ABSTRACT
One of the most frequently heard criticisms of affirmative action is that it displaces the primary goal of public personnel administration—the staffing of public agencies with people who are best able to run these organizations effectively. Yet the message that unifies all of the statements on affirmative action in this symposium is that effective public administration in a democratic society relies heavily on the existence of genuinely representative bureaucracies. In other words, to be truly effective, our public organizations must be representative in the most positive and meaningful sense of the word.
