Bank of New Zealand’s newest director, Auckland lawyer Mai Chen, says ethnic representation has now overtaken gender as one of the biggest concerns for boardrooms.
Chen, who co-founded the firm Chen Palmer, has been appointed to BNZ’s board, with the bank’s chairman, John Waller, saying the post matched BNZ’s mission of supporting a higher-achieving New Zealand.
“Of course I can contribute my years of experience in strategic problem-solving, in running a successful business, and in innovating new services, products and organisations, as well as my expertise in managing regulatory risk, and in showing the relevance of ‘cultural intelligence’ to large organisations
“But as a Chinese woman i can bring so much more to the table too.”
Like what I wonder?
Any company that selects board members on any criteria other than they are the best person for the job, regardless of race or gender, is doing its shareholders or owners a disservice.
One has to wonder how many idiots are in management these days who got there because they were the right gender or race. I suspect the public service is full of them, and there are numerous large private sector companies whose commitment to Fabian socialism obliges them to enforce quotas based on the same criteria.
This cannot bring any kind of real benefit. Regardless of what the Marxist social engineers preach, there is no other criteria that should be used other than “the best person for the job”.
People are people. I wish so much we had a political party that would counter the tidal wave of divisive Marxist propaganda that we have to suffer on this issue.
TrueblueNZ 
Mai Chen is perhaps the over promoted person in NZ as she ticks all the diversity boxes, got a leg up thru Geoff Palmer and holds all of the “approved” views.
If she were a white male, she’d be another run of the mill, parasitical lawyer.
I see that crazed Yank is on the loose again on GD. There is no point engaging with him, he makes reasoned discussion impossible so I’ve taken to prodding him when he is stalking the blog.
LikeLike
If anything, superdiversity has been a great success: in the past few years, European
agencies funded superdiversity grant proposals at the University of Jyväskylä, the University of
Birmingham, and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in
Göttingen, to name but a few. This funding shows that the adepts of superdiversity were on the
mark when they saw “strategic purchase in the field of social policy” (Arnaut et al., 2016a: 4) as
the key advantage of the term. The slogan does indeed have strategic purchase – it is a
convenient euphemism that hits the spot with European funding and governing bodies,
concerned about the new migration and the management of ethnolinguistic diversity.
But then again politicians are notorious for their predilection for euphemisms and weasel
words, astroturfing and doublespeak. Adepts of superdiversity are different: they strive to expose
the process by which “negotiations of power become negotiations of truths, which in turn gain
factuality” (Fabricio, 2014: 10) and to free us from ambiguous terms that “have considerable
ideological force (and as such should certainly feature as objects of analysis)” but “should have
no place in the sociolinguistic toolkit itself” (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011: 5). They would not,
um, lower the threshold of publishing to impose an equally ambiguous discursive construct for
purely pragmatic reasons. Or would they? To answer this question, we need to make
superdiversity an object of analysis and get a grip on what it is.
//
The reality is incontrovertible: international migration reports reveal that between the years
1990 and 2013 the number of international migrants has increased by 50%, from 154 million in
to 232 million (UN DESA, 2013; WMR, 2015). What is altered is the significance of these raw
numbers on the global stage. The analysis of global migration patterns by Czajka and de Haas
(2014) shows that while an absolute number of international migrants has increased, the world
population grew even faster, as a consequence, the proportion of global migrants has actually
decreased from 3.1% of the world population in 1960 to 2.7% in 2000. Their data also show that
in the Americas and the Pacific, the numbers of immigrants have increased but the diversity of
the categories has not. These findings are echoed in recent migration reports that highlight
marked differences between the developed North, where migrants constitute 10.8% of the
population and developing regions where they constitute only 1.6% and where some countries
are neither an important source nor destination for migration flows. They also show that in 2013,
51% of the world’s migrants were living in ten countries: USA, Russian Federation, Germany,
Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia, and Spain
(UN DESA, 2013; WMR, 2015). The concentration of migrants in a “shrinking pool of prime
destination countries” (p. 315), many of them small countries in Western Europe, led Czajka and
de Haas’ (2014) to conclude that “the idea that immigration has become more diverse may partly
reveal a Eurocentric worldview” (p. 314).
Superdiversity and why it isn’t:
Reflections on terminological innovation and academic branding
Aneta Pavlenko,
Temple University
https://www.academia.edu/21163221/Superdiversity_and_why_it_isnt_Reflections_on_terminological_innovation_and_academic_branding_2016_
LikeLike
Abstract
Studies on migration often assume that members of the same ethnic category are less likely to develop exclusionary attitudes toward each other. In order to explain why many Hong Kong people exhibit exclusionary attitudes toward granting social rights to Chinese immigrants who share the same ethnic ancestry with them, we conducted a phone survey to examine four important factors: (1) economic threat; (2) social threat; (3) negative stereotypes; and (4) contact with immigrants. We find that the economic threat—either at the societal or individual level—perceived by respondents does not explain their exclusionary attitudes. The results are consistent with alternative explanations emphasizing cultural and non-economic concerns commonly associated with ethnocentrism.
http://m.amj.sagepub.com/content/25/1/41.abstract
LikeLike