company and tell them they need to beef up your staff. You simply cannot do the job of managing this company's affirmative action program without adequate resources." I think that's a problem in many, many companies. It would be one way of a company showing its commitment to a realization of its EEO and affirmative action goals.

Much has been said about these bureaucratic excesses and I know Larry has talked, about it, and I don't doubt for a minute that he has encountered them. Let me put them in a much more realistic context, though.

I defy anyone who has dealt with Washington over the last 10, 15, 20 years (maybe longer than that, but I can't go beyond that) to tell me that there are not agencies of this government that are inconsistent in their application of rules and regulations, often make extreme demands on people out in the hinterland, and do many things which the officials in Washington would disavow upon learning of them.

You know it happens with the IRS. You are subject to go to an auditor for an audit and that individual will fail to interpret a Commissioner's bulletin the way that person's superior will. There is a process in a chain of command of review of subordinates' work. The same thing has been happening and I believe is still in place at the two agencies that are represented here.

Eleanor and I on numerous occasions had to talk to each other about inconsistencies within our own ranks. She would call me and say, "So and so from your staff is doing this in the Midwest. We are certain that this is not the position of OFCCP. Can you check into it?”

We did. We were able to exercise management control over the process. There have been repeated instances of equal opportunity specialists giving their own interpretation of regulations, of manual chapters, of provisions in the manual, and what I have always said to business is don't take that individual's word as the final agency word-your problem Dr. Horn-and repeatedly where individuals failed to state the law or interpret regulations accurately, they were overruled if they were acting out of step with applicable policies and procedures. So I think it is important that when you look at the work of enforcement agencies, you recognize that we make mistakes; our subordinates make mistakes; they misinterpret policies. But the relevant question is, is there a way to stop that from causing harm to an employer?

I submit to you that there is. There is certainly under the system that I left in place, if it has not yet been dismantled, where appeals could go from an area office to a regional office and ultimately to a national office. And I know that Larry knows that because he's availed himself of that process.

MR. LORBER. Not very successfully. MR. ROUGEAU. Because I overruled you. COMMISSIONER RUCKELSHAUS. Mr. Rougeau, I was interested in Mr. Lorber's discussion of maybe in addition to having a stick also having a carrot for some of these employers. Do you see any possibility for that?

MR. ROUGEAU. Well, we started that about 2 years ago, what Secretary Marshall at the time called the "linkage program." It was his view that there ought to be a supply and demand, if you will, side in the way that the Labor Department did its work, that we were missing a great opportunity, that Congress was giving us a lot of money for training programs, and yet there were employers who we probably encountered in the course of investigations who had taken good-faith steps to achieve compliance, but maybe for the lack of a resource for available workers could not meet their goals.

We began to do that. That program is still in its infancy. It is on a very small scale. It has not even spilled over into other areas of the Labor Department where we might be able to do things, say, if we were working in the coal mining industry, work perhaps with the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

I believe that ultimately it should be an interdepartmental program that would utilize resources from other departments. It has great promise, but as Eleanor has indicated, it cannot be viewed as a panacea or as a means of supplanting responsibilities on the part of those who have duties to eliminate discrimination from our society.

CHAIRMAN FLEMMING. Mr. Nunez? Any ques

tions?

MR. NUNEZ. No.

CHAIRMAN FLEMMING. Well, we have gone beyond our time considerably here, but the contributions that have been made have been very, very helpful, I assure you of that.

This is the kind of discussion I personally hoped we would have had. We have had it because you have been willing to come here and give us this time and share with us the experiences that you certainly

have not been in the ivory tower as far as this problem is concerned.

Quite the contrary. That's why we wanted you to react to the statement, to the approach that is reflected in the statement, and I am sure that some of the suggestions that have come to us will prove to be very helpful as we have put this in final form.

When it is put in final form and released, we hope that it will prove to be useful to the President, to the Congress, and to those who are in positions of leadership in this country, and that is very, very important.

Thank you so much.

March 11, 1981

Designing and Implementing Affirmative
Action Plans

CHAIRMAN FLEMMING. I will ask the witnesses to come forward. May I say that we are very happy to have you with us. We appreciate your spending this time with us. Jack will give us an overall introduction and then introduce the first person.

MR. HARTOG. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This morning we'll have three panels as indicated on the agenda. The first panelists will be Dr. Rodolfo Alvarez, Dr. Martha Glenn Cox, Dr. George Neely, and Dr. Mark Chesler.

