1.
Within the fields of sociology and organization studies,
research on inequality within organizations has
flourished in recent decades (for a review, see
Stainback, Tomaskovic-Devey, and Skaggs 2010).
Beginning with the pioneering work of Pfeffer
(1977) and Baron (1984), scholars have increasingly
recognized that organizations are important engines
of social inequality. In advanced capitalist societies,
earnings and status are largely derived from the positions
people hold in organizations. By structuring
positions and allocating them to individuals, organizations
shape the distribution of earnings and status.
It follows that, as Pfeffer (1977) puts it, ‘[i]f social
stratification is to be understood in general, stratification
in organizations must first be examined’. In
particular, we need to understand the processes
leading to the matching of people and positions in
organizations: hiring, promotion, assignment, and
the attainment of rank and authority more generally.
In this essay, organizational attainment will serve as
an umbrella term for these outcomes.1
This essay seeks to integrate and highlight what
we know about how attainment processes operate in
professional organizations, such as professional service
firms, universities, hospitals, and professional
departments of corporations and governments.
Research on inequality within organizations has not
so far drawn a clear distinction between professional
organizations and organizations of other types, but
there are compelling reasons to do so. The social significance
of professional work is large and increasing.
Professional and expert work represents one of the
fastest-growing segments of employment in developed
economies (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2010;
Uppal and Rochelle-Coˆte´ 2013). Professionals also
wield an important influence on society through
their roles in expanding knowledge, providing education,
health care, and justice, and maintaining the
orderly functioning of financial and commercial markets
(Brock, Leblebici, and Muzio 2014; Gorman
and Sandefur 2011).
Yet we cannot obtain a clear understanding of
inequality processes in professional organizations if
we treat those organizations as indistinguishable
from business corporations or government agencies.
The nature of professional work differs from that of
managerial or administrative work, notably by relying
more heavily on formal, abstract knowledge and—in
most cases—engaging in more direct interaction
with clients.2 Moreover, as an earlier generation of
scholars recognized, professional work is not usually
organized according to a bureaucratic model (Scott
1966; Hall 1968).3 In professional organizations,
labor is less finely divided and distinct roles include
larger bundles of tasks than in the typical bureaucracy.
The boundaries of roles are not fixed, but
rather shift as project-focused teams form and dissolve.
Supervision and authority are based on expertise
and social relationships rather than on formal
hierarchy. Because of these structural differences
between professional and bureaucratic organizations,
promotion, rank, and authority may have different
meanings and may arise through different processes
in the two contexts.
At present, the body of research on attainment in
professional organizations is limited in several ways.
First, such work is relatively scarce; most organizational
attainment research has analyzed data on business
corporations or, to a lesser extent, government
agencies. Second, the research that does exist tends to
highlight conclusions that are generalizable to nonprofessional
settings, neglecting issues that are distinctive
to professional organizations. Third, research concentrates
on a limited number of countries, especially
the USA, Canada, and the UK.4 Although crossnational
differences in professions are diminishing
somewhat with the spread of multinational professional
service firms (see Suddaby, Cooper,
and Greenwood 2007; Faulconbridge and Muzio
2008), different institutionalized organizational and
occupational structures are still likely to produce different
patterns of inequality elsewhere. Fourth,
research coverage is quite uneven across different professions.
The legal profession has received the most
attention, with somewhat less consideration given to
academics, scientists, engineers, and accountants; only
a smattering of work addresses other professional and
expert occupations. This uneven research coverage
makes it difficult to address a perennial issue in the
study of professional and expert work: the scope of
theoretical generalization across professions and organizational
settings. At this stage of research development,
it is difficult to say to what extent findings
based on, say, lawyers in large law firms can be generalized
to nurses in hospitals, engineers in high-technology
firms, or veterinarians in small group practices.
By reviewing what we know so far, this essay aims to
lay the groundwork for future research.
2.
THE SELECTION PROCESS:
WHICH INDIVIDUAL QUALITIES
DO PROFESSIONAL ACADEMIC
EMPLOYERS SEEK?
Organizational attainment occurs through hiring,
promotion, transfer, and assignment of responsibilities
and authority—in short, a series of selection processes.
We may think of each selection process, in
stylized form, as involving two actors: a candidate
and an employer.5 Each actor has a decision to make.
The candidate decides whether to indicate interest in
the role in question, through either formal application
or informal communication. The employer
decides whether to select the candidate for the role.
In professional organizations, the employer’s decision
is usually the more consequential of the two for
inequality along various personal and socioeconomic
dimensions. Although individual characteristics likely
influence decisions to enter particular professions in
the first place, there is little reason to think that they
lead to different preferences concerning hiring, promotion,
and authority.6
Employers’ selection decisions in turn depend on
their preferences concerning employee attributes.
The individual qualities that employers seek tend to
fall into three broad categories: technical ability, cultural
proficiency, and social connections (Fig. 1).7 As
an empirical matter, these qualities are intertwined
with gender, race, and social class. Background characteristics
affect the opportunities candidates have to
develop technical ability, cultural proficiency, and
social connections both before and after entering
their organizations. Moreover, employers’ cognitive
biases relating to gender, race, and class can influence
their perceptions and interpretations of candidates’
individual qualities. Although it is important to
keep these interconnections in mind, it is helpful to
clarify the analytical distinction between the effects
of individual qualities and those of background characteristics.
Accordingly, gender, race, and class are
considered in the following section.