John-Paul Ferguson

The Eyes of the Needles: A Sequential Model of Union Organizing Drives, 1999-2004

This paper models three stages of the union organizing drive, using a new dataset covering more than 22,000 drives that took place between 1999 and 2004. The correlated sequential model tracks drives through all of their potential stages: holding an election, winning an election, and reaching first contracts. Only one-seventh of organizing drives that filed an election petition with the NLRB managed to reach a first contract within a year of certification. The model, which controls for the endogeneity of unfair labor practice (ULP) charges, finds that a ULP charge was associated with a 30% smaller cumulative chance of reaching such a contract. ULP charges had less effect on the votes cast than on the decision to hold an election and the ability to reach a first contract. A sequential model such as this one could be extended to test between some competing theories about the determinants of union organizing.

Specialization and Career Dynamics Evidence from the Indian Administrative Service

In this article, we attempt to resolve the tension between two conflicting views on the role of specialization in workers’ careers. Some scholars argue that specialization is a net benefit that allows workers to get ahead, while others argue that broad experience across several domains is the only way to be truly exceptional. We use rich longitudinal data from 1974 to 2008 on the careers of Indian Administrative Service officers, members of the Republic of India’s elite bureaucratic service, to test both these hypotheses. We find that specialization benefits officers throughout their career. We distinguish between skill-based and signal-based mechanisms that relate specialization to promotion, by exploring the match (or lack thereof) between the skills officers acquire and the jobs to which they are promoted, and we find that both mechanisms operate, but at different points in the career. Specialization is rewarded later in officers’ careers because of the skills they acquire by specializing. Earlier in their careers, skills are less important; it appears that specialization benefits officers because it is a signal of general ability. These results contradict studies that find that specialization helps early in careers but fades with experience, but they also call into question the idea that specialization always reflects accumulated skill. Our results support both types of theories but suggest important scope conditions for when one mechanism or the other is likely to dominate.

Risky Recombinations: Institutional Gatekeeping in the Innovation Process

Theories of innovation and technical change posit that inventions that combine knowledge across technology domains have greater impact than inventions drawn from a single domain. The evidence for this claim comes mostly from research on patented inventions and ignores failed patent applications. We draw on insights from research into institutional gatekeeping to theorize that, to be granted, patent applications that span technological domains must be better than otherwise-comparable, narrower applications. Using data on failed and successful patent applications, we estimate an integrated, two-stage model that accounts for differential selection. We find that more domain-spanning patent applications are less likely to be approved, and that controlling for this differential selection reduces the estimated effect of knowledge recombination on innovation impact by about a third. By conceptualizing the patent-approval process as a form of institutional gatekeeping, this paper highlights the institutional underpinnings of and constraints on the innovation process.

The Control of Managerial Discretion: Evidence from Unionization's Impact on Employment Segregation

Does limiting managers’ discretion limit organizations’ scope for discrimination? Social-psychological research argues that it limits opportunities to exercise cognitive biases. Organizational research has found that formal personnel practices that establish accountability for workplace diversity have increased women and minority representation in management. However, drawing causal inferences from such studies is complicated because adopting such policies may be endogenous to the firm’s wish to hire and promote women and minorities. This study uses unionization elections to conduct a regression-discontinuity test from which stronger causal inferences can be made. It finds that while unionization is associated with more representative workplaces and more women and minorities in management, these effects disappear close to the discontinuity threshold. Most of the effects of unionization on workforce diversity may be attributable to the unobserved drivers of selection into unionization. This has similar implications for the causal effects of diversity policies adopted by managers.