The speakers will talk about the practical issues of designing and implementing affirmative action plans. They have been asked here to assist the Commission in drafting some additional material to be added to its proposed statement on the practical how-to issues of designing and implementing affirmative action plans.

Subsequent panelists this morning and this afternoon will be asked to address the issues of monitoring and evaluating affirmative action plans, and the final panel will be on some executive firsthand experiences with affirmative action plans. We will go in the order in which the speaker is on the agenda and our first speaker will be Rodolfo Alvarez.

Dr. Alvarez is professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. Dr. Alvarez has written and lectured extensively on the subjects of racial discrimination and affirmative action. He is coeditor of two books, Discrimination in Organization: Using Social Indicators to Manage Social Change and Racism, Elitism, Professionalism: Barriers to Community Mental Health. Dr. Alvarez was the founding director of the Spanish Speaking Mental

Health Research Center at UCLA. He was also director of the Chicano Studies Center at UCLA for several years. Dr. Alvarez holds a bachelor of arts in sociology from San Francisco State University, a master of arts and a doctorate in sociology from the University of Washington.

Dr. Alvarez, it is a pleasure to have you with us, and I will just state for the record, it is standard Commission procedure for each panelist to have up to a total of 15 minutes to make his or her presentation, and then there will be questions from the Commission. All of our panelists have prepared or are preparing comments on the proposed statement, and these written products will be made a part of the record of these proceedings. Dr. Alvarez, good morning.

Statment of Rodolfo Alvarez, Professor of Sociology, University of California at Los Angeles DR. ALVAREZ. Good morning. Thank you.

The paper that I have prepared will be coming as soon as I get back to Los Angeles. The title of that paper will be "Enlightened Managerial Self-Interests: Affirmative Action in the 1980s," and I mention that to emphasize that my approach to this subject is from the managerial point of view and from the point of view of someone whose particular approach in sociological research is the analysis of formal organization.

I also say, in advance, that I see affirmative action not as something special or distinct, but as part and parcel of the normal managerial process. With that precursor, I would like to say to the Commission that I am very deeply grateful to have the opportunity to be with you today and to have some input into this enormously important process for our country.

The task before this consultation, as I see it at least, is to assess the adequacy of the proposed Commissions statement, Affirmative Action in the 1980s: Dismantling the Process of Discrimination, as a set of guiding principles by which to conduct relevant public policies in the decade we have just begun.

I want to state at the very start that I view this proposed statement as the most well-reasoned, most well-balanced document on the practice of affirmative action and of the guiding principles under which it might ideally be conducted that I have seen to date.

The Commission staff, no doubt, has worked heroically to understand and carefully discount the ways in which particular political perspectives and motivations might produce particular, shall we say, extreme actions in the political arena or extreme reactions to the document. Instead, their focus appears to have been on the, in a sense, mechanical ways in which affirmative action, as a remedy, has been legally sanctioned to operate in our society to deal with highly specific problems. Those problems constitute some, but by no means all of the elements of which the processes of personal and institutional discrimination are composed.

I will later suggest a working definition of institutional discrimination that I think is more precise than those included in the document-not that those included in the document are not workable. The Commission has wisely noted that the practices legally defined as discriminatory do not include all forms of discrimination experienced by minorities and women, particularly the more complex processes of discrimination.

Indeed, social scientists do not yet fully understand nor have we fully charted the joint processes of personal and institutional or organizational discrimination. Even so, we do know much about the very gross elements of it and how they interrelate to create processes of discrimination in general. As I see it, in the past, affirmative action is a set of very specific legally sanctioned remedies that have been aimed at these very gross aspects of the process of discrimination. I will later suggest how I believe these should evolve into more manageable, more precise or refined aspects. It is, as yet, unclear, in any demonstrable evidentiary sense, what past affirmative action programs and plans have accomplished. This is so as much because government appears to have been slow and uncertain in the pursuit of affirmative action, as well as because resistance to its effective implementation has been so widespread, subtle, and increasingly well organized.

While the progress toward equality of opportunity that has been made by women, and by, particularly, national origin groups, has been substantial in some few organizations and even in some regions of the country, moderate progress has been achieved overall. National statistical evidence for the last decade suggests that we have a long, long way to go before we achieve convincing results. Indeed, the evidence suggests that the gap between the white-especially the white male population-and the disadvantaged

protected groups in question increased rather than decreased in the 1960s.

