Beyond the Sound and Fury of Quotas and Targets

Much of the rhetoric and conflict surrounding affirmative action programs focuses on the introduction and utilization of numerical quotas and target figures to increase minority group representation in public organizations. Despite criticism that they are moving too slowly, published statistics and casual observation reveal that many agencies have had considerable success at employing and promoting more members of minority groups than ever before. But, knowing that the number and percentage of employees from minority groups has increased and that more minority group employees are being promoted to higher grade tells us little about their work experiences and the extent to which racism and sexism persist in public manpower management systems. As pressure has increased for agencies to incorporate larger numbers of minority employees at higher grades, a number of practices have evolved that have enabled agencies to cope with demands for affirmative action yet minimize the impact of minority employees on agency operations. These practices may be lumped together under the concept of tokenism-the assignment of minority employees to grades and positions normally associated with a certain level of authority and responsibility, while limiting the minority employees to minor roles and non-essential tasks. Tokenism is difficult to identify with currently used reporting devices that stress aggregate statistics because affirmative action reports rarely contain extensive or accurate job descriptions, and position classification systems are seldom very precise. Since aggregate statistics rarely reveal patterns of differential incorporation or tokenism in bureaucracies, efforts to evaluate the impact of affirmative action programs must probe beyond statistics that report net changes in the number and percentage of minority employees in different agencies and grades. To combat tokenism, evaluations must focus on differences in patterns of mobility, leverage for investment in personal development, human resource investment, levels of authority and responsibility, organizational experiences, and policy impact between minority and white male employees. One might collect this type of information by administering a questionnaire to samples from both groups and compare the distribution of responses to discover if significant differences exist. By further dividing respondents into categories by age, education, grade, agency, and specialization, problem areas can be more easily pinpointed. A number of pertinent questions can be used to compare job contents and work experiences to discover patterns of discrimination. The following list is merely suggestive and hardly exhaustive, but if answers were obtained to questions like these and used for comparative purposes, we would know much more about the performance of an agency's affirmative action program than we are able to learn from most currently used reporting devices

Acoustics · Physics · Political science · Sound (geography · Public Policy and Administration Research

• Hispanic Executive Personnel in the Federal Service

  Open Access•Antonio Sisneros•The American Review of Public…•1982

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• Organizationl Response To Environmental Pressures

  Open Access•H Brinton Milward, Cheryl Swanson•Administration & Society•1979

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