Diversity and Inlcusion

Diversity and Inclusion

Thomas Welsch

SOC/3151

University of Phoenix

Dr. Stuart Gold

November 2, 2010

Diversity and Inclusion

The dimensions of cultural diversity can be people, concepts, concrete items or abstractions (Harvey & Allard, 2009). These dimensions specify the boundaries within cultural diversity, such as religion, race, material wealth, nationality, and political beliefs. Diversity can also be determined by whether or not there is a subordinate group (Shaefer, 2011).

The author identifies with four interrelated but separate groups: military veterans, military dependents, expatriate, and lastly Caucasian American. Military veterans share a bond that forms every time the military sends a service member a thousand miles from home or overseas. The military locates their bases in relatively isolated areas and is forced to add the necessities such as a general store equivalent, a grocery store, a gas station, and a movie theater. Military bases generally have small populations under 15 thousand people and some can be as small as six hundred people. This helps foster a small town environment where everybody knows the barber, the gas station attendant, and the grocer. The neighbors all share a common work experience and identical living conditions. They tend to take vacations around the same time in order to match training or deployment schedules and this also fosters closer bonds while using mass transit to the nearest airport because of the geographic isolation.

Military dependents, particularly children, see the same people off and on during their lives due to the service member performing a specific duty such as pilot, artilleryman, or sonar operator. These specialties are only stationed in certain locations worldwide and tend to cycle through the available duty stations at least or twice during their careers. This gives the dependents to go to school with the same children more or less, whether there is jungle outside...