Successful businesses, it is argued, will anticipate and capitalize on the swiftly rising proportion of minority, immigrant and female workers - Hispanic workers will be more in tune with Hispanic workers will be more in tune with Hispanic consumers. Asian managers will better manage Asian workers, etc. Corporations may establish diversity goals for all levels of the organizations - such as Xerox's Balanced Workforce plan. Whatever the merits and legal risks of their methods, the diversity meisters ' futurology is proving suspect. Projections of ballooning ethnic diversity and labor shortages are increasingly criticized as exaggerated or inaccurate.
Assimilation continues to melt ethnic separatism.
And, ironically, the very growth and success of diversity management is fostering internal conflicts. These tactics anger veterans with backgrounds in Equal Employment Opportunity enforcement. They bristled when diversity guru R. Roosevelt Thomas, addressing the Second National Diversity Conference, said that efforts should now focus upon educating managers and changing corporate culture. Critics fear Mr. Thomas will expand diversity's focus to include disability, generational styles, and work-family conflicts. On the hand, there were objections that a field already bereft of white males may be devalued as yet another interest-group ghetto.