scholarly journals Job Turf or Variety: Task Structure as a Source of Organizational Inequality

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 1018-1057
Author(s):  
Nathan Wilmers
Keyword(s):  
Panel Data ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
Organizational Theory ◽  
Task Allocation ◽  
Task Structure ◽  
Organizational Influence ◽  
Work Tasks ◽  
Annual Reporting ◽  
Task Variety

What explains pay inequality among coworkers? Theories of organizational influence on inequality emphasize the effects of formal hierarchy. But restructuring, firm flattening, and individualized pay setting have challenged the relevance of these structuralist theories. I propose a new organizational theory of differences in pay, focused on task structure and the horizontal division of labor across jobs. When organizations specialize jobs, they reduce the variety of tasks performed by some workers. In doing so they leave exclusive job turf to other coworkers, who capture the learning and discretion associated with performing a distinct task. The division of labor thus erodes pay premiums for some workers while advantaging others through job turf. I test this theory with linked employer–employee panel data from U.S. labor unions, which include a type of data that is rarely collected: annual reporting on work tasks. Results show that reducing task variety lowers workers’ earnings, while increasing job turf raises earnings. When organizations reduce task variety for some workers, they increase job turf for others. Without assuming fixed job hierarchies and pay rates, interdependencies in organizational task allocation yield unequal pay premiums among coworkers.

Division of labor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phanish Puranam
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Task Allocation ◽  
Task Structure ◽  
Heuristic Approaches ◽  
Object Based ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Task Division ◽  
And Task

Division of labor involves task division and task allocation. An extremely important consequence of task division and allocation is the creation of interdependence between agents. In fact, division of labor can be seen as a process that converts interdependence between tasks into interdependence between agents. While there are many ways in which the task structure can be chunked and divided among agents, two important heuristic approaches involve division of labor by activity vs. object. I show that a choice between these two forms of division of labor only arises when the task structure is non-decomposable, but the product itself is decomposable. When the choice arises, a key criterion for selection between activity vs. object-based division of labor is the gain from specialization relative to the gain from customization.

Rosie the Riveter Revisited

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Milkman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
Automobile Industry ◽  
World War ◽  
Sexual Division ◽  
Sexual Division Of Labor ◽  
United Automobile Workers ◽  
Hiring Policies

This chapter examines the ways in which employers contributed to the historical formation of the sexual division of labor and to patterns of job segregation by gender. It begins with a discussion of the formation of the sexual division of labor in the automobile industry prior to World War II. It then considers the logic of Fordism and the lack of incentive to retain or hire women workers after the war, with particular emphasis on how hiring policies fostered the gender division of labor. It shows that labor unions, and more specifically the United Automobile Workers (UAW), collaborated with management in purging women from the auto industry, with the latter playing the far more powerful role owing to its preference for male workers.

What Do Unions Do for Mothers? Paid Maternity Leave Use and the Multifaceted Roles of Labor Unions

ILR Review ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 662-692 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tae-Youn Park ◽  
Eun-Suk Lee ◽  
John W. Budd
Keyword(s):  
Panel Data ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
Maternity Leave ◽  
Working Women ◽  
Longitudinal Survey ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Non Union ◽  
Paid Leave ◽  
Leave Taking

The authors present a four-fold conceptual framework of union roles—with a focus on availability, awareness, affordability, and assurance—for enhancing workers’ paid maternity leave use. Using a panel data set of working women up to age 31 constructed from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, the authors find union-represented workers to be at least 17% more likely to use paid maternity leave than are comparable non-union workers. Additional results suggest that availability, awareness, and affordability contribute to this differential leave-taking. The authors also document a post-leave wage growth penalty for paid leave-takers, but do not find a significant union–non-union difference.

Division of Labor and Task Allocation

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Bonabeau ◽  
Marco Dorigo ◽  
Guy Theraulaz
Keyword(s):  
Task Performance ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Social Insects ◽  
Task Allocation ◽  
Multiagent System ◽  
Threshold Model ◽  
Response Threshold ◽  
Response Threshold Model ◽  
Response Thresholds ◽  
Colony Level

Many species of social insects have a division of labor. The resilience of task allocation exhibited at the colony level is connected to the elasticity of individual workers. The behavioral repertoire of workers can be stretched back and forth in response to perturbations. A model based on response thresholds connects individual-level plasticity with colony-level resiliency and can account for some important experimental results. Response thresholds refer to likelihood of reacting to task-associated stimuli. Low-threshold individuals perform tasks at a lower level of stimulus than high-threshold individuals. An extension of this model includes a simple form of learning. Within individual workers, performing a given task induces a decrease of the corresponding threshold, and not performing the task induces an increase of the threshold. This double reinforcement process leads to the emergence of specialized workers, that is, workers that are more responsive to stimuli associated with particular task requirements, from a group of initially identical individuals. The fixed response threshold model can be used to allocate tasks in a multiagent system, in a way that is similar to market-based models, where agents bid to get resources or perform tasks. The response threshold model with learning can be used to generate differentiation in task performance in a multiagent system composed of initially identical entities. Task allocation in this case is emergent and more robust with respect to perturbations of the system than when response thresholds are fixed. An example application to distributed mail retrieval is presented. In social insects, different activities are often performed simultaneously by specialized individuals. This phenomenon is called division of labor [253, 272]. Simultaneous task performance by specialized workers is believed to be more efficient than sequential task performance by unspecialized workers [188, 253]. Parallelism avoids task switching, which costs energy and time. Specialization allows greater efficiency of individuals in task performance because they “know” the task or are better equipped for it. All social insects exhibit reproductive division of labor: only a small fraction of the colony, often limited to a single individual, reproduces.

