Page 388 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

15. COMBATING ORGANIZATIONAL DISCRIMINATION
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recruitment, career advancement training, and validation of selection in­
struments (Green, 1989).
Affirmative action, as originally conceived, is a policy designed to "over­
come the discriminating effect of past or present practices, policies, or other
barriers to equal employment opportunity" (EEOC, 1979). More recently,
the Supreme Court ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) additionally legit­
imized affirmative action as a means of realizing diversity goals. Through
a variety of methods, it aims to remedy discrimination and increase repre­
sentation of designated disadvantaged groups, namely women and ethnic
minorities who are underrepresented in the workforce, e.g., African Amer­
icans and Latinos. However, affirmative action goes beyond adopting an
equal opportunity strategy. Equal opportunity is a passive policy in which
employers disregard sex and race when making employment decisions.
In contrast, affirmative action specifies that active efforts be made to con­
sider group membership and that it be explicitly taken into account in such
decisions. Thus, the assumption built into this policy is that nondiscrimi­
nation alone is not sufficient to counteract the consequences of prejudice
and inequality; rather, something additional is needed.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN PRACTICE

As we have seen, affirmative action in its classic form is mandated for
companies entering into contract with the federal agencies by executive
orders 11246 and 11375. Yet the term has come to represent a much broader
range of policies. Affirmative action has become a blanket term that refers
to any number of active policies adopted by organizations to remedy the
effects of discrimination (Clayton & Crosby, 1992; Glazer, 1988).
Oppenheimer (as cited in Tomasson, Crosby, & Herzberger, 1996) de­
vised a typology of the various forms of affirmative action programs and
identified five basic models of programs. The first type of program is "tar­
geted hiring," in which a position is designated a priori, to be filled by a
member of a particular group. In such instances only members of the desig­
nated group are considered in filling the position. Another type of program
is the quota type. This refers to all programs that set specific numerical re­
quirements for hiring members of disadvantaged groups. A third type of
affirmative action involves programs that do not designate positions or set
numerical requirements, but rather give special preferences to certain cat­
egories of persons. This has sometimes been referred to as a "plus factor"
policy (Clayton & Crosby, 1992) as it often involves assigning applicants ad­
ditional points (used to tally a final admission score) purely on the basis of
group membership. There also is the self-examination type, which involves