The Colour of Business: Managing Diversity in South Africa (review)

In The Colour of Business: Managing Diversity in South Africa, Kanya Adam offers a timely although troubling assessment of the implications of affirmative action in South Africa. She finds that implementation of race-based affirmative action in South Africa is complicated by the apartheid legacy, and more specifically, that it reinforces race and class contradictions.

This book, the result of doctoral research, is based upon surveys of business executives, focus groups, and personal interviews at selected companies between 1992 and 1997. Adam's goal is to assess the policies, implications, and changing views of affirmative action in South Africa. She therefore surveys the competing political interests and history of affirmative-action policies in South Africa as compared to those in other countries, as well as the response of businesses and changing views among private-sector executives.

Adam establishes the importance of transforming "business as usual" in South Africa. She argues that South Africa must radically and quickly redress race (and sex) discrimination in business if the processes of nation-building and national reconciliation are to proceed. The question is, "What is the best means of redress?" Affirmative action, Adam shows, is characteristically complicated and controversial. Typically conceived as race-based, quota-driven, preferential treatment of historically disadvantaged groups, affirmative action contradicts fundamental principles of the prevailing politics, a laissez-faire, liberal ideology. First, the concept of group or collective rights contradicts the concept of the individual as the beneficiary of rights. Promoting a collective or group identity necessarily involves subordinating individuality within the group. Further, strengthening identity on the basis of race, religion, language, and/or caste is considered divisive and a threat to equality and freedom. Second, quotas are viewed as a means to achieve equality of outcome by denying equality of opportunity, a fundamental right of individuals.

In South Africa, affirmative action is further complicated by the legacy of apartheid. Many suspect that it will be an excuse for the ANC to institutionalize nepotism and preferential treatment for blacks, in the same way that the Afrikaner nationalist government of the late 1940s employed its own version of affirmative action as a means to increase the wealth and social status of members of its own ethno-national group. Also, given that the majority of the population will be preferred by affirmative action in South Africa, this policy is likely to be a costly undertaking, with minimal benefits.

Adam's review of the history of affirmative action in the United
States, Malaysia, India, and Canada outlines a variety of affirmative interventions ranging from quota systems to flexible preferential policies (p. 79). Typically, however, most of these policies have benefited only the least disadvantaged of the targeted groups. In Malaysia, where the target group has also been the majority, success has been attributed to a strong national economy, which grew at remarkable rates while affirmative action was implemented. These findings suggest that affirmative action in South Africa may have only minimal impact on a needy population, at a prohibitive cost.

As a result, affirmative action in South Africa is riddled with inconsistencies. The ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), conceptualizes affirmative action broadly, as incorporating "the entirety of social relations affected by apartheid" (p. 83). It expects affirmative action to remedy social and economic inequalities by providing access to education, skills, employment, and land to groups disadvantaged by apartheid, yet the ANC has committed itself to a broad policy of nonracialism. Thus, Adam notes, the government's policies are contradictory: on the one hand, they oppose the racial group policies that characterized apartheid; on the other hand, their affirmative-action policies, as documented in the 1998 Employment Equity Bill, rely upon racial group policies to rectify the distortions of apartheid.

Most troubling are the discrepancies that arise in the process of dismantling apartheid in South Africa. From surveys, interviews, and discussions with a cross section of business executives, managers and directors...