M.Com. (Business Management) / The recent historical changes in South Africa resulted in an outcry for affirmative action programmes. The concept of affirmative action is foreign to many businesses in South Africa. Corporate South Africa sometimes lacks focus on how to deal with this trend. Workers, with new political freedom, are not prepared to waft for a gradual introduction of affirmative action. In order to avoid crisis management, business needs to accelerate the pace in adapting to the challenge in organisations of absorbing large quantities of personnel. Affirmative action legislation in future may force employers to implement these programmes. This must be done without sacrificing quality and profitability. In order to achieve this goal, this study aims at setting strategic guidelines for implementing affirmative in an effective manner.

Magister Legum - LLM / This paper evaluates s 42 of the South African Employment Equity Act (EEA) with specific focus on the application of the demographic profile of the national and regional economically active population by designated employers. The comparative analysis considers how the law of affirmative action in the United States of America and in Namibia, international conventions and the International Labour Organization (ILO) in relation to South Africa’s Constitution and the EEA promote affirmative action. While international law holds that affirmative action measures should be of a temporary nature with an individualistic focus on formal equity, the EEA granted affirmative action measures which are permanent, group based and substantive in nature.Given South Africa`s discriminatory past, it became an accepted principle that affirmative action needs to be implemented to redress the imbalances caused by apartheid. In broad terms, the EEA provides for the advantage of persons or certain categories of persons who were disadvantaged by unfair discrimination. As a result the EEA focuses on race, sex and people with disabilities to determine those who are to be the beneficiaries of affirmative action. International Law also embraces the notion of affirmative action and place a duty on all member states to act pro-actively to correct the effects of unfair discrimination. The mini-thesis also evaluates the powers of the Director-General of Labour with specific focus on the enforcement of measures and how it relates to the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act (PAJA) in compliance with the provisions of the EEA. It is concluded that s 42 of the EEA (with the exception of s 42(a)(i)) provides sufficient measures to redress the inequalities of the past by providing equal opportunities for suitably qualified people of the designated groups. That the Constitution and the EEA does not provide for differentiation amongst “Black people” (African, Coloureds and Indians). That the application of both the national and regional demographics are compulsory in formulating an equity plan, that the one cannot be ignored in favour of the other, and that the Director-General of Labour is sufficiently empowered to ensure compliance with the provisions of the EEA.

Thesis advisor: M. Utku Ünver / Thesis advisor: M. Bumin Yenmez / This collection of two essays in market design examines the designs of affirmative action policies. In the first chapter, “Affirmative Action in Two Dimensions: A Multi-Period Apportionment Problem”, we study affirmative action policies that take the form of reserved seats or positions and apply at two levels simultaneously. For instance, in India, beneficiary groups are entitled to their proportion of reserved seats in public universities at both university and at department levels. We theoretically and empirically document the shortcomings of existing solutions. We propose a method with appealing theoretical properties and empirically demonstrate advantages over the existing solutions using recruitment advertisement data from India. Our problem also suggests possible extensions in the theory of apportionment (translating electoral votes into parliamentary seats). In the second chapter, “Impartial Rosters for Affirmative Action’’, we present an answer to this question for the case where all positions are homogeneous. Devising methods is particularly necessary when the number of seats is small. For instance, a university appoints at most one assistant professor of economics every year, while the country’s affirmative action policy has more than one beneficiary group. To ensure that, over a period of time, each beneficiary group respects the spirit of an affirmative action policy, India devised a tool called roster. We present a theory of designing rosters to argue that only a few rosters can be considered impartial in that they do not favor some beneficiaries over others. We provide a method that constructs the set of impartial rosters. We show that the existing roster of India is not one of them and favors categories with a larger proportion of seats relative to the smaller ones. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

The development of affirmative action strategies designed to achieve equal employment opportunity has been studied along six dimensions of functioning within four separate organisations. Three of these organisations were participants in the Federal Government's Affirmative Action Pilot Program in 1984/5, and one was not. It has been shown that change occurred in a continuous developmental sequence, here called an "Affirmative Action Continuum", within each of these six dimensions over the period of study, with each organisation following a similar sequence of movement. Exceptions occurred where an organisation made no movement at all, or where one or more of the sequential processes was omitted or displaced, in a dimension. The reasons for some of these exceptions, and some of their consequences for later action, have been explored. It has been shown that simultaneous activity occurred across several, dimensions, so that no organisation acted upon only one dimension in isolation from all others. There was some chronological sequencing between dimensions. The indicators of movement along the Affirmative Action Continuum within each dimension were used to describe the change process in each organisation. These indicators proved to be useful both in this regard, and in placing each organisation an the Affirmative Action Continuum in each dimension at two different points in time. In this way, the indicators' usefulness was shown to generalise to four very different institutions, thus suggesting applicability beyond the bounds of this particular study. It is intended that the results of this dissertation, and in particular the model of the Affirmative Action Continuum and the indicators described in Chapter Two, be used by Equal Employment Opportunity practitioners to facilitate their decision making about sequencing of activities designed to achieve equal employment oppportunity.

