Racial Dynamics the Organization for

Racial Dynamics The organization for which I work is highly unusual. We are a small CPA firm staffed by eight Asian-American females, so although our staff is relatively homogenous, at the same time we represent a minority community in both gender and ethnicity. Our aim is to provide multilingual support for local businesses and as all our staff members are bilingual Chinese-English, we provide highly specialized services. However, like many businesses, we are now seeking to grow and expand our service offerings as well as our client base.

While we would still like to focus on the needs of the Chinese community in Los Angeles through culture- and language-specific support, we would also like diversify our staff and consequently, our client base. Moreover, we hope to offer business consulting services alongside of our general CPA services, and business consulting requires a more nuanced approach to communications. Therefore, we cannot afford to stagnate and will be seeking new ways to change the racial, ethnic, gender, and overall social dynamics in our organization.

To implement these changes will not be easy. As Oackes et al. note in their study of ten American public schools, the easiest part is designing the changes. Similarly, we have found it relatively simple to envision the direction we would like our organization to take in the future. Implementing those changes is the hard part. One of the main reasons implementing organizational change can be so tough is that it demands a new ideology and requires that we examine and challenge our biases, assumptions, and beliefs.

Although our situation differs from those of the ten schools Oakes et al. speak of in their article "Change Agentry and the Quest for Equity," our company stands to gain a lot from the examples of American public schools. The American public educational system faces the immense challenge of massive curriculum reform. The changes that must be implemented in order to ensure higher achievement among lower-income and ethnic communities challenge existing cultural ideologies and social norms.

In other words, the resistance to change comes not only from the teachers and the school administrators but from the community and society at large. Parents are as resistant to the changes as school board officials, and while most citizens share a vision of a more equitable society, few are sure how racial equity and social justice can be an achievable goal. As Oakes, et al. illustrated, implementing change in public schools was difficult and at times impossible.

We as a small accounting firm can doubtlessly learn from their setbacks and victories and apply their model for change to our organization. Oakes et al. advise an approach that combines moral and ideological reform with empirical knowledge. Detracking" public schools and eliminating the hierarchical distinctions between high and low achievers challenged the very core of the American educational system. Most parents, educational professionals, and students have been programmed by the myth that certain groups of people are high achievers and others low.

Differences in achievement are often attributed to race, ethnicity, gender or social class, when in reality it is often these demographic considerations that impact the ways teachers, parents, and educational professionals treat students. Lowered expectations for African-American students or elevated expectations for upper-income whites are common symptoms of the current and outmoded ideology. All schools needed to examine the problem with such obviously biased assumptions and to reform school curricula based on a more democratic ideology.

Furthermore, the schools had to reform the definition of intelligence in order for the reforms to take root. Redefining intelligence was in fact the largest obstacle in altering the racial dynamics in the public schools. We will not face such serious ideological challenges, as our organization is fundamentally different from a school. However, we face our own outmoded beliefs and assumptions and must also learn to redefine some of the essential aspects of our business.

For example, our wish to diversify our workforce represents a kind of "detracking." We have prided ourselves in our uniqueness. In the same way that public schools gleefully distinguish their "gifted" students from the masses, so too have we proudly distinguished ourselves as a unique company offering unique services. When we diversify, we may feel like we are losing some of that distinctiveness. However, as Oakes et al.

point out, such fears are largely unfounded; just as heterogeneous classes benefit all students in the long run, so too will a heterogeneous workplace benefit all our employees and all our clients in the long run. We will still offer the high quality services and multilingual support that serves minority communities and we will still cater specifically to the needs of the Chinese community in Los Angeles; that is our focus and.