new jobs this week On EmploymentCrossing

506

jobs added today on EmploymentCrossing

24

job type count

On EmploymentCrossing

Healthcare Jobs(342,151)
Blue-collar Jobs(272,661)
Managerial Jobs(204,989)
Retail Jobs(174,607)
Sales Jobs(161,029)
Nursing Jobs(142,882)
Information Technology Jobs(128,503)

Career Systems and Career Stratification in Various Organizations

83 Views
What do you think about this article? Rate it using the stars above and let us know what you think in the comments below.
This article considers what studies of organizational career selection systems and organizational job status systems can contribute to the sociological study of mobility and stratification and to the social-psychological study of employee motivation. The article also indicates why vacancy approaches to the study of careers, though useful for showing hierarchically imposed limitations, cannot adequately address some aspects of organizational careers. Moreover, personnel policy descriptions and employee perceptions, which should be good ways of obtaining descriptions of organizational career selection practices, are found to yield vague, fragmented, and sometimes contradictory portrayals.

The problem arises from the difficulty in conceptualizing careers and the conflicting forces that shape them. These conflicts are reviewed, and they are related to the dominant theoretical approaches. A new model, the tournament model of career systems, is proposed, which is the conceptual focus for this study. 

The study of career opportunities in organizations is useful theoretically because it integrates two important areas of sociological interest-it is the study of stratification in organizations. Although a large proportion of the work force is employed in large organizations and although mobility and stratification have been extensively studied, researchers still have very little information about career mobility in organizations.



While most mobility research has studied changes in occupational attainments, most professionals, managers, and skilled workers tend to stay in the same occupation throughout their work lives (Reynolds 1951, pp. 19-36; Lipset and Bendix 1952; Blau and Duncan 1967). In such occupations, which have many status distinctions and diverse career ladders within them, classic measures of occupational status will be insensitive to career mobility (Blau and Duncan 1967).

Occupational status scales such as Duncan's socioeconomic index (SEI) also have some anomalous characteristics. The lowest professional occupation has a score very similar to that of the highest manual occupation (Blau and Duncan 1967, p. 121). Moreover, when high-status professionals, say chemical engineers (SEI = 90-96), working for a manufacturing firm are promoted to a position of high-level executive (SEI 75-79), they take a large status drop in occupational status score. It is hard to imagine in what respect this promotion represents downward mobility. While these problems do not preclude the usefulness of occupational status scores in some contexts, they do suggest the value of other status distinctions. Given the large segment of the American work force employed by large corporations, the analysis of promotions within large corporations can augment our understanding of intra-generational mobility in society.

The present study investigates changes of status and authority within an organizational hierarchy, and it is able to do so in terms of the actual social classifications made by the organizational hierarchy-classifications which have extensive implications. These status and authority categories define many aspects of employees' work lives: the kind of workspace they receive, how that workspace may be furnished, what kinds of assistance and services they can expect, how much they are paid, and how they are paid (Goldner 1965; Ladinsky 1975; Kanter 1977). They also have great meaning and importance to individuals, defining the discretion, autonomy, and complexity in one's work, factors which have been shown to influence individuals' values outside the workplace (Kohn 1969; Kohn and Schooler 1978).

By studying a single organization, this research can analyze organizational structure at an even more fine-grained level: analyzing the effects of jobs. While sociological research has studied the effects of occupations on economic and status attainments, investigators have noted that the underlying patterns can probably best be seen at the fine-grained level of jobs (Featherman 1973; Kelley 1973a,b). The study of stratification in an organization can focus on actual jobs-their attributes, composition, and effects on earnings and subsequent attainments—in effect, providing a test of whether job effects are fully expressed by job status scales.

In studying attainments in terms of the actual units used by the organization (jobs, statuses, authority levels, earnings), this research provides a description that is likely to resemble the actual processes operating in the organization because it describes relationships in terms of the organization's own labels and categories. 

One could contend that the engineer gives up some prestige in becoming an executive, but the contention is at best equivocal. From a theoretical viewpoint, attainments in an organizational status system are in many ways better indicators of status than the customary occupational status scores. If the Weberian notion of status is viewed as a consensual system of deference, status in an organization is the epitome of this notion, for the small size and institutionalized character of the status system assure an almost total consensus far beyond the inter-rater reliability of occupational status scores in larger society.

In a sense, it is like studying the status system of a small community: The relatively small group of individuals "residing" in a corporation (fewer than 15,000 employees in ABCO) agree on which jobs each individual holds, what status ranking each job receives, and how status rankings are to be interpreted in terms of rewards, prerogatives, autonomy, and deference. Some of their agreements are codified into formal rules and institutionalized into prescribed practices. For instance, the status rankings of jobs are precisely codified by most organizations, and in ABCO, as in many corporations, an extensive job evaluation procedure is used to make the status assignments standardized and widely accepted. Similarly, formal rules tend to define the implications of the various status rankings. A job's status ranking defines its salary range, its benefit package, its office size, its furniture, and whether the individual who holds it gets an outside office with a window. As an advertisement indicates, "You know you've made it when you have a Bigelow [carpet] on the floor," and in ABCO, employees do not get a carpet of that quality until they reach the top status category in the middle-management level. A job's status ranking also defines how much discretion one has about job tasks, how often one reports to a supervisor, and one's latitude to spend the afternoon at the golf course or (for some low-status jobs) to go to the bathroom without permission.

Moreover, like a small community, organizations develop highly articulated norms for interaction. Although the formal compensation system and job evaluation system explicitly prescribe some of these norms, many implicit norms have also developed to specify numerous subtle aspects of interaction (who can interrupt whom, who steps aside in a crowded hall, who "volunteers" to get coffee). The extensive implications of organizational status systems for deferential behavior and the near-total consensus on these statuses and their implications make organizational statuses, in some ways, a better representation of the concept of status than occupational status scores.
If this article has helped you in some way, will you say thanks by sharing it through a share, like, a link, or an email to someone you think would appreciate the reference.



I was facing the seven-year itch at my previous workplace. Thanks to EmploymentCrossing, I'm committed to a fantastic sales job in downtown Manhattan.
Joseph L - New York, NY
  • All we do is research jobs.
  • Our team of researchers, programmers, and analysts find you jobs from over 1,000 career pages and other sources
  • Our members get more interviews and jobs than people who use "public job boards"
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars.
EmploymentCrossing - #1 Job Aggregation and Private Job-Opening Research Service — The Most Quality Jobs Anywhere
EmploymentCrossing is the first job consolidation service in the employment industry to seek to include every job that exists in the world.
Copyright © 2024 EmploymentCrossing - All rights reserved. 21