In particular, a person's job may have an important impact on whether that person's achievements are recognized, valued, or re-warded with promotions. For instance, individuals in clerical jobs may have difficulty getting promotions because they are not given the chance to demonstrate the managerial skills. According to human capital theory, the effects of job status are indeed incidental. Organizations would have to pay for the value of college degrees regardless of whether the job status system existed. In contrast, according to structural theory, the job evaluation system specifies how much this organization is willing to pay for a college degree. While social structuralists concede that external labor markets constrain organizations to pay a premium for college degrees, they would contend that market imperfections permit organizations wide latitude in the amount and form of this premium and that other organizational features determine how much it will be. Indeed, the practice of job evaluation is implemented with the explicit purpose of making job (and indirectly individual attribute) compensation more rational and equitable in relation to one another. Presumably, organizations only go to the bother and great expense of implementing these programs because they seek to realign pay relationships within the firm. It is noteworthy that job evaluation has little way to take account of external market pay relationships. Organizations evidently believe that they can realign these pay relationships without being totally at the mercy of markets and that job status systems are an instrument for doing this. Like most other sociologists, we can concur with this assumption in the inferences we draw from these findings.
The management literature explains this in terms of the "visibility" of jobs, and Kanter (1977) describes some of the social psychological processes associated with high visibility of jobs. Signaling theory suggests an alternative view: that certain highly valued jobs serve as a signal to indicate that their occupants are capable and worthy of pro-motion. An analysis of vacancy chains (White 1970a) suggests another view: that jobs which feed into higher-level jobs will offer greater promotions. Of course these various explanations may be describing different aspects of the same phenomenon since high-visibility jobs may also be social signals and may obtain some of their visibility and signaling value because they are part of a dynamic promotion chain (e.g., a growing or highly valued department).
Economists describe the differential career opportunities associated with different jobs as "dual labor markets"-one containing jobs which offer no career mobility and one containing jobs which offer high promotion chances (Doeringer and Piore 1971). Of course this dichotomy may even be too simple; it may be only one part of a more extensive job tracking system which selects and channels employees' careers in organizations. Observations and surveys of employees in organizations suggests some support for this hypothesis (Martin and Strauss 1959; Goldner 1965; Kanter 1977); however, systematic analyses of the actual promotion chances associated with jobs have not been done.
The following sections analyze three questions about the promotion chances associated with jobs. First, do all jobs at a given level confer the same promotion chances? If there are differences; do they indicate a simple dichotomy (as the dual labor market suggests), a multilevel stratification system of "discrete wafers," or a continuum where jobs at the same level have various degrees of proximity to the next higher level?
Second, if jobs differ, are these differences in promotion chances stable attributes of jobs, or are they transitory phenomena which change over time?
Third, what determines the promotion chances offered by jobs? To what extent are the promotion chances jobs offer determined by their human capital, race, or sex composition?
Do Jobs Offer Different Promotion Chances?
American norms encourage the belief that all individuals have the opportunity to improve their position in life, and organizations generally reinforce this perception among their employees. According to this norm, it is up to individuals to improve their attainments and anyone can do it, regardless of their present job. Indeed, stories of individuals who began as mail clerks and rose to high executive positions are frequently topics of newspaper reports and company gossip.
Unfortunately, the literature provides little good information on the actual distribution of promotion by jobs. The research on dual labor markets suggests a dichotomy among jobs offering good advancement opportunity; however, the available descriptions tend to be vague (Doeringer and Piore 1971). Chinoy (1955) presented data on the promotion chances of automobile workers advancing to foreman positions, but his data did not attempt to differentiate by job. Do jobs at the same level in the authority hierarchy differ in the promotion chances they offer?
An analysis of the proportion of job occupants who are at a higher level in the authority hierarchy after 7 years indicates clear differences among jobs. In order to make these percentages more meaningful, analysis is limited to jobs with five or more employees, and for simplicity, the analysis distinguishes between jobs offering no promotions over the next 7 years and jobs promoting over 50% of their employees in that period. The analysis finds that in 48% of non-management jobs, no employees were promoted between 1962 and 1969, while in 21%, a majority were promoted. In 66% of foreman-level jobs, no employees were promoted, while in 18%, a majority were promoted, and the distributions were similar for lower-management level jobs (67% and 22%).
Described in this way, one can visualize a dual labor market in each level, with jobs offering no promotions being seen as the secondary labor market and those offering more than a 50% promotion rate clearly being seen as the primary labor market. However, these distributions differ from the dual labor market model in two respects. First, the dual labor market model considers the secondary labor market to exist only in the non-management level of organizations, while it considers management jobs always to be in the primary labor market. These data suggest that many management jobs, which clearly have primary labor market attributes in other respects (job security, wage levels, job conditions), offer no promotion chances over a rather long period of time. Clearly the dual labor market model ignores significant heterogeneity within the primary labor market.
Second, the allocation of promotions is more like a continuum than like the dichotomy suggested by the dual labor market model. Considering promotion rates between 10 and 49% as moderate, this moderate level of promotions is offered by 26% of non-management jobs, 10% of foreman jobs, and 11% of lower-management jobs between 1962 and 1969. Moreover, inspection of frequency distributions indicates no clear gaps in the distribution of promotion chances in this moderate range. The dualistic conception of promotion chances would seem to be an oversimplification of the actual situation, and the actual distribution comes much closer to a continuum.
