James N. Baron

The Structure of Opportunity: How Promotion Ladders Vary within and among Organizations.

A previous version of this paper was presented at the 1984 Academy of Management annual meeting. The authors gratefully acknowledge research support from the National Science Foundation (SES 7924905), the CenterforAdvanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (BNS 76-22943), and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Teri Bush, Kelsa Duffy, and Jill Fukuhara provided splendid technical support. Howard Aldrich, Robert Althauser, Yinon Cohen, Frank Dobbin, Paul Osterman, and the ASQ reviewers and editors offered helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. This paper analyzes data describing jobs in 100 establishments in order to test hypotheses about the characteristics of jobs and organizations associated with the structure of internal promotion ladders. The diversity of labor market arrangements found within the organizations indicates only weak support for hypotheses linking internal labor markets to organizational or sectoral imperatives. Atthe job level, however, there is support for hypotheses linking job ladders to firm-specific skills, organizational structure, gender distinctions, technology, occupational differentiation, the institutional environment, and the interests of unions. The paper concludes with an examination of how promotion ladders are formed from clusters of jobs associated with each other by occupation, skill, or gender composition.e

Building the Iron Cage: Determinants of Managerial Intensity in the Early Years of Organizations

Considers the impact of founding conditions on the later administration and management of technology startups in Silicon Valley. Data were collected in 1994-1995 by survey and interviews with 173 technology firms that had at least 10 employees and were no more than 10 years old. This research draws on the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies. The interviews with firm founders identified three dimensions along which work and employment are organized. These are: attachment, basis of coordination and control, and selection. Within these three dimensions, founders created employment models related to their views about desired organizational culture, strategies for employee selection, or perceptions of employee motivation. These three organizational dimensions are used to explain the five basic employment models - engineering, star, commitment, bureaucracy, and autocracy. Results show that the bureaucratic model is the most administratively intense with autocracy in second place, then engineering, star, and commitment. Both the model that is chosen by the founder and the gender balance in these firms affected the level of managerial intensity that resulted in the firms. Firms with a higher proportion of women in the first year became less bureaucratized than other firms. Administrative intensity is found to increase drastically when a firm goes public. This likely results from the need for more financial reporting, regulatory compliance, and investor relations management. Overall, this analysis demonstrates the path-dependence in bureaucratization. (SRD)

Labor pains: Change in organizational models and employee turnover in young, high-tech firms.

Organizational theories, especially ecological perspectives, emphasize the disruptive effects of change. However, the mechanisms producing these effects are seldom examined explicitly. This article examines one such mechanism—employee turnover. Analyzing a sample of high‐technology start‐ups, we show that changes in the employment models or blueprints embraced by organizational leaders increase turnover, which in turn adversely affects subsequent organizational performance. Turnover associated with organizational change appears to be concentrated among the most senior employees, suggesting “old guard disenchantment” as the primary cause. The results are consistent with the claim of neoinstitutionalist scholars that founders impose cultural blueprints on nascent organizations and with the claim of organizational ecologists that altering such blueprints is disruptive and destabilizing.

The Social Psychology of Organizations and Inequality

Structural explanations of the production of inequality in organizations often mimic economics in their choice of both variables and theoretical accounts. The «new structuralism» typically has neglected important social psychological processes such as social comparison, categorization, and interpersonal attraction and affiliation. This paper illustrates how some basic social psychological tenets can substantially enrich the analysis of the division of labor in organizations, the assignment of wages to positions, and the process through which individuals are matched with work roles

Organizational blueprints for success in high-tech start-ups: lessons from the Stanford Project on emerging companies

This publication contains reprint articles for which IEEE does not hold copyright. Full text is not available on IEEE Xplore for these articles.

Targets of Opportunity: Organizational and Environmental Determinants of Gender Integration within the California Civil Service, 1979-1985

This paper links organizational change to social inequality by examining how organizational dynamics affected rates of gender integration among California states agencies between 1979 and 1985. The analysis draws on theories of organizations and organization environment relations to identify factors that influence economic, political, and social pressures for change, the costs of change, and capacities to change in a specific work setting. In conformity with those theories, it is shown that progress toward gender integration has been substantially influenced by the degree of external pressure and bulnerability, the relative sizes of various internal interest groups (e.g., women, nonwhites, unions) that favor or oppose integration, the extent of structural inertia to which an organization is prone by virtue of its size and age, and by characteristics of agency leadership. Some implications of these results for studies of organizations and of social inequality are discussed.

