Capitalizing « Diversity »
In neoliberalized labor discourses, workers are imagined as bundles of skills, some « hard » (knowledge and techniques) and some « soft » (social abilities and characteristics). In such imagining, any attribute that can be imagined in terms of productive labor can be cast as a skill, including forms of social being. In particular, forms of social difference can be imagined as skills, including racial/ethnic markedness and language markedness, so long as they can be cast as providing corporate value. Forms of difference that would otherwise be interpretable as indices of race, ethnic or national identity are reimagined as properties belonging to individuals. Moreover, workers are in effect responsible for recasting their own markers of social disadvantage as markers of added value. By and large, language and race/ethnic differences operate in complement to each other in globalized labor regimes : language difference operating as « hard » skills and social identity forms of « diversity » operating as « soft » skills.