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Re-envisioning Inclusion: Support Human Flourishing in the Workplace with Kenji Yoshino, Professor, NYU School of Law; Author
Historically we’ve seen diversity or inclusion rather than diversity and inclusion. And what I mean by that is that companies really want inclusion but they often predicate that inclusion on the surrender of various forms of diversity that people bring to the table. So the idea is that if you modulate your outsider identity to adopt mainstream behaviors then you’ll be included. And so it puts people to this tragic choice between their identity and inclusion.
The Total Institution
The notion of authenticity itself is really predicated on a concept of human flourishing. And so I think that we really can’t think about individuals within organizations as being able to flourish if they’re leaving their authenticity at the door. One approach to this would be to say that it might have been easier and a less extreme work environment where you were kind of clocking out at 5:00 p.m. to allow people to surrender their authenticity and still expect them to be happy. Because let’s imagine that I go to a workplace and then I clock out at 5:00 p.m. and then I go home to my family and I can be authentic in my home, right. And so in that kind of era this notion of organizations or workplaces or corporations being concerned about people’s authenticity was less of an imperative.
The modern organization is increasingly becoming this total institution where it’s very rare that you have a model in which people feel like they can just go to some other space and be authentic. If you’re talking about 60, 70, 80 hour work weeks then you’re either going to be authentic at work or you’re going to be authentic in your sleep, right, or you’re going to be authentic nowhere. And so that means that organizations if they’re going to ask so much of the whole person and ask for so much of that person’s time needs to be more attentive in the ways that workplaces in the past did not need to be about thinking about the entire human being and their human flourishing and their happiness.
Covering and Authenticity
I look at the notion of authenticity through Erving Goffman’s term covering. So Erving Goffman is a sociologist who wrote back in the 1960s and his notion of covering was the way in which we all modulate our identities in order to be accepted by the mainstream. And whether it’s on the basis of race or gender or sexual orientation or religion or disability, all of us engage in these practices where we downplay the things that push us outside of the mainstream. And that, as our study again shows, comes at a significant cost to people’s sense of self. So, you know, I’m a rubber hits the road kind of guy so even if we find a high incidence of this practice of covering which we found that 61 percent of individuals reported covering, I kind of thought well, I don’t care about this unless people report that it’s harmful to them. If people say I do it but it’s not a big deal then I don’t care. But 60 to 73 percent of individuals depending on the particular axis of covering that we looked at said that this was somewhat to extremely detrimental to their sense of self. So that’s something that we really need to be attentive to if we want people to really flourish in whatever organization they inhabit.