ABSTRACT
Diversity is about the recognition and valuing of difference in its broadest sense. Equality and diversity are at the heart of the National Health Service (NHS) strategy. The diversity consists of visible and non-visible differences which include, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, age and religion. A key plank in the diversity paradox stems from the work on social capital by Robert Putnam, an academic from the United States who has studied the decline of community life. The question of diversity, then, is complex and involves an investigation of the shift from the old order of equal opportunities and multiculturalism to managing diversity and on to the subsequent assertion that too much diversity weakens the social framework. Traditional white communities are rarely constructed as threatening to the social order or destructive of social cohesion. Ideological constructions of difference may bear scant resemblance to those who are differently perceived but they serve to reduce uncertainty and perhaps to structure social responses.
