The aim of this study was to established whether police officials in Area Soweto understand the affirmative action that is taking place within the SAPS. A literature study on affirmative action was done and a questionnare generated. An imperical study was done by questionnaire on the trans formation that has taken place within the SAPS from 1994 to 2000. The sample of 300 members was taken out of the eight identified police stations in Soweto. It was established that police officials in soweto do no understand affirmative action and its implementation within the SAPS in Soweto. Most of them were uncertain in ther reponse to the questions asked. Recommendations are made for the SAPS to teach members about affirmative action and its consequences within this organisation for affirmative action to succeed. / Penology / M.A. (Police Science)

Just like in other national legislatures in recent years, women have increased in numbers in Uganda, owing mostly to the introduction of affirmative action policies. These measures are regarded as fast track approaches to counter previous historical injustices and imbalances. However, these developments, which also reflect transposition in the social positioning of women from a marginal and probably limited outlook, to a broader, public and visible status in the public sphere, come with various challenges. The constraints are attributed to lack of adjustments within the organizational norms and procedures. Thus the main questions addressed by the study are: What happens when this previously less represented group becomes part of the mainstream? What are the implications in information access, information communication and information use? How can this inform us about the overall process of integration and social transformation? What information possibilities can women exploit to gain a more central place in mainstream politics? One of the assumptions is that access to and use of information is essential to full integration and in occupying a dominant position in the political environment which would consequently transform governance. The thesis is based on qualitative in-depth interviews and observations of legislators and non legislators with strong connections to Parliamentarians’ tasks. The findings reveal that a legislator’s versatility, world outlook and social positioning within the Parliamentary structures greatly improves ability to acquire and use information and possibly a legislator’s capability to influence national policy making. Women face challenges at two levels; the social and political context. There are possibilities of change through their own network. / Akademisk avhandling som med tillstånd av samhällsvetenskapliga fakulteten vid Göteborgs universitet för vinnande av doktorsexamen framläggs till offentlig granskning kl. 13.00 tisdagen den 29 september 2009 i sal E310, Högskolan i Borås.

No abstract available. / Thesis (MPA)-University of Durban-Westville, 1995.

Male stereotyping together with perception of women as inferior is hindering recognition of women in senior managerial positions. Through pervious studies regarding female leadership, conducted all over the world, the theme of women being treated differently than males is fundamentally central to all the conclusions. Not many studies relating to this topic have been conducted in South Africa and yet we are in the forefront when it comes to identifying the need to develop women into positions where they can add value on various levels. Some of the issues have even been captured in legislation. However, despite government’s intervention, it is crucial that women take ownership of their own destiny. Unless women can prove that they can add value in the positions that they are appointed, they will not be seen as leaders. To be a successful leader an individual must have certain skills and traits. Some of these can be developed over time, however the individual must first admit that there is a need and identify the area in which personal growth must take place, before a plan can be implemented. Once this point has been reached, a self-management plan can be developed by the individual to align his / her objectives. There are various components to the self-management plan and such a plan cannot always be duplicated, but the focus areas can overlap. If an individual can identify a mentor and enter into a mentoring program, it can give such an individual a huge advantage. Internal and external factors play a role in the development and implementation of a self-management plan. The problem is that one does not always have much control over these elements. Some of these elements include the corporate culture of the organisation in which females functions and the manner in which a female is able to balance work-life. This study determined that males and females agree that female managers add as much value as male managers. Further to the above, it has become evident that A Botha 344-123-44 iv males have different perceptions relating to the issues of how women are experiencing the work environment and the implementation of policies that relate to employment equity. The impact of perception must not be excluded since it can have the effect that people distinguish between leadership skills and traits on different levels. Unless female leaders can make male leaders realise that they experience the work environment and the implementation of policies that relate to employment equity differently than the manner in which males perceive it, they will not be able to get males to change the situation, since males believe that there are nothing wrong with the current situation. This brings one back to the change in culture and the issue that as a result of male dominance in the work place, it is also the males that determine the current culture. It is therefore important for females to take responsibility of the situation and where necessary change the perceptions of males to ensure that as women they are not hindered from receiving the recognition that they deserve.