Preliminary evidence suggests that, proportionately, that overall gap will have increased again in the decade of the 1970s. In short, although some progress has been made by minorities, the progress by the white male population has been even more substantial. Therefore, the relative gap has increased rather than decreased. Thus, it is fair to ask what it is that affirmative action, as practiced in the past, has accomplished.

My answer to that is that affirmative action has accomplished a great deal. Perhaps this increased gap of which I speak would have been larger had affirmative action been absent. It has certainly sensitized and this is my main point-virtually the entire population to endemic inequalities that exist in our society. It has helped to provide documentation for this inequality. It has also provided a forum for the debate between extremes in the political spectrum, those who believe that all differences in the accomplishments of different groups can be eliminated and those who believe that these differences will remain to a substantial degree regardless of how much help any group will get.

In an era of apparent economic abundance, the sixties, generalized mass media announcements of educational and occupational opportunities for previously excluded populations were only mildly objectionable to favored constituencies, since they perceived no real substantial threat to their own interests. In the ensuing era of increasing economic stringency, the seventies, such announcements in the mass media were like matches on kindling because, correctly or not, favored constituencies in our society now began to perceive their interests to be threatened. It now appears that virtually all programmatic efforts to increase opportunities for populations sufficiently designated as needful of assistance will come under reactionary counterattack. We can predict that many such programs will be undone or severely curtailed.

This, what I call reactionary trends, is born out of fear and narrowly conceived self-interest rather than the overall interest of the entire enterprise. It is based on popular misconceptions rather than empirically demonstrable evidence. One can only speculate, at this point, as to whether the dismantling of affirmative action programs will reverse whatever real progress our society has made toward equality of opportunity by women and minorities.

Regardless of the rhetoric of the extreme proponents and the extreme opponents of affirmative action during the decade of the seventies, it seems clear that affirmative action has never-and probably will never-substantially intruded upon the wellestablished, well-protected advantages of the white male center of the population. What little, if any, impact affirmative action has had makes charges of reverse discrimination ludicrous.

If extreme proponents and opponents had their say in the sixties and seventies, what shall those of us who want to go for real substantive change in the eighties stake out as our ground? The arena that I see emerging for public debate in the eighties is that of enlightened managerial self-interest.

I stated earlier that affirmative action has left virtually no sector of our society unsensitized to the endemic inequalities that persist and which affect our capacity to live in peace with our constitutional ideals. The vast majority of people who are neither extreme proponents nor opponents of affirmative action have, nevertheless, been touched by the greater public awareness that has resulted.

Among the vast majority of our population are middle and higher level managers that hold responsibilities for the day-to-day operations of thousands, perhaps millions, of public and private organizations through which the very life of our society-of our pluralistic society-is conducted. When major organizations set their policies, they impose the pattern of activity in smaller organizations through several orders of magnitude and then throughout the rest of society. I, for one, am therefore delighted that the Commission has now begun to focus its attention on organizational, that is, institutional discrimination, per se. My remarks are designed to suggest to the Commission that among all of the many things it must do to pursue its own mandate, it must surely focus sharply upon ways by which to enlighten the middle and upper levels of management in all kinds of private and public organizations.

My own particular bias as a professor and a researcher is that research is, at least, a very important avenue by which to reach managers. To do so, it has to be research, the results of which allow managers to realistically see that change toward the elimination of discriminatory practices will increase, rather than lessen, their control over the success and economic well-being of the organizations over which they hold stewardship.

The message, the appeal, must not be characterized by lumping managers as part of the much larger category of "white males," which is very threatening to them. I might add that managers that hold significant leadership and decisionmaking authority are only a fraction of the white male population, even though white males are a significant proportion of the managerial population.

I have misjudged the length of time available. Let me just, very quickly, skip a number of things and go directly to a working research definition that I propose that gets at institutional discrimination much more directly.

Institutional discrimination is a set of social processes through which organizational decisionmaking, either implicitly or explicitly, results in a clearly identified population receiving fewer economic, social, and material rewards for quantitative or qualitative units of performance than a clearly identifiable comparison population within the same organizational constraints. And the question of constraints then becomes terribly important, because you thereby get at comparability of demands for a particular job or a particular educational require

ment.

