Joe Guzzardi at Vdare put together an interesting assemblage of stuff about “diversity” in business and scholarly efforts to find out whether it does anything for the bottom line. Seemingly it doesn’t—the main study cited concludes that it can’t be shown to hurt or help much, although the finer print refers to problems created by racial and ethnic diversity that require special efforts to overcome. No smoking guns, but lots of interesting detail like the account of problems at Xerox (a company that notoriously discriminates against non-homosexual white men).
My own take is that “corporate diversity” is part of a general trend toward applying totalitarian tactics—management by terror, disorientation, and visibly absurd propaganda—to big corporations. It goes along with “vision” statements, attempts to reinvent corporate culture, retreats aimed at behavior modification, and evaluation systems that require a certain percentage of employees to be let go every year. So even though it has no specific advantages, corporations now feel “diversity” as a good thing for general social and ideological reasons. A population of disconnected individuals promotes consumerism, increases the pool of potential employees, and is easier to reshuffle and remold than a population with other strong connections in their lives. What’s not to like?