THE ORGANIZATION OF WORK IN A SEGMENTED ECONOMY

Stratification researchers have increasingly embraced segmentation perspectives, dividing industries into groups believed to exhibit different work arrangement and opportunity structures. Previous research, however, indicates only limited support for those predictions. This paper assesses the utility of segmentation approaches by conceptualizing and measuring sectors organizationally, rather than among industries. Center and periphery enterprises are distinguished along two interrelated dimensions: the complexity of their organizational forms (size, structure, and technology) and the degree of market power or environmental dominance. These dimensions are operationalized and tested in analyses of more than 400 work organizations. Our formulation captures predicted organizational differences in work and opportunity. For example, as hypothesized, establishments that are high on these dimensions rely more on internal career ladders and the proliferation ofjob titles. While coarse taxonomies of economic segmentation may accurately represent the economic extremes, however, they obscure the diversity of enterprises between those extremes. Stratification and work arrangements can be better understood by analyzing their specific organizational and environmental determinants.

For What It's Worth: Organizations, Occupations, and the Value of Work Done by Women and Nonwhites

Economic penalties against jobs employing disproportionate numbers of women or nonwhites vary across organizational context and occupational type. Analyses of prescribed pay rates for jobs in the California state civil service in 1985 suggest that work done disproportionately by women and nonwhites is devalued most in positions that are older, not represented by activist unions, have ambiguous performance criteria, or are most generic across organizational settings. We conclude that the extent of ascription depends on propensities toward devaluation in a given setting, prospects for collective action by disadvantaged groups, and the organizational costs and benefits (economic and otherwise) of recalibrating job worth to achieve pay equity.

The Proliferation of Job Titles in Organizations.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1985 American Sociological Association annual meeting, Washington, D.C. The authors were supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES 79-24905) and by generous research funds from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The Occupational Analysis Division of the U.S. Employment Service graciously provided data and assisted us in this research. Teri Bush, Kelsa Duffy, and Ann Bucher worked wonders on the manuscript. Howard Aldrich, Glenn Carroll, Paul DiMaggio, Frank Dobbin, John Meyer, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Peter Reiss, and the ASQ editors and reviewers offered assistance and helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. This paper develops and tests hypotheses about the characteristics of organizations and their environments that favor the proliferation of detailed job titles to describe work roles. A method for measuring the proliferation of job titles is proposed and applied to a sample of 368 diverse work organizations. It is hypothesized that proliferation is linked to four main factors: technical and administrative imperatives; internal political struggles over the division of labor; the institutional environment and its role in shaping personnel practices; and the market environment. Crosssectional and longitudinal analyses indicate that job titles proliferate most in organizations that are large, bureaucratic, rely on firm-specific skills, have a professionalized workforce, and are in institutional sectors. We describe howfragmentation among job titles imposes status gradations and gender distinctions in organizations, noting some important theoretical and practical implications of the phenomenon.*

Avenues of Attainment: Occupational Demography and Organizational Careers in the California Civil Service1

This article outlines a comprehensive approach to analyzing organizational career inequality, emphasizing interdependencies among multiple �avenues of attainment�: job shifts and lateral moves, within and between organizations; changes in salary and salary ceilings associated with job shifts; and within‐job salary advancement. Hypotheses regarding how occupational sex and race composition affect these career outcomes are tested with data describing work histories of California state government employees. Although female‐ and minority‐dominated occupations were disadvantaged in many respects, their incumbents moved among state agencies more frequently (and reaped greater economic benefit) than did employees in occupations dominated by white males. Intraorganizational promotions yielded roughly comparable salary gains for incumbents of male‐ and female‐dominated occupations, but through distinct paths: male‐dominated occupations had less frequent promotions with larger salary increases; female‐dominated occupations experienced more frequent job shifts with smaller pay changes. Men in female‐dominated occupations were shielded from many of the adverse career outcomes experienced by their female counterparts.