentity
We are on the cusp of a new age. We are now entering the Age of MultiDentity, the new era rapidly sweeping the globe. This era has come upon us swiftly as the forces of economic globalization, unbounded technology, demographic shifts, and the continuous expansion of individual and cultural freedom have all converged … along with the polarizing backlash against the speed and depth of these changes.
The new reality is that culture, labor, capital, ideas, social movements, information, products, services, and people now flow more freely around the world and across national borders than ever before. As this happens, these changes are rapidly reshaping our old notions of identity at every level, including what identity means at the personal, the organizational, and the social level. Many past “solutions” to identity challenges have been tied into the recent perspectives of multiculturalism and diversity.
But these are now globally recognized as merely two of the many available mindsets that compete for the right to determine how we engage one another across identity differences, such as race, religion, culture, socio-economic level, nationality, political preference, sexual orientation, and gender. Prominent though they have been in the past two decades, these two mindsets are no longer comprehensive enough on their own to help us, our organizations, or our communities meet the unprecedented challenges we all face in a truly global society.
Diversity and multiculturalism provided partial solutions in an era when the global economy was stable. Over time, as resources appeared scarcer and as more previously excluded identity groups gained recognition and acceptance, this led to an atmosphere that continued to become increasingly fragmented and more and more polarized.
Skepticism about the future relevance of multiculturalism and diversity is also now openly expressed by those who were originally intended to be among its beneficiaries. Today, many of those stakeholders express feelings of abandonment. They believe that, during the past decade, diversity jettisoned the moral and social justice “rocket boosters” that enabled it to take off into prominence… in the name of business acceptability.
Further, the entry of new identity groups into the diversity movement has not always been met openly or in the spirit of inclusion by the previous beneficiaries … whom one would expect to be the most welcoming of these new entrants. For all these reasons, it has become clear that we need a new, more comprehensive, paradigm.
The new and emerging MultiDentity Paradigm operates at a more macro level, since it embraces all of the stakeholder mindsets. Indeed, it starts off with a recognition and an acceptance that there exist many competing identity mindsets, each possessing its own unique viewpoint, ideology, and solutions related to global identity – and that multiculturalism and diversity are just two among these many mindsets. Indeed, for many of these mindsets, there is no willingness to entertain the idea that “their mindset” is partial, incomplete or only a piece of the whole global picture. After all, we must never forget that billions of global stakehold-
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that
created it.” - Albert Einstein
multi-identity?
is multidentity a neologism? or is it supposed to be MultiDentity?