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The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies (review)

straints they operate within. It remains unclear to the reader how, on the one hand, wildland firefighters can value self-restraint and prudence in the face of danger, yet on the other, can possess an ideology that their work is not, in fact, dangerous. Perhaps this analytic tension could be eased if we dig a bit deeper into Desmond’s own rich evidence about the firefighters’ views of God and Mother Nature. My reading of his data is that the members of Elk River lived in a remarkably magical world, filled with omniscient forces beyond human control. Fire is a central character in this story, very much alive and possessing its own internal logic. Desmond reserves his most loving and reverential prose for the flames. He also reports that many of his colleagues have been obsessed with fire from a young age. Desmond and his crewmates pine for fire, and gaze longingly when it is before them. One confesses to having committed arson while on duty, for the thrill of seeing it “light off,” its captivating sights and smells, and the ensuing drama of the fight. Several of his subjects convey a deep deference to either, or both, Mother Nature and God. In the minds of many of Desmond’s Elk River colleagues, then, these are the forces – not the Forest Service’s rational planning, or urban encroachment, or the incompetence of the dead – that determine one’s ultimate fate. Looked at from this vantage, the firefighters may report that their work is not dangerous because they ultimately have no control over their fate. This would suggest that side-by-side with an illusio of self-determinacy, then, we need to theorize an illusio of fatalism. I suspect that a theory of deference to omniscient forces, whether supernatural or all-too-natural, is in the offing here, in the sense that people may hold contradictory positions on organizational risk and human efficacy when ultimate consequences are attributed to omniscient powers. While a competent firefighter must do her or his best to preserve life on the fire line, after God, Mother Nature or some other omniscient power decides fate, individual and organizational efficacy are understood to be superfluous. Taking omniscient forces seriously, of course, is not readily within the repertoire of Bourdiean-inspired analyses of organizational conduct. More classic traditions, particularly Durkheimian and Weberian traditions, might more readily point toward a theory of deference to omniscient powers as a key factor in the social organization of high-risk occupations.