The Republic Of Nice, Versus The Culture Of Bureaucracy

The Boston Globe notes: “Diversity training has swept corporate America. Just one problem: It doesn’t seem to work”:

Now a few social scientists are taking a hard look at these programs, and, so far, what they’re finding is that there’s little evidence that diversity training works. A paper published last year by the psychologist Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and the Yale University political scientist Donald Green comprehensively surveyed the literature on prejudice reduction measures and found no empirical support for the idea that diversity training programs change attitudes or behavior. Similarly, a 2008 literature review paper by Carol Kulik of the University of South Australia and Loriann Roberson of Columbia University found that, on the question of changing behavior, there were few trustworthy studies – and decidedly mixed results among those. And research by a team of sociologists on more than 800 companies over three decades has found that the best diversity training programs make little difference in who gets hired and promoted, and many programs actually decrease the number of women and minorities in management. “Even with best practices, you’re not going to get much of an effect,” says Frank Dobbin, a Harvard University sociology professor on the research team. “It doesn’t change what happens at work.”

Two observations: first: wouldn’t you expect someone associated with the Woodrow Wilson School to say that diversity training doesn’t work? But second, as Florence King memorably wrote a few years ago, in contradistinction to the misanthropy that Mad Men demonstrates each week, the American corporate world is already very much “the Republic of Nice.” And as Orrin Judd quips, “Don’t we all hate anyone who makes us go to a meeting?”