14 - Attainment Processes in a Large Organization

Summary

I want now to turn to a very different sort of issue. To this point, we have considered the behavior of individuals in social settings that are not constrained by formal rules. That is, there are no established rules about how one should behave in a riot or as part of a lynching party. Sociologists, however, spend much of their time examining the structures of formal organizations – schools, churches, workplaces, and the like – and studying the behavior of individuals in these settings. In this chapter I discuss such an investigation, one that examined the structural features of a large corporation and tried to assess how its structural arrangements have differentially influenced the advancement prospects and attainments of male and female employees. The data come from an American insurance company that, a few years ago, gave me access to the records of its employees, which numbered around 16,000 at any point in time. These data cover an eight-year period during the 1970s. Because of employee turnover, I have career history information for some 25,000 workers.

We need, first, to define what we mean by advancement. It could mean a salary increase. That's certainly one measure of getting ahead. It could also mean promotion or a combination of promotion and salary increase. I decided to focus on promotion since I was interested in questions of organizational structure, and promotion is a concept that is linked to movement across structural units. But we still have to specify what constitutes a promotion.