1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings, Sydney
Coming to Grips with the Implications of Multiculturalism: Civic Pluralism, Renewing Australia's Social Contract
Professor Mary Kalantzis
Professor of Education, Centre for Workplace Communities and Cultures, James Cook University, Australia
Key Points
1. We are currently experiencing a moment of epochal change in which negotiating cultural diversity is now a critical necessity.
2. Changes in our working lives, our lives as citizens and our public lives, demand that we develop a "post-nationalist sense of common purpose".
3. Australia is particularly well-suited to meeting the challenges of the new global environment.
4. What needs to be done: key structures to facilitate changes and key forms of competence for citizens and workers.
5. The new citizens and the new state will be very different from the citizens and states of our recent past.
1. We are currently experiencing a moment of epochal change in which negotiating cultural diversity is now a critical necessity.
Diversity is the central issue of our time, and on two fronts: the local and the global. Indeed, these are not two separate fronts. Total globalisation means the localisation of diversity. Local diversity represents in microcosm global realities.
Thinking of diversity as a global issue in this way, two enormous changes have occurred in the last decade which make it a far more critical matter than ever before. The first is the end of the Cold War. The century-long argument about economic resources and the role of the state in relation to civil society was dominated by the communism-capitalism dispute, with a variety of welfare state compromises occupying the middle ground. Now, we find that this argument is suddenly over. Privatisation, economic rationalism and the culture of consumerism and the market prevail internationally. Into the space within political discourse that has been vacated with the termination of the Cold War dispute, has stepped the politics of cultural difference. At one extreme we witness the flaring up of virulent ethnonationalisms in societies where once-strong states have all but disappeared. And, even in apparently stable metropolitan societies, the state is contracting even if still resilient. Here, a politics of ethnic or indigenous assertion and subcultural interest or lobby groups has taken the space held until recently by socio-economic class-based arguments about the distribution of resources.
In the post,Cold War politics "culture", "identity" and "nation" are concepts that have a new global force. Disputes over resources are now phrased in the language of cultural symbolism. This means that symbolic representation of differences is more critical than at a time when old style nationalism could at least convey the impression that the differences had been successfully ignored. Representation and symbols of identity are now critical; cultural differences are now critical.
The second change, one in which we now are in the midst, is rapid globalisation. The local becomes global, as immigration transforms once-homogenous local communities. Communications media make the global local, just a television or computer screen away. Tourism makes experience of the distant possible for more and more people. Global trade means that there are no local markets, only global goods in local markets and local goods in global markets. In all of this, negotiating cultural differences is now the name of the game. Indeed, it is the main game. The universal processes of globalisation perform the opposite function to what it was once assumed they would, imposing homogeneity. Instead, they accentuate diversity, deploy diversity as a means of product differentiation, and use local diversity as the basis for making global connections.
2. Changes in our working lives, our lives as citizens and our public lives demand that we develop a "post-nationalist sense of common purpose".
Three epochal shifts are currently underway, in our working lives, our public lives and our private lives. In each of these shifts, diversity is critical. In each, local diversity and global diversity connectedness are critical features. And in each case there are both disastrous possibilities and the positive possibility of constructing a new, pluralist "social".
Changing Working Lives
We are in the midst of radical changes in the nature of work. These are not only technological, they are also organisational. Replacing the old pyramid structures, more and more work organisations are opting for "flattened hierarchy". Commitment, responsibility and motivation are won by developing a "workplace culture" where the members of an organisation identify with its "vision", its "mission" and its "corporate values". Old vertical command structures are replaced by the horizontal relationships of "teamwork". A division of labour into its minutest, deskilled components is replaced by coteries of "multiskilled" all-round workers who are flexible enough to be able to do complex and integrated work. Indeed, in the most advanced of today's workplaces, traditional structures of command and control are being replaced by relationships of mentoring, training and the "learning organisation".
But these changes create a whole series of new problems, and nowhere more clearly so than the new organisational relationships which encounter the unavoidable realities of diversity. Culture is the guiding organisational metaphor. But it is culture as similarity: shared vision, shared values, common aspirations. The reality of workforces and clienteles, however, locally and globally, is diversity. In this sense, the new organisational arrangements are not relevant to one of the most important conditions under which they operate. The only solution is to shift towards a "Productive Diversity" model of organisational culture.
Productive Diversity, as a positive possibility, means taking the new ideas about organisational life at the best of their word and pushing that word beyond its own limits. For example, the diversity of communities and workforces and the multiplicity of experiences and perspectives can be harnessed as a productive asset. Cross-cultural communication and the negotiated dialogue of different people who have had different experiences can be a basis for worker creativity, for the formation of locally-sensitive and globally-extensive networks which closely relate a business to its clients or suppliers, and for structures of motivation in which people feel that their different backgrounds and experience are genuinely valued. Rather ironically perhaps, pluralism is now both possible and necessary in workplaces, for the toughest of business reasons.
Changing Public Lives
Just as work is changing, so is the realm of public participation. Over the past two decades, the century-long trend towards an expanding, interventionist, welfare state has been reversed. The domain of citizenship and the power and importance of public spaces is diminishing. Economic rationalism, privatisation, deregulation and the transformation of the public institutions so that they operate according to market logic, these changes are part of the global shift. The shift coincides with the end of the Cold War.
In some parts of the world, once-strong centralising and homogenising states have all but collapsed. Everywhere states are diminished in their roles and responsibilities. This has left space for a new politics of difference. In worst case scenarios, in Los Angeles, Sarajevo, Kabul, Belfast, Beirut, the absence of a working, arbitrating state has left governance in the hands of gangs, bands, paramilitary organisations and ethnonationalist political factions. In best case scenarios, the politics of culture and identity has taken on a new significance. Negotiating these differences is now a life and death matter. Now the perennial struggle for access to resources and participation is increasingly articulated through the discourse of identity and recognition.
Civic pluralism is the only way to manage diversity in public spaces. This changes the very meaning of public spaces, from the broad content of public rights and responsibilities to the detailed institutional logistics of service delivery. Instead of core culture and national standards, the civic is a space for the negotiation of another sort of social. It is a place where differences are actively recognised, where these differences are negotiated in such a way that they complement each other, and where people have the chance to expand their cultural and linguistic repertoires so that they can access a broader range of cultural and institutional resources. Civic pluralism necessarily changes the nature of the "civic".
In order to achieve civic pluralism, states must become strong again, but not impose standards. They must be strong as arbiters of difference. These are not just the socio-economic differences that were the main concern of modern nation states and states in the era of the capitalism-communism dispute. The state remained a distributive mechanism ensuring equitable access to resources and participation; but now it must also be a broker of symbolic and cultural differences.
This is the new basis for cohesive sociality, a new civility in which differences are used as a productive resource and in which differences are celebrated. It is the basis for the postnationalist sense of common purpose that is now essential to a peaceful and productive global order.
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