One of the most controversial issues of the past two decades involves the area of civil rights, specifically, the achievement of equality for minority individuals within American society. To that effect both scholars and practitioners of public administration have been faced with the challenging task of increasing the representativeness of the Federal public service, in order to make Federal bureaucracy more aware of the social, economic, and political needs of the minority individuals which it serves. Recent attempts to achieve a Federal bureaucracy broadly representative of all subgroups in American society at all levels of the organizational hierarchy include the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, and although the provisions of these acts, in conjunction with the program of Affirmative Action, have been successful in increasing minority representativeness at the lower levels of the Federal public service, the lack of a substantive number of minority individuals in higher level supervisory and/or managerial positions within the bureaucratic hierarchy poses a critical threat to the realization of a more representative Federal bureaucracy within the United States. / In examining reasons for the inability of minority individuals to make necessary inroads into the higher levels of the bureaucratic hierarchy that are essential for the attainment of bureaucratic representativeness, this study investigates the argument that minority employees of the Federal bureaucratic organization experience discrimination in promotion as a result of their culturally influenced perceptions of the Federal merit system and Federal merit principles. Given the observation that the cultural group responsible for developing organizations within society creates societal organizations predicated on the values of that particular group, coupled with data confirming that the Federal public service was established by individuals from the dominant white male culture, the dissertation proposes that the merit principles governing personnel policies in the current Federal public service are defined according to white male values and, as such, may act to discriminate against minority individuals not subscribing to the same culturally defined perceptions of merit. / The hypothesis that the cultural environment from which an individual originates effects that individual's perceptions of the Federal merit system and Federal merit principles, in short, the proposition that perceptions of merit are a function of culture, is tested on a sample of minority and non-minority Federal employees from selected Federal organizations in Atlanta, Georgia. Through the use of bivariate, partial, and conditional correlation techniques, the dissertation analyzes the data gathered by the survey of minority and non-minority Federal employees, provides insight into whether or not perceptions of the Federal merit system and Federal merit principles are related to cultural environment, and considers the implications of the research findings with respect to the achievement of a more representative American Federal bureaucracy. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-03, Section: A, page: 1308. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74436 |
| Contributors | KANISS, JAYME LUKAS., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 299 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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