More thoughts on diversity —
Today, Daniel Henninger, of The Wall Street Journal, expands on the recent study by Professor Robert Putnam on the downsides of diversity, in his article “The Death of Diversity“.
I found this quotation from the article particularly interesting:
Robert Putnam has a possible assimilation model. Hold onto your hat. It’s Christian evangelical megachurches. “In many large evangelical congregations,” he writes, “the participants constituted the largest thoroughly integrated gatherings we have ever witnessed.” This, too, is an inconvenient truth. They do it with low entry barriers to the church and by offering lots of little groups to join inside the larger “shared identity” of the church. A Harvard prof finds good in evangelical megachurches. Send this man a suit of body armor!
Christian evangelical megachurches certainly are not places I initially would associate with diversity. According to Putnam’s study, assimilation is vitally important for diversity to deliver a positive rather than negative influence. This ties in very well with my last post “Diversity: The Key to Innovation“.
As Edmund Phelps reveals in his commentaries, low entry barriers and openness to influences from all directions result high levels of “dynamism”. Also, the decentralized but integrated nature of innovation centers, such as communities in Silicon Valley or corporate cultures like that found at Google, is analogous to the positive diversity found in megachurches, which is supported by “low entry barriers to the church and by offering lots of little groups the option to join inside the larger ‘shared identity’”
When highly integrated, diversity is innovation’s success factor.