Identity

Andrew Layman:  PCB CEO

Last week, I quoted Professor Koraan who referred to our nation as one of forty-five million “minorities” rather than a conglomeration of groups – “opposition” parties, “majority” parties, “disadvantaged” people,  those in “designated groups”, and so on.  The point he made was that, despite our constitution’s focus on the rights of individuals, we think in groups and consider rights in their contexts.      To a very large extent, of course, this is because human beings appear to favour formation into groups, the effect of which is to present homogeneity.     Adolescents are classic group-seekers.   The more they can identify with one another, the better they like it.  It gives them an enhanced sense of personal worth and security.    Yet, anyone who has dealt with adolescents will agree that they yearn for recognition as individuals.    While they are making such effort to display their adherence to the group and its mores, they want people to see through this affectation and recognise them for their individuality.   I’m not sure that adults are all that different.   Generally, they, too, feel more comfortable if they are identifiable as part of a group.

Our country has very many serious challenges in the context of diversity.    Is it for this reason, I wonder, that we seek to categorise people and to place them into groups?   Is it easier to deal with diversity if the groups, rather than the individuals within them, can be aligned to one another?   Or is it that we have an intuitive tendency to stereotype?   We do this all the time.    Nigerians are type-cast as criminals, mini-bus taxi drivers are road hogs, students are irresponsible, teachers and nurses are unprofessional, workers want too much, politicians are greedy, and so on.    Eugene Terreblanche represented white Afrikaners, and his killers, black oppressed workers.    In order to satisfy the Employment Equity legislation, a predetermined number of members of certain groups have to be appointed into jobs.  Some of these must be people with disabilities, as if they are all similar.     In a recent conference on transformation, I listened to company officials describing how their companies accommodate various groups.    In one slip of the tongue, I heard how all the employees, whatever group they belonged to, had access to the same canteen and attended the same Christmas party.    The expectations of the “millenials” (younger people) and “greybeards” were work-shopped so that there was better understanding, and the company is able to manage the differences between them.   Perhaps similar workshops were held to manage the differences between men and women, Muslims and Christians, those who attended “former model C schools” and those who didn’t.    Having devoted so much effort to dealing with the issues of diversity, the company is confident that its corporate culture is secure and that all its employees “fit it.” 

This approach, which is infinitely more acceptable than no approach at all, seems to me to pre-suppose that all millenials are the same.   Perhaps they do dress alike and use the same colloquial expressions that the greybeards cannot understand, but I doubt very much whether they actually have shared values, shared dreams, shared experiences, shared hopes and fears or shared disappointments.   Each one is different and is his or her own person.   The fact that one might rave on a Friday after work, does not mean that the other has any interest in doing so.    Ideally, therefore, each person in the workplace has the right to be afforded his or her own individuality.    The successful management of diversity is not to create harmony between groups, surely, but to ensure that the richness and value of individual differences are exploited.     I’m not sure of the extent to which this would require a diversity plan or a diversity executive to implement it.   Perhaps managers and supervisors that are sensitive to the needs of people and care about individuals would suffice.    They, better than strategic plans, would be able to harness the emergent strength of people interacting with one another in a benign, unthreatening workplace.    It might be the most constructive corporate culture that a company can have: one in which every person feels free to be individual, in which all are equally respected by all and in which identification by group is superfluous.    

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