Racial Diversity and Union Organizing in the United States, 1999–2008

Does racial diversity make forming a union harder? Case studies offer conflicting answers, and little large-scale research on the question exists. Most quantitative research on race and unionization has studied trends in membership rather than the outcome of specific organizing drives and has assumed that the main problem is mistrust between workers and unions, paying less attention, for example, to the role of employers. The author explores the role of racial and ethnic diversity in the outcomes of nearly 7,000 organizing drives launched between 1999 and 2008. By matching the National Labor Relations Board’s information on union activity with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s surveys of large establishments, the author reconstructs the demographic composition of the work groups involved in each mobilization. The study finds that more diverse establishments are less likely to see successful organizing attempts. Little evidence is found, however, that this is because workers are less interested in voting for unions. Instead, the organizers of more diverse units are more likely to give up before such elections are held. Furthermore, this higher quit rate can be explained best by considering the other organizations involved in the organizing drive. In particular, employers are more likely to be charged with unfair labor practices when the unit in question is more racially diverse. This effect persists when the study controls for heterogeneity among industries, unions, and regions.

The Lives and Deaths of Jobs: Technical Interdependence and Survival in a Job Structure

Prior work has considered the properties of individual jobs that make them more or less likely to survive in organizations. Yet little research examines how a job’s position within a larger job structure affects its life chances and thus the evolution of the larger job structure over time. In this article, we explore the impact of technical interdependence on the dynamics of job structures. We argue that jobs that are more enmeshed in a job structure through these interdependencies are more likely to survive. We test our theory on a quarter century of personnel and job description data for the nonacademic staff of one of America’s largest public universities. Our results provide support for our key hypotheses: jobs that are more enmeshed in clusters of technical interdependence are less likely to die. At the same time, being part of such a cluster means that a job is more vulnerable if its neighbors disappear. And the “protection” of technical interdependence is contingent: it does not hold in the face of...

Firm Turnover and the Return of Racial Establishment Segregation

Racial segregation between U.S. workplaces is greater today than it was a generation ago. This increase happened alongside declines in within-establishment occupational segregation, on which most prior research has focused. We examine more than 40 years of longitudinal data on the racial employment composition of every large private-sector workplace in the United States to calculate between- and within-establishment trends in racial employment segregation over time. We demonstrate that the return of racial establishment segregation owes little to within-establishment processes, but rather stems from differences in the turnover rates of more and less homogeneous workplaces. Present research on employment segregation focuses mainly on within-firm processes. By doing so, scholars may be overstating the country’s progress on employment integration and ignoring other avenues of intervention that may give greater leverage for further integrating firms.

Osmotic Mobilization and Union Support during the Long Protest Wave, 1960–1995

To examine whether and how social movements that target private firms are influenced by larger protest cycles, we theorize about osmotic mobilization—social movement spillover that crosses the boundary of the firm—and how it should vary with the ideological overlap of the relevant actors and the opportunity structure that potential activists face inside the firm. We test our hypotheses by examining the relationship between levels of protest in U.S. cities around issues like Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, and the women’s movement and subsequent support for labor-union organizing in those cities. Combining nationally representative data on more than 20,000 protest events from 1960 to 1995 with data on more than 150,000 union organizing drives held from 1965 to 1999, we find that greater levels of protest activity are associated with greater union support, that spillover accrued disproportionately to unions with more progressive track records on issues like Civil Rights, and that these effects were disproportionately large in the wake of mobilization around employment-related causes and shrank in the wake of conservative political reaction that limited room for maneuver among the external protesters, the labor movement, or both. Our research helps to specify the channels through which external pressures affect firm outcomes.

Population Processes and Establishment-Level Racial Employment Segregation

Racial segregation between American workplaces is greater today than it was a generation ago. This increase has happened alongside the declines in within-establishment occupational segregation on which most prior research has focused. We examine more than 40 years of longitudinal data on the racial employment composition of every large private-sector workplace in the United States and calculate decomposable Theil statistics of segregation to compare and contrast between-area, between-establishment, and within-establishment trends in racial employment segregation over time. We demonstrate that the increase in establishment segregation owes little to within-establishment processes but rather stems from the different birth and death rates of more- and less-homogeneous workplaces. Present research on employment segregation focuses intently on within-firm processes. By doing so, we may be overstating what progress has been made on employment integration and ignoring other avenues of intervention that may give greater leverage for further integrating firms.