Promoting Equality

Working with Diversity and Difference

Neil Thompson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781350312876
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Practitioners working within the people professions have a legal and moral responsibility to promote equality wherever possible. This insightful book from a leading author provides a lucid guide to the complexities of inequality, and offers a sound foundation for practice that makes a positive contribution to equality, social justice and empowerment. Now in its fourth edition, this highly successful text challenges oversimplified approaches to tackling discrimination and oppression. It combines an impressive blend of theoretical analysis and practice insights, all conveyed in the accessible and engaging style which has earned Neil Thompson his sterling reputation in the field. With a clear exposition of a coherent theory base that does justice to the multi-level and multi-dimensional nature of discrimination, Promoting Equality is essential reading for students and practitioners within the helping professions, and managers and supervisors across the public, private and voluntary sectors.

1

Equality and diversity in context

Introduction

This opening chapter in many ways sets the scene for what is to come in the rest of the book. The social scientific concept of ‘equality’ has a long history of being oversimplified as a result of being too closely identified with the common-sense view of equality as meaning ‘sameness’. To promote equality has, for many people, meant to promote sameness, to see difference as a problem to be solved or a difficulty to be avoided (see Practice Focus 1.1 below). As Witcher so aptly puts it: ‘The vision is not for a stagnant pool of sameness. Equality does not have to mean “the same”. It can also mean equivalent: different but of equal worth’ (2015, p. 11).

This tendency to misinterpret the idea of equality can be seen to have had two sets of unfortunate and unhelpful consequences:

1.Some people have rejected the idea of promoting equality, regarding it as an illegitimate goal as they recognize that trying to make everybody the same is not socially useful and is personally disempowering for individuals.

2.Others have regarded promoting sameness as a legitimate goal to pursue, and have therefore taken steps to reduce or remove difference, in the mistaken view that this is a legitimate and helpful thing to do. This conflicts strongly with the notion of ‘valuing diversity’ that we will discuss later.

Either way, the result is problematic, as it is based on a misguided understanding of the word, ‘equality’. One of the key tasks in this chapter, therefore, is to explore what we do actually mean by equality, to try to do justice to the complexities involved so that the tendency towards oversimplification is challenged, rather than reinforced.

To facilitate this discussion and thus to set equality in context, this chapter also examines the historical background to our understanding of equality and related concepts of discrimination and oppression. In this way we are looking back on the origins of equality as a concept to guide policy and practice.

However, what is also important to clarify in this introductory chapter is the way in which equality relates to what are now seen as key issues, namely diversity and difference. Unfortunately, the growth of interest in diversity has led to more oversimplifications and misunderstandings, two in particular. One relates to the nature of diversity itself and its significance, while the other relates to the relationship between equality and diversity. Both of these will be addressed below in the section entitled ‘The Diversity Approach’.

The overall task of this chapter, then, is, as the title spells out, to set equality and diversity in context. This is achieved by first providing an overall historical perspective on efforts to tackle inequalities and promote social justice. Next comes a more detailed exploration of the concepts of, first, equality and then diversity, before an important discussion about the need to approach these matters from the perspective of critically reflective practice.

The historical background

One well-known, well-established approach to promoting equality is that of equal opportunities (EO). The equality of opportunity approach is based on the desire to achieve a fair starting point for people – a level playing field – so that some people are not disadvantaged in terms of employment, access to services, housing and so on. While this certainly has a lot of merit as a strategy, it has also been criticized for its narrow focus on individual issues without addressing broader structures of power and inequality. It appears to be based on the assumption that the solutions to problems of inequality are to be found mainly at the level of the individual: if we can give individuals more and better opportunities, inequality will no longer be a major concern. We shall explore in Chapter 2 in more detail why this is not an adequate framework to work from.

It was also criticized for being a philosophy of equality that emphasizes opportunities rather than outcomes – which may be anything but equal as a result of the broader issues of culture and structure to be discussed later. It is therefore very consistent with individualistic and conservative approaches to equality, but is limited in its scope for addressing the more complex issues of institutionalized discrimination and inequality (Marlow and Loveday, 2000). As Humphries put it:

EO policies were based on the liberal assumption that … society was at root sound, with discrimination against some groups a superficial blemish which could be manipulated away – a wart on the face of the good community.

(1996, p. 3)

A straightforward equal opportunities approach can therefore be seen to be fundamentally flawed, in so far as it does not address the wider or deeper issues of inequality – it remains at a narrow and superficial level. It fails to recognize that the problems of inequality are not simply a matter of some people not having the opportunities others have. It did not consider that, even if opportunities were equal, there would still be significant barriers for many groups of people who are marginalized and disempowered in our society.

Some critics of the equal opportunities approach argued that what was needed was a focus on equality of outcomes. This can be seen as an improvement on the EO position, in so far as it recognizes that opportunities are not enough. However, an approach that focuses on equal outcomes can also be seen as problematic. This is because, if the aim is to achieve equal outcomes, there is a danger that this will produce uniformity, an expectation that, whatever effort people put in (or do not put in), whatever talent they may have (or not have), the outcome will be the same, the rewards will be the same. There is little talk these days of ‘equality of outcomes’ largely because of the confusion the term caused. It was never intended that the idea should be used to mean no differentials in terms of rewards, but this was how it was widely interpreted – it was therefore seen by many as both unworkable and undesirable. Its potential was therefore lost.

