Let’s start with religion. Ragnarok is a series of disasters
on earth, ending with the great battle of the Norse Gods against Giants and
beasts. For those who don’t read sagas (or play the computer game Ragnarok), the
Norse Gods are very diverse, which helps them defeat their enemies. So, is diversity also a good thing when facing adversity in our world?
A recent paper in Administrative Science Quarterly by Sunasir Dutta tells us that the answer is yes and no.
Let me explain. He examines the effect of natural disasters on communities in
California, which of course is one of the few states with enough disasters to
do such a study. He is interested in whether the communities can found new
human services organizations to help disaster recovery. The answer is that
communities with more diversity of voluntary associations are better able to
recover from disasters, and this effect is bigger for more unexpected disasters
and more complex disasters. An unexpected disaster would mean something that
the community does not expect, like a flood in the Southern California counties
that often get hit by wildfires instead. A complex disaster is when multiple
events happen in the same year, like an earthquake and a wildfire (I am not
making this up – it happens). So part of the answer is yes, and it is a good
illustration of how communities build organizing capacity that can help them
later on.
But the answer is also no. Political diversity makes a
community less capable of founding new human services organizations to help
disaster recovery, possibly because it is related to disagreement and
polarization that complicates the unified effort needed to form human services
organizations.
This is an interesting contrast because it illustrates how
diversity can have many different effects. Voluntary organizations provide a
community with models of organizing, trained volunteers, and networks of people
who help each other. They are a form of organizing capacity that gets stronger
the more kinds are present. I have written more about this in a blog post on how research shows that communities are imprinted with the memory of past organizing. On the other hand, political views are markers
of ideological boundaries. They also represent different views of who are
responsible for community help, how it should be organized, and how it should
be led. No wonder these forms of diversity have opposite effects.
