During the late 1960s and early 1970s, these rankings came under increased criticism, and the traditional status system provided neither a basis for justifying its practices nor a procedure for adjusting its rankings to accommodate to the criticism. The traditional status system was criticized for the low status it assigned to jobs predominantly occupied by females. It was also criticized for its unresponsiveness to economic changes. Finally, employees in certain jobs were critical of the rankings of their jobs, and, though specific criticisms in themselves might easily have been ignored in other circumstances, coming during a period of general social restiveness, they were taken as cause for concern.
The corporation decided to shift to a job evaluation system for ranking and compensating jobs, and Hay Associates, a leading consulting firm, was hired to design and implement a job evaluation system. The Hay system is probably the most commonly used form of job evaluation.
Although the issues posed for this article are pertinent to a traditional compensation system, they have special pertinence for a job evaluation system. Job evaluation explicitly aims to compensate jobs according to their economic value. As such, it seeks to compensate job holders based on exactly those factors emphasized by economic theories, and, as a result, it may be predicted that it will make job status and compensation even more related to human capital factors and less related to discriminatory factors.
Mobility and Mortality of Jobs: Defining the Sample
Even before considering these central issues, it is necessary to begin with a simpler, and more fundamental, question about the nature of a job hierarchy. Just in defining the sample of jobs, one must consider to what extent a stable job hierarchy exists in ABCO. There is a tendency to think of large organizations as unchanging, almost physical structures-much like the concrete and steel structures which house them. Organizational charts of jobs in a corporation are drawn as if these diagrams were believed to represent something enduring about the corporation.
White (1970a) formalizes these common assumptions in his model of vacancy chains which assumes a fixed set of jobs that remain in the same positions over time. This assumption is central to White's analysis. His entire analysis is based on the assumption that when someone leaves a job, a vacancy is created. However, to the extent that jobs are destroyed or moved in the organization, no assumption about vacancies can be made, so the pertinence of this assumption to various organizations requires empirical testing.
Organizations sometimes change their organizational structures: Jobs are upgraded, downgraded, created, and destroyed. Technological and economic changes occur, requiring new kinds of jobs while making others obsolete. Political battles over authority and task responsibilities change jobs so that they may be upgraded or downgraded in authority or shifted to entirely different departments and transformed into becoming entirely different jobs. Individual job occupants might become proficient and take on so many additional tasks that they change the nature and position of a particular job. These dynamic processes seem entirely plausible, but the frequency with which they occur is difficult, if not impossible, to predict. To the extent that they do occur, they pose a serious challenge to the notion of a fixed organizational structure; they suggest that old job duties or old ways of organizing duties into jobs will disappear and new duties or new ways of organizing duties will appear in the form of new jobs.
These analyses study the set of job titles which are listed in the personnel records for the years 1962,1965,1969,1972, and 1975. Titles for the three lowest levels in the organization-non-management, foreman, and lower management-are considered here. The job title identifications for higher levels were removed from the data to protect the anonymity of employees, since these jobs tend to have few occupants. Of course, the small number of occupants also makes them unsuitable for these analyses.
The main concern of the first analysis is the number of jobs which appear or disappear, that is, those that go from having no occupants to having some occupants and vice versa. However, inferences are more ambiguous for jobs with few occupants, since these jobs could mistakenly appear to have been eliminated when they temporarily have several vacancies. Consequently, the analysis distinguishes between small jobs (having 1-4 employees) and large jobs (having 5 or more employees). It can be inferred with confidence that jobs with five or more occupants have been eliminated when these jobs subsequently have no occupants.
The fact that the set of jobs in the organization was so thoroughly altered while showing few major changes in product or in organizational structure suggests that this may be a widespread phenomenon. However, few studies currently exist on the topic. One relevant finding is Granovetter's report that 35% of the job placements of individuals in his study were jobs that had not existed before (1974, p. 14). The Markov research literature has sometimes had data suitable for a test of this issue, but the assumptions of these models have prevented the issue from being studied.
This analysis clearly indicates that customary images of a fixed organizational hierarchy are seriously misleading. Jobs appear and disappear at a surprisingly high rate. White's (1970a) procedure for analyzing mobility in terms of vacancy chains would clearly not apply here, even over the short period 1962-1965. Although the assumptions of vacancy analysis seemed to apply rather well to the Episcopal Church hierarchy White studied, in the corporation studied here, any vacancy that occurred could go unfilled forever while new jobs were being created and filled which had never before been occupied.
