The demography of organizations - the distribution of the members of employing organizations along similar dimensions as length of service.

The demography of organizations - the distribution of the members of employing organizations along similar dimensions as length of service, age, and race - is a flourishing area of investigation for organizational scholars. Building upon the pioneering theoretical work of Pfeffer (1983) and in succession earlier sociological theories of arrange interaction (Simmel, 1955; Blau, 1977) and demography (Ryder 1964 1965; McNeil and Thompson 1971) organizational demography has been linked empirically to many important organizational outcomes: intergroup cohesion, conflict, and turnover (eg McCain, O'Reilly, and Pfeffer 1983; O'Reilly, Caldwell, and Barnett, 1989; Pfeffer and Davis-Blake, 1992); communication (Gladstein, 1984; Wagner, Pfeffer and O'Reilly, 1984; Zenger and Lawrence, 1989); agriculture (Carroll and Harrison, 1994); the distribution of power in organizations (Shenhav and Haberfeld, 1992); innovation and adaptability (Re 1978; O'Reilly and Flatt, 1989); and organizational performance (Michel and Hambrick, 1992; Smith et al., 1994) Although the effects of organizational demography are well studied, there has been far les effort to consider its causes.

Theorists have speculated that organizational putting out and contraction, technology, personnel practices, and unionization will alter organizational demography, specifically firms' manner [i]or[/i] principle of holding profiles (Pfeffer, 1983: 310-320), yet empirical research has been sparse (Mittman, 1992) simply a handful of studies has examined the origins of demographic patterns. These studies have protracted Pfeffer's (1983: 310-320) model, explaining organizational demography using a variety of factors: organizational product and commitment to change through top management (Roos and Reskin, 1984; Konrad and Pfeffer 1991); organizational pile and personnel practices (Bielby and Baron, 1984 1986; DiPrete, 1987); timing in the round of years of organizational evolution (Keck and Tushman, 1993); and external crushings and internal capacities for demographic change (Baron, Mittman, and Newman, 1991; Tolbert and Oberfield, 1991) in the greatest degree of these studies have focused forward sex segregation in the workplace. Far les has been done to discover the antecedents of other aspects of organizational demography.

This paper bring to maturitys and tests a new archetype of the antecedents of organizational demography. I focus upon the aspect of organizational demography that has been linked most numerous strongly to individual and organizational outcomes: organizations' use distributions. This paper heeds Ryder's (1965: 860-861) call for studies of the demographic metabolism of social organization, the passage and exit by individuals into and not at home of social aggregates, which he argued is of great importance to the contemplation of social change. Cohort replacement, Ryder propos provides an opportunity for social aggregates, including formal organizations, to modify their courses of action. I build a standard of the demographic metabolism of organizations, drawing in succession the organizational ecology and career mobility literatures to exhibit to how ecological processes - organizational founding, dissolution, and merger - drive the motion of managerial employees into and disclosed of firms in one industry and to what degree this ecologically induced mobility shapes the manner [i]or[/i] principle of holding distributions of these organizations' managerial work forces.

This paper accomplishes a secondary but by no means ancillary task. It applies the organizational ecology framework to explain a fresh set of phenomena by demonstrating that organizational founding and failure, the pendent variables in ecologists' models, are powerful independent variables in examples of turnover and organizational demography. through doing so, I move organizational ecology closer to achieving individual of its original goals, namely, to redirect the subject of attention of organizations toward mainstream sociology and fundamental question at issues of social organization and social change (Hannan and Freeman, 1989: 3-44) The ecological view in general, which encompasses human and organizational ecology is well suited to explaining forms of social organization and changes in these forms (Duncan and Schnore, 1959: 142-144) Organizational ecology in particular is well suited to addressing questions of to what degree industry dynamics influence the composition of organizations' work forces. Organizational ecology theory is inherently dynamic and therefore is centrally affaired with change. Moreover, the theory's emphasis forward the context within which organizations are embedded facilitates building theoretical links between industry-level processe and the composition of individual organizations.

Organizational Demography

Organizational demography is the distribution of organizational members along any demographic trait or any settle of demographic traits (Pfeffer, 1983; Mittman, 1992) Organizational scholars have examined many dimensions of organizational demography, notably occupation sex, race, and age. Studies of the dependence of cause and effects of organizational demography range from Kanter's (1977: 206-264) pathbreaking work upon how the proportions of men and women in corporations affect collection processes and individual outcomes to Michel and Hambrick's (1992) studious mood of how the diversity of top management teams affects organizational performance and Ely's (1994) application of mind of how the proportion of women at top flats of law firms influences women lawyers' professional relationships.