A model of matching processes determining career outcomes must also specify how matches respond to individuals' career histories. Career history information is particularly important in organizations. In an organization, information about an employee's career history is likely to be readily available; it is contained in company records. Moreover, in an organization, career history information is likely to be meaningful to promotion committee members, who can interpret employees' previous jobs and who know what it takes to get into these jobs and to perform the duties associated with them. In addition, because organizations are small communities with strong norms and policies about many aspects of organizational life, particular kinds of careers are likely to be more valued and, consequently, to affect future career attainments.
This study hypothesizes that a matching process exists which is affected by individuals' career histories. This process, called here a career selection system, or, more simply, a career system, is a system for matching employees with jobs based (at least in part) on employees' career histories. Unlike the human capital model, which posits that individuals' earnings attainments are determined by their human capital attributes, the career system model posits that careers are also affected by earlier career attainments. Unlike some structural models, which stress the influence of vacancies or rigid career ladders, the career system model posits that a dynamic selection mechanism deter-mines which employees will be considered for advancements, when employees will be considered for advancements, and what their rate of achievement will be.
The career system model suggests that selection mechanisms respond not only to individuals' human capital but also to their career histories: the jobs they have held, the timing of their past advancements, and their rates of advancement. Note that these are not attributes of individuals per se, but attributes of individuals in relation to organizational positions. These career history attributes are generalizable roles that some individuals in any cohort could fill, regardless of the individuals' personal attributes and particular performances. By making individuals' chances of future career advancement be a function of their career histories in the organization, the career system can guarantee the availability of candidates for upcoming vacancies and the orderliness and predictability of career transitions. The career system conception is an alternative to the individually based model which underlies so much of the economic and psychological literature.
The particular model of career systems proposed here, the tournament model, describes a career selection system as a series of implicit competitions which progressively differentiate a cohort of employees throughout their careers, each time further defining their opportunities for future attainments. Thus the tournament model provides a resolution of the conflict between opportunity and efficiency by offering initial opportunity to all employees while fostering efficiency by repeated selections to remove employees from the tournament for top positions.
The tournament has a number of implications which suggests that selections among the members of a cohort occur continually as their careers unfold, that employees' careers differ in their timetables for advancement and in their rates of advancement (trajectories), and that these timetables and trajectories will be related to employees' ultimate career attainment. Moreover, just as sports tournaments are used to identify the most able contestants, career tournaments may be used to create social signals of ability, which explain restrictions on opportunity and which legitimate investments in the winners of each stage. Finally, the tournament model is a dynamic mechanism which may operate over changing historical circumstances, and social and economic forces may have different effects on careers at different stages and for different employee groups.
While the social psychology of employee behavior tends to stress only current situational influences, it is commonly accepted that individuals are also affected by their past experiences and their future expectations. To the extent that these are patterned by an organizational career system, such as the one described by the tournament model, this model can identify some of the structural sources of individual behavior in organizations.
Generalizability
As an ideal type, this organization can be conceived as a microcosm of stratification and mobility in larger society. This microcosm manifests strata in a formal status hierarchy which are more explicit and more clearly delineated than are statuses in the larger society. Studies of mobility among these strata are also likely to show clearer patterns of mobility than are likely to occur in averaging over diverse practices in the entire society.
Moreover, large organizations like this one employ a large portion of the entire labor force. Roughly 30% of the nonfarm labor force is employed by business enterprises with more than 500 employees (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1972), and another 20% works for local, state, or federal governments (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1976). In addition, major corporations like ABCO influence the rest of the labor market by their visibility as models of personnel practices and by the magnitude of their economic influence on the external labor market.
But there are some important conceptual and empirical distinctions between mobility within a large corporation and other kinds of mobility. Within a single organization, information about an employee's career history is more available, more interpretable, and more trustworthy than is such information when it is transferred across employing institutions. These conditions make many kinds of social labeling processes possible which would be weaker or inoperative across institutions.
Moreover, large organizations treat employees differently than the smaller ones do. For instance, larger organizations pay higher wages (Lester 1967; Phelps Brown 1977), and they pay more for education (Stolzenberg 1978). Although the reasons for the effects of organizational size are subject to various interpretations (Kimberly 1976; Hall 1982), this study of a large corporation is likely to obtain findings which differ from those of studies of smaller firms. Consequently, while careers in the microcosm of a single large organization may represent some features of mobility in larger society and may affect mobility patterns more generally, careers in a corporation are likely to differ from mobility among organizations and from mobility within small organizations.
Unfortunately, other attributes of the organization which might aid generalizability inferences cannot be specified here, because I had to promise not to reveal information that would identify this corporation when I was given access to these personnel records. This leads to an unfortunate vagueness in the description of ABCO.
