Scott R. Eliason

When Organizations Rule: Judicial Deference to Institutionalized Employment Structures

This article offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of legal endogeneity—a powerful process through which institutionalized organizational structures influence judicial conceptions of compliance with antidiscrimination law. It finds that organizational structures (e.g., grievance and evaluation procedures, antiharassment policies) become symbolic indicators of rational governance and compliance with antidiscrimination laws, first within organizations, but eventually in the judicial realm as well. Lawyers and judges tend to infer nondiscrimination from the mere presence of those structures. Judges increasingly defer to organizational structures in their opinions, ultimately inferring nondiscrimination from their presence. Legal endogeneity theory is tested by analyzing a random sample of 1,024 federal employment discrimination opinions (1965–99) and is found to have increased over time. Judicial deference is most likely when plaintiffs lack clout and when the legal theories require judges to rule on unobservable organizational attributes. The authors argue that legal endogeneity weakens the impact of law when organizational structures are viewed as indicators of legal compliance even in the face of discriminatory actions.

Characterizing the Life Course as Role Configurations and Pathways

The life course is a multi-faceted phenomenon. It involves a complex interplay among psychological orientations and behaviors; past experiences and future actions; age and cohort influences; network, historical, and institutional contexts that provide an environment of opportunities and constraints; and the interconnections among social roles that change over time in that environment. All of these coalesce to set the stage for life chances and personal wellbeing throughout one’s life. The life course itself constitutes a social institution, cutting pathways through time and creating a gravity of sorts, varyingly attracting individual lives into role configurations conforming to age-graded norms. Research on the life course and the development of accompanying theories thus grapples with a wide array of issues, have numerous foci, and draw upon a number of disciplines in order to understand the social context of human lives over time (Elder, 1994).

Labor-Market Experiences and Labor-Force Outcomes

This article presents a comprehensive framework for studying the linkages between previous labor-force behavior and current labor-force positions. This approach can be used to study labor-force dynamics in new ways and to show how margianl work consists of several types of labor-market experience. These include most forms of job search or employment behavior identified in previous sociological and economic literature. Labor-force outcomes include both current labor-force participation and underemployment or part-time work. Both typologies are modifications of the Hauser-Sullivan-Clogg Labor Utilization Framework. The cross-classification of the two typologies provides an empirical definition of the labor-market matching process. This contingency table characterizes structure in that process. The association between labor-market experiences and labor-force outcomes is strong and remarkably stable over time.

Analyzing the labor force : concepts, measures, and trends

Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. An Introduction to the Labor Utilization Framework. 3. Analyzing Trends in Labor Force Activity. 4. Latent Class Models in the Analysis of Social Mobility. 5. Analyzing the Relationship Between Annual Labor Market Experiences and Labor Force Positions: A Modification of the Labor Utilization Framework. 6. Labor Force Behavior and its Influence on Status and Wage Attainments. 7. Market Experiences and Labor Force Outcomes: Fifteen Years of Race and Gender Inequality, 1982-1996. 8. Occupations, Labor Markets, and the Relationship between Labor Market Experiences and Labor Force Outcomes. 9. Toward a More Complete Understanding of Labor Markets and Stratification. References. Index.