The Structuring of Work in Organizations by Cohen Lisa;Burton M. Diane;Lounsbury Michael;

Author:Cohen, Lisa;Burton, M. Diane;Lounsbury, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2016-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

CATEGORICAL SOCIAL CODES AND JOB STRUCTURES

Our central thesis is that the social code associated with an organizational form category influences its job structures. The way tasks are grouped together into distinct jobs and work groups constitutes an “organizational language” (Meyer & Rowan, 1977, p. 349) that current and prospective employees use to understand their roles. “Speaking” this language signals employing organizations’ conformity with the social codes associated with their particular form. Having job structures that meet external expectations not only brings organizations legitimacy, it also brings material resources, stabilizes operations, and enhances survival prospects (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). But organizations often face great uncertainty about the best way to divide up their tasks and people – not only the most technically efficient and effective way to operate, but also the most culturally legitimate way. The tasks organizations must accomplish, and thus the structures they must use to co-ordinate these tasks, vary with observers’ expectations (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Meyer & Rowan, 1977). This creates variation between organizational categories in the “typical” ways category members arrange employees’ jobs. For example, advertising agencies must balance creative urges and profit motives; therefore, jobs in advertising agencies are divided between the creative side (e.g., copywriter) and the business side (e.g., account manager). Similarly, wineries face pressures to manage aspects of their operations that are distinctive to their organizational form, notably the growing of grapes; the fermenting, refining, and bottling of wine; and adherence to the strict regulations that govern all producers of alcohol in the United States. Therefore, wineries’ job structures highlight these form-specific tasks (e.g., viticulturist, enologist, and compliance manager).

Our analysis focuses on the division of labor in job structures, in particular, the number of distinct job titles and the number of detailed functional areas delineated by job titles. These are easy to observe and they constitute labels that have significant social and economic consequences. For workers, job titles and functional designations signal status and serve as prominent markers of identity. For employing organizations, job titles and functional designations signal similarity to other organizations that use similar titles and distinctiveness from organizations that use different titles. In addition, the use of standard job titles arrayed across the usual functions and the expected set of hierarchical ranks smooths operations: it can facilitate recruiting and retaining scarce talent because these are the job structures that prospective employees have come to expect and therefore value.

Expectations about job structures are incarnated in the structures of other organizations in that category; specifically, the central tendency of category members (Barsalou, 1985). When organizational forms display sharp differences, as in industries partitioned into generalist and specialist forms, observers pay close attention to the job structures of other members of the same form, and little, if any, attention to the job structures of members of other forms. Moreover, because generalists tend to be larger than specialists, which makes them both far more visible than specialists and generally gives them greater legitimacy and superior material resources, we expect that decision makers in generalists organizations pay attention only to other generalists and not at all to specialists.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.