Global Perspective on Diversity and Inclusion

Diversity and inclusion are two terms that provide an umbrella for efforts to tackle discrimination, exclusion, and inequality by valuing diversity and promoting inclusion for historically disadvantaged groups across social, organizational, and individual levels. Diversity and inclusion are now academic, political, and professional fields of study and practice. Diversity and inclusion efforts gain meaning and shape depending highly on the spatial, temporal, sociocultural, and symbolic context in which they manifest. There is a spatial dimension to diversity and inclusion, which means different things across different international, regional, national, and organizational contexts. While in some national and organizational contexts, there is support for diversity and inclusion in terms of recognizing, protecting, valuing, and promoting a more comprehensive range of diversity categories and tackling inequalities across these categories, other contexts remain hostile, unsupportive, and adversarial across some sorts of diversity. While eight types of discrimination are unlawful in the UK, class inequalities are not part of equality laws. In India caste caste-related inequalities are targeted by laws. In South Africa, the legal framework promotes reconciliation to address the detrimental consequences of Apartheid. In terms of temporal context, there is a time dimension to equality and diversity efforts. While earlier diversity and inclusion efforts primarily included generic (-etic) categories such as gender, ethnicity, and disability, recently legitimated diversity categories such as sexual orientation, belief, appearance, and age are considered in some countries. Further, there has been a posthumanist turn, which problematizes the domination of human diversity concerns above and beyond those of nature and technology. In recognition of this, diversity and inclusion research now includes new categories such as biodiversity, technological diversity, and interspecies diversity in the posthumanist landscape of diversity and inclusion. The sociocultural context of diversity and inclusion refers to the specific values, beliefs, and practices that shape and underpin how inclusion and exclusion, privilege and disadvantage, and equality and discrimination manifest in different cultural settings. Sociocultural context is highly varied across national and regional settings, making adopting a standardized, one-size-fits-all approach to diversity and inclusion ineffective. The legal context explains what aspects of diversity and inclusion are considered priority categories for protection against discrimination and inequality. Legal regulation and compliance-based work can set the floor and the baseline for diversity and equality interventions in organizations and nation states. Due to variations in regulatory systems, diversity and inclusion efforts at work emerge as idiosyncratic.