| Any effort to transcend the substance and banality that characterize human history must have failings, or even be variously false, but some efforts have a greater usefulness than others. That constitutes the challenge of the 1993 Coleman B. Ransone Lectures: to get a running head start toward dealing with diversity in organizations. Can the details be transcended in the real service of application as well as analysis? The readers will judge for themselves, but my hopeful answer to the question is, Yes, you bet. |
| In any case, the risk cannot be avoided. Paramountly, much social commentaryand perhaps especially that about diversityhas a historical perspective that runs the very short gamut from A to C. Indeed, most of the diversity-friendly literature implies contemporaneity, if it does not explicitly advertise itself as the future-only-just-beginning-to-emerge. Today's premium seems to go to a kind of free-floating novelty: hence the neglect of foundations on which we can build and hence also the myopia about developmental tendencies that could provide useful momentum and direction. This sacrifices too much, in the present view, and (sadly) most often for very little benefit. |
| The invitation to deliver the 1993 Ransone Lectures provided the immediate stimulus to try to do better, if with an eventful detour. Originally, I set out to do the lectures on the theme of "avoiding the hollow state," into which we seem to be ineluctably led by the curious concatenation of two forces otherwise in opposition: the bureaucracy-bashers of the past two decades or so, including virtually all recent presidential candidates; and several prominent defenders of our public agencies and personnel, most notably Goodsell (1982, 1985, 1993), Wamsley et al. (1983, 1990), and the Volcker Commission (1989). That initial effort became too ponderous for present purposes but has happily taken on a life of its own (Golembiewski, 1994). |
| So the invitation to do the Ransone Lectures did double duty, as it were. No sooner did the multiple inappropriatenesses for present purposes of what became |
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