Path Dependency, Demographic Change, and the (De-)Differentiation of the German Secondary School System

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Bartl ◽  
Reinhold Sackmann
Keyword(s):  
Panel Data ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Demographic Change ◽  
School System ◽  
Path Dependency ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Regional Level ◽  
Education Systems ◽  
Moderate Effect

SummaryCurrent sociological debate on the effects of demographic change on education systems still swings between the extremes of “demography as destiny,” which conceives of demographic change as a phenomenon with immediate impact, and “demography as ideology,” which questions any relevance of demographic factors at all. This article adopts a Durkheimian perspective and checks whether changes in the division of labor moderate the effects of demographic change. This hypothesis is tested by analyzing panel data at the regional level of counties on the differentiation of the German secondary school system for the years 1995-2010. In addition to demography, the effects of path dependency, party politics, and German re-unification are modeled as well. The analysis shows a moderate effect of demographic change on the (de-)differentiation of the German secondary school system.

Pay Cuts for the Boss: Executive Compensation in the 1940s

2012 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 225-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
CAROLA FRYDMAN ◽  
RAVEN MOLLOY
Keyword(s):  
Panel Data ◽  
Executive Compensation ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
Government Regulation ◽  
Executive Pay ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Top Executives ◽  
The Past ◽  
Pay Cuts ◽  
Modest Effect

Executive pay fell during the 1940s, marking the last notable decrease in the past 70 years. We study this decline using a new panel data set on the remuneration of top executives in 246 firms. Government regulation—including explicit salary restrictions and taxation—had, at best, a modest effect on executive pay. By contrast, a decline in the returns to firm size and an increase in the power of labor unions contributed greatly to the reduction in executive compensation relative to other workers’ earnings from 1940 to 1946. The continued decrease in relative executive pay remains largely unexplained.

Too Few Cooks Spoil the Broth: Division of Labor and Directed Production

2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marisa Ratto ◽  
Wendelin Schnedler
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Task Allocation ◽  
Task Assignment ◽  
The Other ◽  
Direct Production ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Worker Activity ◽  
Single Worker

Abstract How can a manager influence workers' activity, while knowing little about it? This paper examines a situation where production requires several tasks, and the manager wants to direct production to achieve a preferred allocation of effort across tasks. However, the effort that is required for each task cannot be observed, and the production result is the only indicator of worker activity. This paper illustrates that in this situation, the manager cannot implement the preferred allocation with a single worker. On the other hand, the manager is able to implement the preferred allocation by inducing a game among several workers. Gains to workers from collusion may be eliminated by an ability-dependent, but potentially inefficient, task assignment. These findings provide a new explanation for the division of labor, and bureaucratic features such as ``over"-specialization and ``wrong" task allocation.

scholarly journals Relational Categorization: Evidence from the Diversification of American Labor Unions

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John-Paul Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
Organizational Theory ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
American Labor

This article draws upon the changes in voting patterns for American laborunions in recent decades to extend organizational theory about howcategorization systems are reproduced and break down. Recent categorizationresearch emphasizes cognitive mechanisms for the reproduction of categoryschemes: actors explicitly evaluate organizations against an ideal set ofcategories. This article argues that category schemes can also bereproduced as the epiphenomena of stable social interactions. Such“relational” mechanisms are particularly useful for understanding whyspecialized organizations sometimes manage to diversify, despite havingsimilar audiences. When stable patterns of social interaction aredisrupted, category schemes that were reproduced by such interactionsquickly fall apart. Predictions based on this theory are tested on theattempts by American labor unions to diversify their memberships between1961 and 1999. Consistent with the theory, workers after the early 1980scame to vote for unions that diversified their organizing acrossindustries, but only if those unions had adopted organizational reformsconsistent with those described in recent literature on labor-unionrevitalization. The interaction between such revitalization attempts byindividual unions and the strength of union jurisdiction is explored usinga combination of interviews with current and former union staff andorganizers, and quantitative analysis of four decades’ organizing drives.

scholarly journals Division of Labor Through Self-Selection

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marlo Raveendran ◽  
Phanish Puranam ◽  
Massimo Warglien
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Private Information ◽  
Narrow Range ◽  
Relative Advantage ◽  
Task Structure ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Organizational Contexts ◽  
Matching Process ◽  
Self Selection ◽  
Agile Teams

Self-selection–based division of labor has gained visibility through its role in varied organizational contexts such as nonhierarchical firms, agile teams, and project-based organizations. Yet, we know relatively little about the precise conditions under which it can outperform the traditional allocation of work to workers by managers. We develop a computational agent-based model that conceives of division of labor as a matching process between workers’ skills and tasks. This allows us to examine in detail when and why different approaches to division of labor may enjoy a relative advantage. We find a specific confluence of conditions under which self-selection has an advantage over traditional staffing practices arising from matching: when employees are very skilled but at only a narrow range of tasks, the task structure is decomposable, and employee availability is unforeseeable. Absent these conditions, self-selection must rely on the benefits of enhanced motivation or better matching based on worker’s private information about skills, to dominate more traditional allocation processes. These boundary conditions are noteworthy both for those who study as well as for those who wish to implement forms of organizing based on self-selection.

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