The “value” of cultural diversity: cultures of integration and global intercultural management

Often multicultural discourses, policies and practices deal with the social and educational integration of migrants as if it depended solely on their cultures and that of their hosts, as if it the only issue were preserving, losing or claiming the migrants' ethnic identity and mother tongue. More recent integration policies, instead, have placed more emphasis on social and economic (i.e. “employability”) aspects. Drawing on the latest developments in transnational anthropology and governmentality studies, the paper suggests a more complex approach which attempts to examine “integration cultures” as local and global assemblages of old and new forms of governmentality and local and transnational rhetorics. As an example, the paper examines “global intercultural management”, one of the most influential and widespread contemporary integration cultures and carry out an analysis of its theoretical assumptions and ambivalent effects on the intercultural training of teachers and social operators