The Lives and Deaths of Jobs

Sharique  Hasan; John-Paul  Ferguson; Rembrand  Koning

Article | Organization Science

The Lives and Deaths of Jobs: Technical Interdependence and Survival in a Job Structure

by Sharique Hasan, John-Paul Ferguson and Rembrand Koning

Abstract

Prior work has considered the properties of individual jobs that make them more or less likely to survive in organizations. Yet little research examines how a job’s position within a larger job structure affects its life chances and thus the evolution of the larger job structure over time. In this article, we explore the impact of technical interdependence on the dynamics of job structures. We argue that jobs that are more enmeshed in a job structure through these interdependencies are more likely to survive. We test our theory on a quarter century of personnel and job description data for the nonacademic staff of one of America’s largest public universities. Our results provide support for our key hypotheses: jobs that are more enmeshed in clusters of technical interdependence are less likely to die. At the same time, being part of such a cluster means that a job is more vulnerable if its neighbors disappear. And the “protection” of technical interdependence is contingent: it does not hold in the face of strategic change or other organizational restructurings. We offer implications of our analyses for research in organizational performance, careers, and labor markets.

Keywords: Jobs; organizational structure; natural language processing; Jobs and Positions; Organizational Structure;

Format: Print

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Hasan, Sharique, John-Paul Ferguson, and Rembrand Koning. "The Lives and Deaths of Jobs: Technical Interdependence and Survival in a Job Structure." Organization Science 26, no. 6 (November–December 2015): 1665–1681.

Does public ownership improve employment diversity? Organizational researchers theorize that increased transparency to regulators and the public should lead firms to conform to legal and social norms; but also that social closure and decoupling should preserve the status quo. Empirical research has been difficult because we lack data on comparable private firms and because firms likely self-select into going public. We construct a new, nationally representative dataset that links firms' filings for initial public offerings to longitudinal data on employment composition from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We construct a set of comparable firms by looking at companies that filed and then withdrew a plan for an IPO. To account for selection bias in withdrawal and IPO success, we instrument the transition to public ownership using market returns in the book-building phase of the firms' IPO attempts. We find no evidence that moving from private to public ownership increases the representation of women or nonwhite workers or managers. We discuss the implications of this finding for our ability to generalize findings in organizational research.

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The Lives and Deaths of Jobs: Technical Interdependence and Survival in a Job Structure

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