The South African government introduced Affirmative Action in 1998 to redress historical workplace discrimination. The South African moral imperative considers Affirmative Action to be a necessary instrument of change influencing social and economic equality, which impacts on the development of Blacks. Affirmative Action is being researched in academic circles for reasons other than moral concern, which calls for a new breed of scientist to take equitable academic demographics into consideration. The exploratory study in question aimed to identify employees’ perceptions on Affirmative Action within the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Witwatersrand. The survey method was utilized in the study and opinions were elicited from 108 respondents in the Faculty. The results were analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively in order to gain a comprehensive insight into the perceptions. The focus of the study included: profile of the respondents, staffing and standards, employee development and mentorship, attitudes, training and culture. The findings of the investigation indicated that progress achieved by Affirmative Action within the Faculty was generally perceived to be slow. However, there appeared to be no problems related to holistic practices established in support of Affirmative Action. / Prof. W. Backer

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of the Witwatersrand, 1999. / Recent developments in South Africa and the impending changes in the workplace, have placed new challenges and demands on managers of both big and small organisations. One of these challenges is the introduction and implementation of successful Affirmative Action (AA) programme. However, preparatory to this, it is important to gain an understanding of the perceptions of employees concerning AA because the way perceptions of employees may influence the manner in which such programmes are implemented in companies. The Employment Equity Act No. 55 (Republic of South Africa, 1998) makes it clear that every designated employer must, in order to achieve employment equity, implement AA measures. A survey method was used in this study, and opinions were sought from 209 supervisors and junior managers at Eskom Head Office, Megawatt Park. The results were analysed quantitatively in order to gain an insight into their perceptions of issues concerning AA. The results reveal that there are differences of opinion about AA amongst the junior and middle management employees. The differences are mainly racially based. There is no common understanding of AA and this leads to a dysfunctional effort in the implementation of this change. As resistance to change is a natural behavior of organisations and its members, naturally AA can be expected to be resisted by most employees. The present study suggests ways to overcome this problem and identifies the need for intervention to be undertaken concerning changing perceptions before AA can be understood and successfully implemented .

Student Number: 0316733E Master of Arts (Industrial Psychology) Faculty of Humanities / The aim of this research project was to investigate final year university students’ attitudes towards affirmative action. In particular the current research investigated the final year students’ justice perceptions and attitudes towards affirmative action as well as their perceptions of job opportunities. The study also incorporated the role of locus of control in relation to the above mentioned variables. Prior research indicated that affirmative action is perceived as controversial in nature and has been accused of promoting inherent unfairness of practices and procedures that give preferential treatment to certain groups of people based on gender, race and ethnicity (Parker, Baltes and Christiansen, 1997). In addition affirmative action has been accused of reducing job opportunities for non-beneficiaries, as well as stigmatising those it aims to assist (Kravits and Plantainia, 1992). Therefore there arises a need to examine and explore affirmative action within South Africa, as much research has been conducted in the United States and is not applicable to South Africa. The present research was conducted using a quantitative, non-experimental cross sectional research design. The sample consisted of fourth year bachelor of accounting students. Five hypotheses were tested. The results indicted that support was found for three of the hypotheses, indicating that attitudes towards affirmative action differ between beneficiaries and non – beneficiaries. There is a relationship between perceptions of job opportunities and attitudes towards affirmative action as well as a relationship between justice perceptions of affirmative action and attitudes towards affirmative action in both beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries. The findings are discussed in relation to previous research. The implications of the research and the limitations of the study are outlined in the research report.

