Originally Posted by
Razion
Institutions and affiliations aren't constructs of culture in terms of diversity as they don't make a group more diverse and inclusive, they segregate and make it less diverse and inclusive. By making these orders, the Night Elves prioritize individuality rather than togetherness. I'd argue diversity is more about inclusion rather than exclusion. If we were going by total organizations, that's an arbitrary abstraction -- there can be any number of branches to any number of "companies". But it's entirely pointless. It's not including other races still. It's not including other people. It's still just Night Elves a lot of the time. They aren't taking in other aspects of other cultures as much as Dwarves or Trolls, and they aren't sharing theirs with other races as readily certainly - only Worgen seem to get that special treatment.
A company for what it's worth as a cultural milestone as a worthwhile entity in WoW is broken up primarily by professions and class. This is how the game defines its major cultural milestones and how the races culturally draw the line at where the meaningful lines of inclusion are drawn. So if you want to argue Night Elves are more exclusionary than any other race, sure, they have a lot of red-tape and organizations arbitrarily telling themselves they have different sects of druids. But they're still druids. It's not any more diverse than any other race having druids versus one that doesn't. Druids encompass every facet of power within it as a whole - when classes are available for study on a racial level, all specializations and trees, all forms are open to study and learning.
It's one thing for a Night Elf to say "I'm really good at cat form, and look I made a special institution for it," and then for a Troll to say, "well, we can do that too. Why does having a label for it make that any more culturally diverse? If anything, we don't need the label for people to be able to study it. People can just decide to do that." We could be arbitrary here, and point to all the various examples of Trolls and all the Loa and Wild Gods that they follow, too. The list would equally be long and pointless, as it only serves to segregate at a base level. If we're including all these groups as equal parts as defined in the culture by the base class system that is established as being, frankly, a class caste system, we can get a better idea of what cultural lines mean across different races and where they actually draw the line.
Some organizations can be inclusive, like say the Argent Crusade, which accepts everyone and everything, and some organizations, like Druids of the Fang, are again, far more insular and less diverse. If we were going for business openness, that's something goblins and humans tend to win. But I think the Warcraft universe isn't one centered around business and commerce and money. This is a class caste system that defines your status in this medieval societies and cultures, where supernatural powers and deals with gods and your own connection to magic is far more important than gold. Goblins as well, all the business and collateral in the world. But that doesn't make them diverse or inclusive just because they made another business. Any one person can make their own business and be completely self-employed. That doesn't make it inclusive. To be inclusive is to be inclusive, to let others in. Night Elf institutions by the nature of their culture are generally not very inclusive of outside races. Barely anyone else gets in. You don't see any other Priests of Elune outside Night Elves and Worgen really. Yet meanwhile with Trolls, you can see many many other racial followers of Loa besides Trolls in all the other primal races -- it extends to anyone far more freely and the lines aren't fiercely defended as if territory.