-- CYNICAL DIVERSITY MANAGEMENT --

Effective diversity management cost money and time and commitment that is an ongoing long-term investment in the organisation's ability to uphold the law. It requires the reformatting of organisational structures, and systems for appropriate professional practice.

Many organisations and the individuals that lead them in particular, do not want the structures and systems and professional practice to change!

They want to maintain a discriminatory environment often for self-serving and bigoted reasons.

Often they are in DENIAL that unlawful discrimination takes place on their watch and resist any system that will show it for what it is.

They want to maintain women at the bottom of the organisational pyramid for example, keep blacks and people of colour outside the organisation, deny the opportunity for people with disabilities to have access to positions of responsibility etc. In any event they will actively continue to deny opportunities for advancement to members of “underrepresented groups whomever they may be.”

They way they achieve this is by employing CYNICAL DIVERSITY MANAGEMENT techniques.

Cynical diversity management techniques enable organisations to look like they are making efforts to comply with the law, they may make a diversity management policy that is written on paper and gathers dust in a drawer somewhere.

Some organisations have very visible policies with structures and systems that serve to disable the policy's effectiveness by design. Often diversity management operations are deliberately poorly financed so that they fail to deliver.

Organisations within the justice systems of the jurisdiction concerned are often the worst offenders in that they serve to cover-up or even compound cases of discrimination.

In recent times there is considerable corruption in the diversity management industry and its getting worst.

For example anti discrimination laws seek to encourage CONTRACT COMPLIANCE in the awarding of public contracts (often worth millions and billions of dollars) in an effort to spread effective diversity management techniques to less dominant organisations thus enabling equality of opportunities to spread throughout the society.

Institutions and corporations etc are mindful of this and select experts and consulting organisations that will make them look like they are operating effective diversity management standards in contract compliance operations when in fact they are not.

This is a major cynicism in the context of diversity management operations.

They actively seek to minimise the involvement of consultancy organisations and experts in the diversity management field who are committed to effective diversity management techniques. They get little if any work and eventually have to go do something else to make a living, whilst those committed to cynical diversity management techniques grow and help to maintain discriminatory conditions for us all!

Far more often than not, the contracting and buying organisations as well as the experts and consultants they employ, are dominated by members of the OVERREPRESENTED groups!

Another major cynicism in diversity management operations is in the marketing OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES.

Some organisations will have very visible diversity management policies and operations, they will look good in the context of presenting token members of underrepresented groups as a part of the organisation.

The goal here is to fool the public in to believing that they are operating effective diversity management processes that deliver equality of opportunities to the people who work for them and buy from them and to fool potential customers in to thinking that they are good citizens when in fact they are not, often their products and services are ill configured to the genuine needs of sections of the community they target.

Money and the manipulation of people to serve the narrow interest of senior management and stockholders are paramount. And its all just business !