Cultural Diversity

Arguments for the recognition of cultural diversity have led to a fundamental question in political theory: On what basis the process of political decision making should be formed to accommodate cultural diversity as a permanent feature of contemporary societies? The aim of this paper is to examine whether 'dialogue' can be employed as a means in such a process. The first section of this paper is concerned with the nature and sources of cultural diversity. It is also important to see in what way cultural diversity implies problems which concern political theory. This is the concern of the second section. Next, I shall examine ways in which dialogue can be employed to aid the formation of political decision making process to accommodate cultural differences. In particular, I shall suggest that interpretations of dialogue such as Brenda Dervin's and David J. Schaefer's interesting discussion, which aims to transfer the burden of dialogue as a discipline from participants to procedures, may be useful so far as dialogue among cultures and civilizations is concerned.

While categorization of human beings into various subgroups in terms of their race, ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality and alike is not a new phenomenon but such a diversity in communities all around the world has drawn much attention to the issue in recent years due to the increasing importance of equality for governments and societies. Workplaces are among those contexts which are proposed to equality issues and are trying to deal with it utilizing different approaches among which creating spirituality in workplace is a noteworthy one. Tourism businesses are not an exception in this regard and are faced with the diversity challenge especially in terms of interaction between different cultures throughout the industry. Additionally, it seems that organizational outcome is influenced by level of diversity at the workplace. Therefore, this paper adopts a developmental descriptive-analytical approach implemented by documentary analysis to discuss the relationship between diversity management and organizational outcome and provides a theoretical model indicating how workplace spirituality (WPS) mediates the relationship between cultural diversity management and organizational outcome in tourism businesses since cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature and can be a source of competitive advantage for businesses as well.

Human cultural vision in religious rituals and ceremonies of different religions, denominations and sects is of such a difference that this difference sometimes puts them in complete contradiction with each other. Apparently, every religion speaks of the eternal principles that must be followed by that religion’s followers and seeks to raise reasons of the veracity of its own claims as well as the refutation of the claims of other religions in order to prove its own supremacy in the face of the inferiority of the other religions. Today, man needs to have an interpretation and perspective of these diversities and to offer a judgement of their veracity, rightness or deviance may it make the best choice in rational terms. Referring to the ideas of thinkers is one of the methods that can help the humans to identify or mitigate these challenges. Thus, this study aims at assaying the perception of religious other from the point of view of the human scientists. The approach of this research is based on the qualitative method focusing on thematic analysis, data collection through semi-structured interviews as well as the analysis of the findings based on the stages of the thematic analysis. The research field is constituted by the professors of the universities of Tehran city. Sampling process continued in a purposeful manner among the professors of philosophy and sociology up to 8 cases until the theoretical saturation. The results of the research show that religious other within Iranian cultural context includes eight sub themes: Sunni, Zoroastrians, Christians, Jews, Mandaeans, Yarsans, Derwishes and Baha’is.