Journey to a Different Place: Reflections on Taylor Cox, Jr.'s Career and Research as a Catalyst for Diversity Education and Training

In the preface to his book, Creating the Multicultural Organization (2001), Taylor Cox, Jr., invites readers to “take a journey to a different place on diversity issues.” Cox’s career has entailed just that—taking readers of his research to new and different places. He has not only charted new territory, but also has enriched diversity education and training by showcasing the theoretical sophistication necessary for understanding, studying, and teaching about organizational diversity. Cox, an African-American scholar who came of age during segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, grew to become an architect of diversity management. His research, teaching, consulting, and professional advocacy helped to establish a foundation for educators, practitioners, and researchers seeking to understand and manage diversity in organizations. Cox took a personal vision of what diversity could bring to organizations, designed a comprehensive plan for conducting ground-breaking diversity research, and then pursued this plan on several fronts, as a researcher, trainer, and agent of social change. He laid the structural foundation for the cultural diversity landscape by conducting empirical research on multiple dimensions of diversity, including race, gender, national origin, work function, and organization level. His signature contributions to education and training are threefold: (1) exposing dimensions of cultural difference while unveiling their interconnectedness and commonalities via theoretical models and experiential exercises; (2) providing educators, diversity consultants, and researchers with common language to talk about the intersection of cultural and physiological characteristics; and (3) highlighting that cultural diversity and organizational culture—together—must be understood and influenced to create effective organizations. Given the prevalence of diversity research today, it might be easy to overlook the sheer courage that it took for Cox to embark on his ambitious diversity education, training, and research agenda. He reached across a wide range of disciplines to construct a theoretical framework of diversity and tackled an issue that was not considered a legitimate field of academic study. From our perspectives, as colleagues and former doctoral students who had the honor of conducting research with Cox, the risks that he took to advance the study of organizational diversity were significant. In pioneering the important issue, Cox advanced education and training by developing early conceptual models for understanding diversity and multiculturalism (e.g., Cox, 1993); by creating teaching and training tools to help individuals discuss and learn about diversity (e.g., Cox & Beale, 1997); and by establishing the business case for Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2008, Vol. 7, No. 3, 394–405.