Affirmative Action in Human Resource Management
This paper examines affirmative action as a human resource management issue, tracing its origins from the systemic racial discrimination endured by African Americans through the civil rights era to the executive orders issued by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in the 1960s. It explains the conceptual rationale for affirmative action programs and distinguishes between mandatory public-sector compliance and voluntary private-sector adoption. The paper then analyzes how HRM professionals navigate affirmative action in the contexts of recruitment, EEOC liability, employee retention, and organizational culture change, with particular attention to managing workplace diversity and the attitudinal barriers minority employees may face even in ostensibly compliant organizations.
- Introduction: Racial Discrimination and the Road to Civil Rights: Historical context of slavery and civil rights struggle
- Concept and History of Affirmative Action in the United States: Origins and rationale of affirmative action policy
- Relevance of Affirmative Action in Contemporary Human Resource Management: Public vs. private sector HRM compliance obligations
- Relevance to Recruitment, Liability, and Retention: HRM roles in recruitment, civil liability, and retention
- Relevance to Organizational Policy, Culture, and Change Management: Culture change and attitudinal bias in organizations
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its policy analysis in historical context, giving readers a clear rationale for why affirmative action programs were deemed necessary before explaining how they function in practice.
- It draws a useful and well-maintained distinction between mandatory public-sector obligations and voluntary private-sector adoption, which sharpens the practical HRM implications throughout.
- The paper moves logically from macro-level policy to concrete HRM responsibilities — recruitment, liability, retention, and culture — demonstrating applied analytical thinking rather than abstract description.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates policy application analysis: taking a broad legal and social policy framework (affirmative action) and systematically translating it into specific professional responsibilities across multiple HRM domains. By citing both legal sources and organizational behavior texts, the author bridges legal compliance and management practice effectively.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a historical narrative establishing the moral and legal backdrop for affirmative action, then defines the policy and its origins in presidential executive orders. Subsequent sections pivot to HRM practice, covering public versus private sector distinctions, recruitment and liability risks, and finally the more nuanced challenge of shaping organizational culture and managing attitudinal bias. Each section builds on the last, moving from history to law to management application.
Introduction: Racial Discrimination and the Road to Civil Rights
The long history of the United States includes a shameful three-century-long period during which African people were rounded up in their native lands, bound in shackles, forced into the putrid, rat-infested holds of ships, and transported to North America, where they were worked — often to death — as slaves, especially in the southern states. Despite the fact that the institution of slavery officially ended with the 1865 enactment of the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment, it would be an entire century before Black Americans received the full rights of citizenship and the same protections of law to which they had officially been entitled since the era immediately following the end of the American Civil War.
During that time, they endured systemic discrimination, frequently with the outright support or tacit approval of local, state, and federal authorities, including law enforcement (Edwards, Wattenberg, & Lineberry, 2009). Black Americans were routinely denied their most basic constitutionally protected rights, and many southern states enacted so-called Jim Crow Laws — expressly designed and intended to prevent Black Americans from exercising their rights, particularly their voting rights. Even in northern states, public facilities remained largely segregated, and Black Americans were excluded from educational, employment, and housing opportunities throughout the country (Edwards, Wattenberg, & Lineberry, 2009).
By the civil rights era, the infiltration of racist hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan into local police agencies prompted federal authorities to intervene. The governors of several southern states had to be confronted by armed U.S. marshals and National Guard soldiers dispatched by the Kennedy administration before they would step away from the doors of public universities when the first Black students attempted to exercise their constitutional right to equal education — a right confirmed years earlier in the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which finally reversed the 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that had established the doctrine of "separate but equal" (Goldfield, Abbot, Argersinger, et al., 2005).
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