Center for Organizational Research (COR)

Colloquium: Carrie Wang, “Tackling the relevance of management research as a scholarly enterprise” – 10/14/2022 at 10:30am

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Please join us this Friday at 10:30am for a talk by Carrie Wang in SB1 5200. Carrie is an O&M PhD student and the title and abstract of her talk is below:

Title: Tackling the relevance of management research as a scholarly enterprise

Abstract: The relevance of scholarly research is a central concern in the field of organizations and management, warranting an ever-growing body of literature. However, in this literature, the same challenges and solutions seem to repeat periodically with little progress made. In this review, we address the literature’s sense of dissatisfaction and suggest directions to move the conversation forward. Firstly, we present the different discussions and perspectives prominent in the literature. We build our critique based on two repetitive themes others who have noted: the fragmentated nature of the literature and the simplistic treatment of relevance within it. Next, we add to this critique with insights from peripheral perspectives in the literature, specifically on the nature of social science and on management education. Then, using our review and critique as a starting point, we propose three potential ways of redefining relevance that integrate the fragmented perspectives in the literature in a meaningful way. These three proposals help inform a more comprehensive understanding of the relevance of management research.

Grant Recipients 2021-22

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Isha Ballamuhdi, Sociology/Social Sciences

Sridipta Ghatak, PPD/Social Ecology

Hannah Hertenstein, Sociology/Social Sciences

Li Huang, Social Ecology

Jihan Johnston, ICS

Jeesoo Kim, Merage

Katelyn Malae, Sociology/Social Sciences

Jonathan McIntyre, Nursing

Ekaterina Moiseeva, Social Ecology

Ben Raynor, Political Science/Social Sciences

Kelsey Weymouth-Little, Sociology/Social Sciences

May 6: COR Paper Development Workshop on Reporting Wrongdoing, RSVP

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COR Paper Development Workshop

Friday, May 6, 2022

12:00-1:30pm

SBSG 1517

“Reporting Wrongdoing”

By Patrick Bergemann (Assistant Professor, Paul Merage School of Business)

Discussants:

Irene Vega (Assistant Professor, Sociology, Social Sciences)

Val Jenness (Distinguished Professor, Criminology, Law and Society, Social Ecology)

Lunch will be provided.

Please RSVP to cor@uci.edu for lunch order and to receive the paper to read before the workshop.

Abstract

In many settings, witnesses of wrongdoing can report to internal authorities such as managers within an organization, or to external authorities such as the police. Yet why they report to one versus the other is not well established. In this paper, we introduce the concept of alignment to demonstrate that witnesses’ categorization of perpetrators as in-group or out-group members and prevailing categorizations within the social environment matter for reporting behavior. When wrongdoers are viewed as in-group members by witnesses and other group members, individuals tend to report to internal authorities. When wrongdoers are viewed as out-group members by witnesses and other group members, individuals tend to report to external authorities. When views are misaligned, reporting is less likely to occur. We evaluate this theory using the extreme case of villagers’ reporting of illegal Taliban activity in Afghanistan in 2017 and 2018, where observers of crimes could report to external authorities such as the National Police, to internal authorities such as village elders, or to no one at all. Situating individuals within their social context shows how responses to wrongdoing arise from the interaction between self and others, as wrongdoing becomes defined as either a local or a more general problem.

COR/Merage: talk on Transformation of Organizational Pay Practices, Friday 4/15, 10:30am

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You are invited to attend…

SPEAKER: Laura Adler, PhD Candidate in Sociology, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University

TITLE: “From the Job’s Worth to the Person’s Price: The Transformation of Organizational Pay Practices since 1950”

DATE AND TIME: Friday, April 15, 2022 at 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM PDT

LOCATION: SB1 2321(Judy Rosener Flexible Classroom); Zoom link:
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://uci.zoom.us/j/94617716622__;!!CzAuKJ42GuquVTTmVmPViYEvSg!Ks4qqRo_irPHFyqNrtgZDF67R5KSw0XVd4DZ_Yf3ZhBMjBZdkFM9pKaVDKwJLFP_lYslN_5nrPt6ca0lzQ$  [1]

TALK ABSTRACT: This article examines a major historical change in employers’ pay-setting practices. In the postwar decades, most U.S. employers used bureaucratic tools to measure the worth of each job. Starting in the 1980s, employers abandoned these practices and relied instead on external market data to assess the price of a candidate. In doing so, organizations tied employee pay more tightly to the external labor market. This presents a puzzle for organizational theories, which propose that organizations aim to buffer internal functions from the environment. To describe this shift, I use a new database of 1,059 publications from the Society of Human Resources Management and 83 interviews with compensation professionals. These data highlight the role of law. When the U.S. courts rejected comparable worth lawsuits in the 1980s, their decisions created an opportunity for employers to reduce liability for discrimination by relying on external, market data. Those legal decisions encouraged employers to abandon bureaucratic methods. The analysis identifies market coupling–using the market to distance organizations from discriminatory outcomes–as a response to the law and highlights how the comparable worth movement backfired by facilitating a change in organizational practices that entrenched inequalities.

SPEAKER BIO: Laura Adler is a PhD candidate in Sociology (expected 2022). Her dissertation examines how organizations set pay for new employees, identifying organizational practices and moral narratives that produce and legitimize gender pay inequality. Past research examines the preference for precarious work among aspiring artists. Laura has built on a background in urban planning in her research and teaching, with papers on the role of physical space on the formation of social ties (with Mario Small) and city efforts to regulate the platform economy. Prior to beginning her PhD, Laura received a Masters in City Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and worked for the New York City’s Department of Information Technology.

Links:
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https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://uci.zoom.us/j/94617716622__;!!CzAuKJ42GuquVTTmVmPViYEvSg!OVwIZgRiYGQsQpmN__r65eDXDsp-VjBpYucDiuKFHHFI5aj_rV6Zmdp1VymDVKTnRXV0xdiekXHOjsyo8g$