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Preface to Beyond Difference

By Al Condeluci, Ph.D.

The tenor of our world has changed. If you look around, the signs are everywhere. I’m not speaking of the current political and social rhetoric of diversity, multi-culturalism, and inclusion. Indeed, we hear of these things daily in reports from our government, schools, and committees, and many of us embrace these notions.

My reference point for change is found more in the behavior and actions of people and systems. Although it is suspect to generalize, I call you to examine actions and patterns of people and organizations that you know in your life. Certainly, patterns vary, but to me it seems as if our society, and its institutions, are becoming more and more calculating, predictive, specialized, and mechanical.

By institutions, I am referring to the structured actions, formal and informal, of our society. Sociologists (Bellah, et al., 1991) define an institution as:

a pattern of expected action of individuals or groups enforced by social sanctions, both positive and negative… institutions may be a simple custom as the confirming handshakes in a social situation… or they may be highly formal institutions such as taxation upon which social services depend (p. 10).

The notion of institutional change and the mechanistic tenor of its impact is all around us. Our schools, for example, offer an interesting lens for analysis. Although their goal is to prepare a well rounded citizen, they work hard to help students develop technical skills and focus on a standard scale. Some argue that a broad basis of exposure has been diluted and distilled (Bloom, 1987), leading way to a very narrow student, one who is missing in the broader interpretation of the work around them.

Businesses, too, promote workers to become more proficient through uniformity, and often the lure to comply is found in a promotion or raise that keeps the workforce standardized. We have harnessed tools, machines, and more recently, computers and high technology, to enhance our personal and corporate abilities, expand our memories, and allow us to even greater sense of specificity.

As I examine my own field, disability rights and human services, I see this continued quest toward accountability, objectivity, and precision. We strive to enhance policies and procedures to guide our work and there is a premium on predictability. Terms such as units of service, slots for service, management by objectives, and zero based budgets have become the norm, and anyone associated with human services have felt this mechanization.

To a certain extent, mechanization seems rational and logical and my point in raising this is not to berate technical specialties or the notion of accountability. All organized efforts need a detailed, structured side to them. There would be chaos and dysfunction without an organized format. In fact, it seems that this march to mechanization is a direct response to the importance of organization. The past 20 years in human services, there has been great interest in more succinctly predictable approaches.

This type of organizational influence however, creates an interesting situation. To a large extent, organizations mirror the tenor of the people who comprise them. Often, it is hard to say if organizations influence the individual or that the individual influence the organization. In the Good Society, Bellah and associates state:

Institutions are patterns of social activity that give shape to collective and individual experience. An institution is a complex whole that guides and sustains individual identity… Institutions form individuals by making possible or impossible certain ways of behaving and relating to others. They shape character by assigning responsibility, demanding accountability, and providing the standards in terms of which each person recognizes the excellence of his or her achievements. Each individual’s possibilities depend on the opportunities opened up with the institutional contexts to which that person has access… Institutions, then, are essential bearers of ideals and meanings; yet in the real world the embodiment is imperfect (p. 40).

This assertion that institutions shape character through assigning responsibility, demanding accountability, and providing standards is an important one. If our institutions are becoming more mechanical and robotic, then so will our character.

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