A more recent approach that has presented a major challenge to the dominance of equal opportunities is what has come to be known as the managing diversity approach (or, simply, the diversity approach). This differs from traditional EO approaches in two main ways:

First, by concentrating on diversity (that is, social variety across and within groups of people – to be discussed in more detail below) as a positive aspect of society – an asset to be affirmed and valued, rather than a problem to be solved – it seeks to counteract the negative, defensive elements of EO that have unfortunately tended to develop.

Second, it is broader than the traditional EO approach which tends to have a narrow, legalistic focus – that is, EO approaches tend to concern themselves primarily, if not exclusively, with those aspects of discrimination that are illegal in terms of the framework of anti-discrimination legislation.

The development of the diversity approach, its strengths and weaknesses, will feature in the discussion later in this chapter.

While, as I shall be arguing later, it is important not to lose sight of equality as a key theoretical concept and policy and practice principle, it needs to be recognized that the primary focus in organizations these days is on diversity, with terms like ‘equal opportunities’ or ‘equality of outcome’ fading into the background and sounding increasingly oldfashioned. It is therefore important to make sure that our understanding of equality is based on a sound understanding of the issues involved and not on a superficial adherence to fashion in the use of terminology.

Indeed, the history of efforts to promote equality can be seen to be littered with superficial and oversimplified attempts to make progress. Chapter 6 provides a number of examples of such misguided efforts that have sadly proved counterproductive in many ways, and seeks to explain how they have come about through reliance on some problematic theoretical premises.

The current position at the time of writing is that inequality is increasing at an alarming rate, as the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest groups gets bigger and bigger. This can be related to the dominance of ‘neoliberalism’, a political and economic philosophy that places great emphasis on the role of the ‘free’ market and leaves only a marginal, much-reduced role for public services (Thompson, 2017b). Monbiot comments helpfully on the perceived central role of the market:

Today the dominant narrative is that of market fundamentalism, widely known in Europe as neoliberalism. The story it tells is that the market can resolve almost all social, economic and political problems. The less the state regulates and taxes us, the better off we will be. Public services should be privatized, public spending should be cut and business should be freed from social control. In countries such as the UK and the US, this story has shaped our norms and values for around thirty-five years, since Reagan and Thatcher came to power. It’s rapidly colonizing the rest of the world.

(2016, p. 15)

One of the consequences of the dominance of neoliberalism is that the wealthiest sectors of society benefit significantly while those at the other end of the socio-economic spectrum lose out in major ways, not least through the reduction in public services as part of neoliberalism’s ‘austerity’ agenda (Mendoza, 2015).

Beck (2016), a renowned sociologist, argues that, not only is inequality increasing, but new forms of inequality are emerging. He links this to the environmental challenges we face as a result of the continuing destruction of our habitat. He points out that the effects of global warming will have a much greater impact on poorer, less powerful groups who will have fewer resources to be able to shelter themselves from, for example, rising sea levels that will make many homes uninhabitable in due course. Affluent, powerful groups will have the wherewithal to relocate to safer areas, whereas many others will have no way of avoiding the adverse consequences.

The picture that is emerging, therefore, is that inequality has long been a source of problems and injustices, but we are now witnessing not only increasing inequality along existing fault lines, but also new forms of social injustice arising.

Having briefly reviewed the historical background to issues of equality and diversity, it is now time to begin to get to grips with the concept of equality by asking the thorny, but none the less very important, question of: What is equality?

What is equality?

Equality is a word that means different things to different people. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that it is a political term. Like ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, equality is a term used by different political groups or affiliations to promote their own particular values or interests. In this sense, equality is an ideological concept. As we shall see below, ideology involves the power of ideas being used to reinforce and legitimize existing power relations. The task, then, is not to find the ‘true’ meaning of the word ‘equality’, but rather to clarify the way it is being used in the context of this book and thus in my approach to the subject.

Equality, in the sense I am using it here, is not to be confused with uniformity. Being equal does not necessarily mean being the same. Indeed, I shall be arguing later that a better understanding of difference and diversity is an important part of promoting equality. As Lister argues:

Equality and difference are not incompatible; they only become so if equality is understood to mean sameness. In fact, the very notion of equality implies differences to be discounted or taken into account so that, despite them, people are treated as equals for specific purposes. Equality and difference are, therefore, better understood as simultaneously incommensurate and complementary rather than antagonistic. The opposite of equality is inequality. To posit it as difference disguises the relations of subordination, hierarchy and consequent disadvantage, which underlie the dichotomy, and serves to distort the political choices open to us.

(1997, p. 96)

Practice Focus 1.1

Peter was involved in a project that had been set up to tackle the growing problem of...