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Difference Matters: Communicating Social Identity Brenda J. Allen Waveland Press Long Grove, IL 2004 253 pp. (including index) ISBN 1-57766-304-7 $19.95 USA
Keywords Difference, Social identity, USA
Review DOI 10.1108/09649420410529898
As a little black girl Brenda Allen learnt how to internalise oppression by singing with her friends, "When you're white, you're right; when you're brown, stick around; but when you're black, oooh baby, get back, get back, get back." Today, as Associate Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado and volunteer at a soup kitchen, she argues for change, and motivates students to be aware of prejudice. The title of her book, Difference Matters was inspired by Cornel West's controversial book, Race Matters. Allen takes up West's argument that race is important, and extends it to examine five additional social identity categories: gender, social class, ability, sexuality and age. It is probably no accident that the cover is in suffragette colours of purple, green and white.
Allen envisages her book being used as a textbook for undergraduate and graduate papers in organisation and communication, as well as other training courses and curricula. She has opened a web site with ideas and resources to be used in conjunction with it: http://communication.cudenver.edu/~ballen/Difference-Matters.html (currently still under construction) and invites readers to email her.
Interactive educational tools like these ones are particularly relevant in this area, as society continues to become increasingly diversified and organizations attempt to develop strategies to deal with the changes.
The book begins with an introduction on why difference is important and the obstacles that impede us from valuing it. Allen makes it clear from the outset that she is looking at difference through a social constructivist lens, because she sees this as the best perspective for discovering how amenable to change social identities are. In the second chapter, Allen describes power dynamics and how power is communicated, introducing students to the ideas of Foucault and Gramsci. The next six chapters focus on each of the six social identities: race, gender, social class, ability, sexuality and age. In each of these she includes a section on history, and then synthesises research from several disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, philosophy and psychology, on how social identity relates to communication in organisations. In...