Organizations in America: Analyzing Their compositions and Human Resource Practices.

Organizations in America: Analyzing Their compositions and Human Resource Practices.

Arne L Kalleberg, David Knoke, Peter V Marsden, and Joe L Spaeth. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996 382 pp $6600 cloth; $3200 paper.

Kalleberg and his collaborators were supplyed by the National Science Foundation to deportment the first (and only) application of mind of a representative sample of organizations in the United States, the National Organizations meditation (NOS). They sampled organizations by the agency of asking respondents in the National Opinion Research Center's General Social inspect (GSS) to report the name and address of their confess and their spouse's employer. Interviewers from the University of Illinois' scan Research Laboratory then contacted the firms and attempted to bearing an interview with the individual responsible for hiring and personnel matters. Complet interviews were obtained from 727 of the 1427 organizations nominated by means of the GSS respondents. The NOS informants were queried upon issues ranging from hiring and promotion practices to organizational edifice and context.

Part 1 provides a thorough description of the conceptualization, design, and execution of the NOS. Parts 2 and 3 report descriptive and analytical findings onward organizational structures and human resource practices. Part 4 includes substantive chapters onward contingent employment, gender segregation, and organizational commitment, as well as a chapter summarizing major findings and expectations for future data collection efforts onward organizations and workplace practices. Nine of the sixteen chapters appeared in a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist onward the NOS, and four of the chapters have appeared elsewhere in refere journals.

The National Organizations application of mind is publicly available for secondary analysis, and this part illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of the NOS dataset. Organizations in America (or the special issue of American Behavioral Scientist, which includes all of part 1) is essential reading for anyone planning to do research with the NOS. The unique hardness of the NOS is its representativeness of the well stocked [i]or[/i] provided range of employers in the United States. Unweighted, it is representative of the work words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings of the U.S. labor force, and applying sampling weights inversely proportional to total firm trade yields results representative of U establishments. The authors' claim that each worker is preferableed with equal probability, however, is not quite accurate. This is because the GS samples just common respondent per household, and the NOS rareed the employing organization for the GS respondent and his or her spouse, if it be not that not for any other give employment toed adults in the household. Unfortunately, neither the rationale for t his aspect of the sampling design nor its implications for analysis are discussed in the book

more [i]or[/i] less limitations of the NOS are attributable to the inevitable compromises that are made in any general project survey; others are simply oversights. For example, the NOS includes information onward the gender composition of the firm and of three work at jobs categories in the firm: the piece of work of the GSS respondent, "managers and other administrators," and the "core" occupation, defined as the undivided "most directly involved with producing the establishment's main useful or service." While less than ideal for analyzing establishment-level sex segregation, the data are uniquely valuable for analyzing the relationship between the form relative to sex composition of jobs and individual-level consequences (by merging the NOS data with the individual-level GS data). nevertheless the NOS does not include comparable data upon the race of job incumbents, which is unfortunate, since surpassingly little research has been done to date forward the impact of a work setting's racial composition in succession earnings, job satisfaction, workplace relations, and racial attitudes.

The quality of the substantive chapters in this whirl is uneven. For example, chapter 4 (Marsden, tamper with and Kalleberg) examines the relationships among an organization's size, manner of making administrative intensity, and environmental words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following and the data from the NOS are probably the best through all ages collected for such an analysis. if it were not that the hypotheses examined were not particularly interesting when they were explored in detail in the 1970 and are equal less so today. Furthermore, the point to be solved [i]or[/i] settleds of causal ordering and the limitations of cross-sectional data for drawing inferences about dynamic processe that plagued earlier research are not away here as well. Chapter 6 onward human resource practices and organizational performance (Kalleberg and Moody) is based entirely upon correlational analyses, and there is a general bias across chapters to draw substantive conclusions about environmental and institutional general intents from bivariate associations and then to qualify them when they fail to imprison up in multivariate analyses. For example, in chapter 5 Kalleberg et al. argue that their bivariate findings are "consistent with the arguments that attribute the emerging see the verb of FILMs [firm internal labor markets] to external influences rather than to internal organizational strategies" (p 99) even now the multivariate analyses show that pure of measures of a firm's size and erection variables such as union constraining force and institutionalization have absolutely no impact onward the presence of internal labor markets.