Thesis advisor: Utku Ünver / This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter consists of a survey of the literature on affirmative action and diversity objective in school choice mechanisms. It presents and analyzes some of the main papers on the subject, showing the evolution of our understanding of the effects that different affirmative action policies have on the welfare and fairness of student assignments, the satisfaction of the diversity objectives as well as the domain of policies that allows for stable outcomes. The second chapter analyzes the problem of school choice mechanisms when policy-makers have objectives over the distribution of students by type across the schools. I show that mechanisms currently available in the literature may fail to a great extent in satisfying those objectives, and introduce a new one, which satisfies two properties. First, it produces assignments that satisfy a fairness criterion which incorporates the diversity objectives as an element of fairness. Second, it approximates optimally the diversity objectives while still satisfying the fairness criterion. We do so by embedding "preference" for those objectives into the schools' choice functions in a way that satisfies the substitutability condition and then using the school-proposing deferred acceptance procedure. This leads to the equivalence of stability with the desired definition of fairness and the maximization of those diversity objectives among the set of fair assignments. A comparative analysis also shows analytically that the mechanism that we provide has a general ability to satisfy those objectives, while in many familiar classes of scenarios the alternative ones yield segregated assignments. Finally, we analyze the incentives induced by the proposed mechanism in different market sizes and informational structures. The third chapter (co-authored with Orhan Aygün) presents an analysis of the Brazilian affirmative action initiative for access to public federal universities. In August 2012 the Brazilian federal government enacted a law mandating the prioritization of students who claim belonging to the groups of those coming from public high schools, low income families and being racial minorities to defined proportions of the seats available in federal public universities. In this problem, individuals may be part of one or more of those groups, and it is possible for students not to claim some of the privileges associated with them. This turns out to be a problem not previously studied in the literature. We show that under the choice function induced by the current guidelines, students may be better off by not claiming privileges that they are eligible to. Moreover, the resulting assignments may not be fair or satisfy the affirmative action objectives, even when there are enough students claiming low--income and minority privileges. Also, any stable mechanism that uses the current choice functions is neither incentive compatible nor fair. We propose a new choice function to be used by the universities that guarantees that a student will not be worse off by claiming an additional privilege, is fair and satisfies the affirmative action objectives whenever it is possible and there are enough applications claiming low--income and minority privileges. Next, we suggest a stable, incentive compatible and fair mechanism to create assignments for the entire system. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

The main goal of affirmative action (AA) policies is to give opportunities otherwise nonexistent to minorities and underprivileged students. In this paper, I investigate whether the introduction of a college affirmative action policy enables AA beneficiaries to obtain a career in Law and to catch up with high scoring candidates who did not get admitted due to the policy (i.e., displaced candidates). To do so, I use a new dataset from UERJ admission office, a prominent public university in Rio de Janeiro, which was the first in Brazil to adopt a quota system for both black and public school students. I combine this dataset with the OAB exam passage records, equivalent to the American Bar exam. Preliminary results suggest that the quota policy improves OAB passage rates for beneficiaries. I find that lawyer certification for underprivileged students increases by 51 p.p., even though they underperform by 4.56 p.p when compared to displaced candidates. I also present evidence that displaced candidates do not experience any drop in their OAB exam passage rates due to the policy. Furthermore, I find that public school quota beneficiaries who score close to the admission cutoff present an increase in the probability of passing the OAB exam by up to 52 p.p. / O principal objetivo de políticas de ação afirmativa (AA) é dar oportunidades, em geral inexistentes, aos membros da sociedade menos privilegiados, em especial àqueles pertencentes a minorias. Neste trabalho, é feita uma análise acerca do impacto da política de cotas no curso de Direito da primeira universidade pública a adotar a política de cotas no Estado do Rio de Janeiro, a UERJ, de forma a estimar os efeitos da política após o ensino superior. Especificamente, o quanto a política impulsiona seus beneficiários e em que medida permite que estes se aproximem de candidatos que obtiveram pontuação alta no vestibular, mas não foram admitidos exclusivamente por causa da reserva de vagas. Adicionalmente, o impacto sobre estes últimos, que também são diretamente afetados. Para tanto, foram utilizados dados do processo de admissão do curso de Direito da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), considerado de alto prestígio, em conjunto com as listagens de aprovação no exame da Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil. Os resultados indicam que a política aumenta em 51p.p. a probabilidade de certificação dos candidatos que se beneficiam da política, apesar de os mesmos ainda apresentarem 4.56p.p. menos chance de certificação do que os candidatos displaced. Além disso, há evidências de que a política não afeta negativamente as chances de aprovação na OAB dos candidatos displaced que pontuaram pouco abaixo do corte de admissão na UERJ. Por outro lado, a política é capaz de aumentar a certificação dos alunos admitidos para vagas destinadas ao sistema de ensino público com pontuação próxima ao corte em até 52p.p.

Using a structural topic model text analysis approach in a mixed methods framework, these studies seek to better understand the language, rhetoric, and rationales amici curiae employ to defend or deride affirmative action in cases before the Supreme Court. Through a better understanding of the content and framing of these briefs, the next time an affirmative action case is before the court a larger, more articulate, and more united network of advocates from the higher education sector and beyond will be better position to have their voices heard.