This study was undertaken to assess and describe a unique aspect of affirmative action planning in disciplines of higher education physical education. The two major purposes of the study were to (1) identify by sex, ethnic origin, and area of specialization faculty and doctoral students who were available for teaching and research in higher education disciplines of physical education, and (2) to develop a model for predicting future availability of faculty and doctoral students for teaching and research in higher education disciplines of physical education. The review of the literature indicated that there were a number of inflow and outflow parameters which must be considered in determining present availability and in predicting future availability. Research questions were formulated to address the academic workforce inflow and outflow parameters identified. Data were obtained from chairpersons of physical education departments at institutions offering advanced degrees in the disciplines of physical education and from the literature relating to the career patterns of doctoral recipients and to the academic workforce. Findings were based upon a descriptive analysis of the data with respect to each research question. A model for predicting current and future availability pools of all individuals for teaching and research in higher education disciplines of physical education was developed. Also, models were developed for predicting current and future availability pools of all white females and all male and female minorities for teaching and research in higher education disciplines of physical education. The models were based upon the inflow and outflow parameters as reported by the respondents to the questionnaire and in the literature. The currently predicted availability pool of individuals for teaching and research in higher education disciplines of physical education was found to be 3,160 faculty and doctoral students. The predicted availability pool of all individuals for teaching and research in higher education disciplines of physical education within the next two years was found to be 2,987 of the 3,448 faculty and doctoral students reported in the current availability pool.

The purpose of this study was to examine attitudes and general knowledge of Affirmative Action in higher education admissions at one HBCU in Tennessee. The researcher used a modified version of the Echols’s Affirmative Action Inventory (EAAI) to assess attitudes and general knowledge of all administrators, faculty, staff, and students at this institution. At the conclusion of the collection period, 269 surveys were deemed usable. Of these, 31 surveys were completed by administrators, faculty completed 62 surveys, 55 surveys were completed by staff, and 121 surveys were completed by students. The dependent variables for the study were individual survey questions (1-9) and three dimensions created by transforming the data from sets of survey questions. The independent variables were participant group (administrators, faculty, staff, and students), gender, race, and academic discipline. Two-way contingency tables and c2 were used to examine the associations between each independent variable and the dependent variable for each of the individual survey questions. Two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to compare the mean differences between the dimensions and pairs of independent variables. The quantitative findings indicated that the independent variable, participant group, was found to differ in five of the 11 research questions significantly. Administrators hold positive attitudes and exhibit greater general knowledge on the topic of Affirmative Action compared to faculty, staff, or students. Of the other independent variables, only race and academic discipline resulted in significant differences. Respondents who identified as Non-White exhibited positive attitudes towards the dimension that assessed whether Affirmative Action was moral and ethical over respondents who identified as White. Respondents who were classified as belonging to the humanities (academic discipline) were more likely to exhibit positive attitudes toward support of Affirmative Action over respondents who were classified as belonging to business.

In this dissertation, I develop a framework to investigate the implications of Affirmative Action in college admissions on both study effort choice and college placement outcomes for high school students. I model the college admissions process as a Bayesian game where heterogeneous students compete for seats at colleges and universities of varying prestige. There is an allocation mechanism which maps each student's achieved test score into a seat at some college. A colorblind mechanism ignores race, while Affirmative Action mechanisms may give preferential treatment to minorities in a variety of ways. The particular form of the mechanism determines how students' study effort is linked with their payoff, playing a key roll in shaping behavior. I use the model to evaluate the ability of a given college admission policy to promote academic achievement and to minimize racial academic gaps--namely, the achievement gap and the college enrollment gap. On the basis of these criteria, I derive a qualitative comparison of three canonical classes of college admissions policies: color-blind admissions, quotas, and admission preferences. I also perform an empirical policy analysis of Affirmative Action (AA) in US college admissions, using data from 1996 on American colleges, freshman admissions, and entrance test scores to measure actual AA practices in the American college market. Minority college applicants in the United States effectively benefit from a 9% inflation of their SAT scores, as well as a small fixed bonus of approximately 34 SAT points. I also estimate distributions over student heterogeneity and perform a series of counterfactual policy experiments. This procedure shows that AA practices in the US significantly improve college placement outcomes for minorities, at the cost of discouraging achievement by the most and least talented students. The analysis also indicates ways in which AA could be re-designed in order to better achieve its objectives. As it turns out, a quota system produces a substantial improvement relative to either the current system or a color-blind system. However, quotas are illegal in the US and cannot be implemented as such. Nevertheless, I propose a variation on the AA policy already in place that is outcome-equivalent to a quota.

When the general public discusses Affirmative Action, they are more likely to make an assumption that the person is not qualified without seeking their actual qualifications. Some may hesitate to provide any reasonable explanation for their opposition because the policy is a controversial topic. The goal of this journal was to search for the possibilities that may actually inspire their opposition and relate it to the stigma theory, which might explain some of these reasoning. By focusing on black recipients in the workforce research on the policy and reactions to Affirmative Action, some researchers appeared to study according to what they think Affirmative Action is supposed to accomplish. There are not enough scholars, with a specialization in human resource, to provide objective facts about the actual intent of the policy. It appears that some managers are not knowledgeable on how to manage the program legal. When certain individuals, who are supposed to have expertise on this policy, are not knowledgeable, then the public cannot be expected to be knowledgeable about the policy. The purpose is to look at Affirmative Action from an objective point of view to differentiate the actual purpose of the policy from the stereotypical purpose of the policy. Recommendations are provided to determine how Affirmative Action can prove to the critics that it is necessary when the program is operated properly.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (MEd. (Education management and policy studies))--University of Pretoria, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.