Sanford M. Jacoby

Are Career Jobs Headed for Extinction

Despite corporate downsizing and the rise of Silicon Valley, career-type employment practices remain prevalent in the United States. Evidence to support this claim is drawn from a variety of data on employee tenure and mobility; job creation and job quality; employer responses to labor-market tightness; and benefit and pay structures. Yet while career jobs are not dead, employees today bear more risk, such as risk of job loss and of pay fluctuations. This is an important change. But it would be a mistake to think that employers will ask employees to shoulder ever-larger amounts of risk. That is because there are limits—economic, demographic, and political—to the risk-shifting process.

Employing bureaucracy : managers, unions, and the transformation of work in the 20th century

Review(s) of: Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in the 20th Century by Sanford M Jacoby, Revised Edition, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 2004. pp. xi + 315. US

The Effect of Employer Networks on Workplace Innovation and Training

79.95 cloth, US

Union-Management Cooperation in the United States: Lessons from the 1920S

34.50 paper.

The Workers of nations : industrial relations in a global economy

If innovative work practices improve performance, why does the intensity of their adoption vary substantially across establishments? Following a lead suggested by some sociological studies, the authors empirically investigate the role of social networks (ties to other organizations) in the organizational learning associated with diffusion of innovative work practices. Using establishment data on formal affiliation and other network measures, they find that managerial participation in networks—specifically, in industry and cross-industry associations, civic organizations, and the internal networks of multi-unit firms—positively affected both the probability that high-performance work practices and employee training programs would be adopted and, where they were adopted, the intensity of their adoption. Furthermore, multiple affiliations raised the likelihood that an establishment would pursue an intensive approach to work reorganization and training.

Employment Duration and Industrial Labor Mobility in the United States, 1880-1980

This paper presents an analysis of several experiments in union-management cooperation that took place during the 1920s. The author examines the economic and social factors that influenced the formation, operation, and decline of these experiments. Although observers at that time hoped that union-management cooperation would be widely adopted, it extended only to industries suffering from declining markets for union-made products and failed to survive the Great Depression. When the author compares these early experiments to current cooperative endeavors, he concludes that unions and employers will voluntarily work together to improve productivity only within an intermediate range of economic stress.

Corporate Governance in Comparative Perspective: Prospects for Convergence

The new international economy is today the single most important factor shaping relations between employers, unions, and governments in the worlds advanced industrial societies. While companies compete in global markets with firms around the world, workers remain fixed in each country and are influenced by local the customs and mores. This book explores how globalization affects the contemporary workplace and how workplace policies can make nations more internationally competitive. Unlike other country-by-country treatments of the subject, this analysis compares and contrasts the experiences of different nations around important developments, such as the labor market consequences of regional trading pacts, the international diffusion of new forms of work organization, and the strategies that nations are pursuing to keep their work systems competitive. The contributors come from a variety of disciplines but all bear expertise in international industrial relations.

Business and Society in Japan and the United States

Recent studies of job tenure raise the question of the appropriate duration statistic to use in historical research. This article compares duration measures and examines their empirical and theoretical implications for historical research on employment tenure. Using a variety of data from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we find that although there existed a sector of stable jobs, most industrial jobs were brief. Since World War I, however, there has been a sharp shift in the relative size and importance of the short- and long-term job sectors.

Risk and the Labor Market

Pundits of globalization predict the eventual demise of the stakeholder corporate governance model found in Europe and Japan and its replacement by the Anglo-American shareholder model. Were this to occur, it would sharply change the relationship of employees to their employer in many parts of the world. Yet its not obvious that convergence is inevitable. There is considerable inertia and persistence of national governance models due to factors such as path dependence, bounded rationality, uncertain macroeconomic benefits, and weak globalization pressures. Moreover, while one can find evidence of institutional diffusion across borders, it occurs in multiple directions; not all roads lead to Wall Street.

Management attitudes toward two-tier pay plans

This essay discusses various aspects of corporate organization in Japan and the United States. First it examines some concrete empirical questions, such as relative differences in decentralization of decision-making, and in outsourcing. Next it turns to more theoretical and historical questions to do with the meaning of embeddedness (in what sense are companies embedded in national contexts) and with the process of organizational change. It analyzes the role played by institutions and social norms in determining the rate and direction of economic change in Japan and the United States. The essay is for a book symposium on The Embedded Corporation.