So much has been made of the issue of meritwhen merit is described as kind of a universal category-when, in fact, for example, in the case of entering into law school or medical school, academic ability is only one criterion for success in that enterprise. And yet merit-it is defined as meritwhereas merit might reasonably be assessed in a whole number of other criteria as well as academic ability.

Another issue that I want to raise and maybe I will raise it in the discussion if I have that opportunity-is the difference between representation and representativeness. In the decades that have just passed, we have had tremendous emphasis on representation; that is, the distribution of minorities and women in various organizations-various sectors of organizations-that is, are women distributed in engineering, as well as in clerical positions or bilevel vice-presidential positions, as well as the clerical position? It is a distribution, a representative distribution, that has been the focus by which to determine whether or not discrimination exists.

What I am suggesting, through the definition that I propose, is that we also look at something that might better be labeled "representation"; that is, do the interests of particular populations have represen

tation in the policies that an organization pursues? You see that, in effect, you might have representativeness; you might have a black or woman vice president of a bank, and you might say, "Well, everything's fine, we have achieved representation." But you haven't. All you have achieved is representativeness of that individual. But that individual might, in fact, continue to pursue the prior established policies of that institution in redlining against a particular population or credit policies that impact

on women.

So the fact that you have achieved representativeness of a population within an organization does not necessarily mean that the interests of that population have achieved representation in the work of the organization. And, I remind you, that it is through organizations that the bulk of the work of our modern industrial society is accomplished, so when policies themselves have discriminatory impact, it matters little that you have achieved representativeness of people throughout the organization. Well, I apologize for not having focused the presentation well.

MR. HARTOG. Thank you, Dr. Alvarez.

Martha Glenn Cox is assistant professor of organization and management at Yale University, and a senior associate with the consulting firm of Goodmeasure, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Cox has written and published several professional articles on communication between culturally diverse groups. She is currently collaborating with Rosabeth Moss Kanter in the preparation of training programs of tokenism and other topics related to the elimination of racism and sexism in organizations and the improvement of the quality of worklife. Organizations to which she has been consultant include the General Electic Company, HewlettPackard, the Royal Bank of Canada, Honeywell, Inc., Digital Equipment Co., and Conoco. Dr. Cox holds a bachelor's degree from Indiana University and a doctorate in psychology and social relations from Harvard University.

Good morning, Dr. Cox.

Statement of Martha Glenn Cox, Assistant Professor of Organization and Management, Yale University

DR. COX. What I would like to do before I begin is, first, thank the Commission for bringing together its consultation. I, necessarily, cannot know what you are getting out of it, but I know I have learned a

great deal in the past day, and whoever organized it deserves a strong commendation because they have accomplished a great deal in a short time, I think, which is not always true of such meetings. Secondly, I wanted to mention that I thought the Commission's paper was extremely evenhanded and thoughtful. I was happy to see it.

I think affirmative action is a complex issue and I think the statement does justice to that. It doesn't try to seek resolution of the issues, but, rather, lays clearly out what the dimensions are. And I especially appreciated the discussion of unintentional discrimination, which, I think, you will see plays a key role in my analysis of what the problems are and what sort of programs are really needed within corporate America to make affirmative action viable.

With that, I would like to say there are three basic points that I would like to make this morning. One of them is to explain to you my general orientation— the way I understand discrimination and how it operates in the corporate world. Secondly, I would like to present the elements that I think are important for effective implementation. And, finally, I would like to end with what may be a slightly more philosophical, but, I think, nonetheless, important point.

First then, does discrimination occur in corporate America? Yes, indeed, it does.

Are white male managers to blame? No, I don't think so.

Are women or minorities to blame? No, I don't think they are to blame, either.

What I think, in fact, occurs within the corporate world is a pattern of structural discrimination, by which I mean that jobs are structured within those settings in ways that they either create opportunity for the individuals in them or inhibit opportunity. They do so in a variety of ways, by creating differential access to information resources, support, contact with a large organization, and a possibility for advancement-both formal promotional advancement and also for growth in the job-intellectual growth, creative growth, links with the community one is serving, and so on.

Those are the ways in which organizations structure their jobs. And in the analysis of how those jobs are structured you can see that some of them have a great deal more room for growth than others do. I think that, in turn, the way the job is structured has a very big impact on the effectiveness of the occupant