The allocation of prestigious positions in organizational science: accumulative advantage, sponsored mobility, and contest mobility

• Published in: Journal of organizational behavior 2005-08, Vol.26 (5), p.489-516
• Main Authors: Miller, C. Chet, Glick, William H., Cardinal, Laura B.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Academia; Academic staff; Allocation; Bias; Business schools; Careers; College faculty; Doctoral programs; Educational administration; Employee turnover; Gender differences; Graduate schools; Higher education; Job mobility; Job training; Language; Mentors; Meritocracy; Modeling; Occupational prestige; Organization studies; Organization theory; Organizational behavior; Organizational sociology; Prestige; Science; Sociology; Studies; Success; Teaching; Universities; USA
• ISSN: 0894-3796; 1099-1379
• DOI: 10.1002/job.325

More than 200 freshly minted doctoral graduates enter the field of organization science every year. A non-trivial number of existing faculty members move from one university to another every year, while other organization science faculty leave academia to enter retirement, consulting, or industry. Despite the importance of this large, complex system of entries and exits, few attempts have been made to explicitly understand how the system works. Drawing upon sociology of science and careers research, we studied the underlying form of the position allocation system by focusing on the relative importance of research success and prior affiliations as antecedents of movement and stability across positions. We used three theoretical models: accumulative advantage, sponsored mobility, and contest mobility. Tracking hundreds of faculty members for 16 years post doctorate, we find a downward cascading of affiliation prestige over time that affects people more dramatically and quickly than we expected, especially women. Accumulative advantage, the most predictive of our models, does help to maintain relative but not absolute prestige, at least until its effects wane in later years of the career. These findings are relevant to scholars interested in the sociology of science, organization scholars interested in the underlying dynamics of their discipline, and individuals making career choices.