Economic diversity as a performative ontological project

In the fields of biology, ecology, and cultural studies, the concept of diversity is naturalized (even as this naturalization is contested). But in economic science, monocultural thinking has naturalized capitalist economic relations and their homogenizing dynamics and thus “interfered” with the “realities” of economic diversity (Law and Urry 2004, 404). When economic diversity is evoked it is associated merely with the mix of economic and industrial sectors (primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary), or the mix of public and private sectors, all within an economy of capitalist sameness. The interfering effects of monocultural thinking have been eloquently identified by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2004, 238), who alerts us to how certain kinds of difference have largely been “disqualified and rendered invisible, unintelligible, or irreversibly discardable.” In the economic arena where lively conceptions of diversity have been rendered non-credible, we are able to see the reinstatement of economic diversity as a performative act of world-making