Managing Diversity in Public Organizations

While population trends will increase pressures on public administrators to strengthen organizational diversity, however, concurrent social, political, and judicial trends will cause this task to become more complex and difficult. While a majority of the population in the United States continues to express support for the concept of equality of opportunity, there is simultaneously increasing resistance among the general population to specific programs, such as "Affirmative Action," designed to assure such an outcome. Further, it has become an unfortunate political tactic to pander to such concerns by attempting to dismantle or starve such programs. Lastly, the federal judiciary, while recognizing the merit of the intent of such programs, increasingly

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issue. Requirements for equality may be legislated and those requirements may be enforced with some degree of effectiveness. Real equality of opportunity will not occur, however, until such time as the great majority of individuals and organizations within a society voluntarily behave in a socially responsible manner. Within the Marxist interpretation, the inequalities and the conflict will continue as long as one group attempts to maintain an inequitable balance in employment. Income distribution objectives, laws prohibiting social discrimination, and, in some instances, policies intended to rectify the effects of past discrimination·affirmative action goals·have all become a part of "the rules of the game" for organizations in the United States. Equal opportunity and fair employment practices legislation has been enacted and enforced (with varying degrees of vigor, depending upon the philosophical stance of the administration in power) since the early 1960s. The concept of equal opportunity, however, often appears to defy precise definition·definitions tend to change with the perspective of the protagonist. One theorist concluded that most assessments asserting that equality of opportunity is absent are actually saying t
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 6171
Approximate Pages = 25 (250 words per page)

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