The Politics of Nationhood: A Theory of Diversity Culture in the Contemporary United States
The Politics of Nationhood: A Theory of Diversity Culture in the Contemporary United States
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CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, December 1st 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
The Politics of Nationhood:
A Theory of Diversity Culture in the Contemporary United States
Mitchell L. Stevens
Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Education
The idea that ethno-racial and cultural diversity is a positive attribute in organizational life has become deeply divisive in contemporary US culture.
Elites in many institutional domains of US society — higher education, tech, corporate America and the Democratic Party — perform strong commitment to the diversity idea.
Yet diversity also engenders fierce opposition among cultural and political conservatives.
Sociologists have amply investigated the rise of the diversity idea but have little explanation for the strong emotions and costly activism it engenders across the political spectrum.
Drawing on institutional theory, political-historical sociology, cultural theory, and the sociologies of nationalism and religion, my coauthors and I develop a syncretic theory of diversity culture as a strand of American civil religion: an ongoing tradition of practice and discourse about who constitutes the American nation.
Developed initially among academic elites in the 1970s, diversity culture has sought to extend the idea of e pluribus unum to explicitly include people who are not white.
While obvious to many, the hegemony of this idea has never been absolute, and is increasingly challenged by populist movements anchored in enduring traditions of racial hierarchy.
