Diversity or Individual Differences. The Gap and the Overlap in Thoughts

The central questions, being asked in the paper are: what is new in an old idea? Or what is new in an old wine even in a new bottle? What is current or germane in diversity study? Can more or less be achieved focusing on individual difference studies as a purer concern of the social science? Diversity and individual differences seems to connote the same meaning. It could be likened to the farmer practicing shifting cultivation and crop rotation which are both concepts /methods of farming but different in practice. The paper is built around a framework exploiting the meaning of and origin of studies in individual difference and diversity and it was shown that diversity study as well as such recent conceptions as performance appraisal or talent management or performance management are hardly new conception but only new preoccupations. Modern social scientists are in the paper viewed as idea farmers practicing a semblance of shifting cultivation rather than crop rotation thereby leaving a frontier of knowledge not thoroughly expanded before the soil is left to fallow. Of what use is the fallowing period? Do the land recover nutrient or the soil is washed off by erosion of time and lack of focus? Or is there a tendency or possibility of under exploitation of the natural reserve of a forest under shifting cultivation compared to the crop rotational practice? Could it be the case that old fields become drudgery once it continued to be cultivated continuously? Copious search of literature on diversity and individual differences underscored the similarity of the two concepts. Viewed against the object of science and scholarship, not much may be achieved if the current trend of rehashing, renaming, or reloading old concepts and presenting them as new is sustained. An approach in which the farm is wholesomely cultivated, perhaps extracted, until what other resource lying beneath the surface is accessed is therefore advocated.