Promoting communication, cultural diversity and solidarity inside organizations. The educational European project Codes

This essay intends to bring to the attention of the scientific community the outcome of an international project for the promotion of diversity and inclusive- ness inside European societies and organizations. In this first section we will introduce the case study and the reasons why we consider it so relevant; on the following pages we will explain the goals, the method and the first evidence of our inquiry. Codes is the acronym for ‘Communication, Diversity, Solidarity’. It is a scientific-educational project aimed at promoting communication, cultural diversity and solidarity inside organizations. The leader project is the University of Lyon 2 Lumière (France); the other members of the partnership are: the ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome (Italy), the University of Bucharest (Romanian), the University of Coimbra (Portugal), the ‘Europe’ University of Flensburg (Germany) and the ‘Panteion’ University of Social and Political Sciences (Greece), Codes is a project funded by the European Union. It started in November 2017 and it is scheduled to be completed by October 2020. Its goal is to design a course focused on intercultural competencies. Such course is intended to train future experts in this field that will be working as ‘attachés of the communication for cultural diversity’ in several types of public and private organizations: enter- prises, public administrations, non-governmental and voluntary organizations, and media corporate. Codes is based on the idea that the professional organizations living in con- temporary multicultural societies need to develop specific sets of competences to answer to complex situations and to communicate with their crew, that is be- coming day by day more heterogeneous (Benadusi, Molina, 2018; Emmerling, Boyatzis, 2012). Indeed, like all the other spheres of societies, also the internal populations of the corporates and institutions are today more differentiated than in the past. Individuals and groups working inside organizations can be often characterized by many identity differences: differences of origins and ethnicity, of gender and sexual orientations, of religious beliefs and of any kind of behaviours (Zanfrini, 2011; Kymlicka, 1995). As diversity implies the risk of inequalities, people featured by a difference commonly perceived as ‘a strangeness’ or ‘a problem’ can be easier victims of injustices and discriminations (Peruzzi, Antonutti, Lombardi, Ruggiero, 2018) These asymmetries not only create vulnerabilities and barriers to full citizenship of individuals, but also compromise the efficiency and productivity of the companies (Romanenko, 2012). There are various reasons why we consider Codes an attractive case-study. First, it is an innovative experiment in Europe. All the partners are public universities (with one exception: a French private tech company, included for the fast supply of the digital services) determined to open a dialogue with many different social actors and to recover centrality to public education and academic world. Then, these institutions come from different areas of Europe, so that they ‘cover’ the point of view of many regions and cultures: the ‘Old Europe’, the ‘Mediterranean Europe’, the ‘East Europe’. But, above all, the overriding goal to involve many participants make Codes a unique occasion to compare different conceptions on diversity, and especially different ways to manage it in the European societies. This duty is made by cross-checking the voices and the needs of many stakeholders: students and scholars, enterprises, public administrations, non-governmental organizations, voluntary associations and media