Organizational Theories of the Employment Relationship

0.5 Course Units

Why do organizations look the way they do — and with what consequences for the people inside them? This seminar takes those questions seriously, drawing on theoretical traditions that have made organizations the central unit of analysis for understanding inequality, authority, careers, and economic life. Whether your primary interest is in how firms compete and survive, how workers experience opportunity and constraint, how managers shape organizational culture, or how entrepreneurs build new ventures, the answers run through the same foundational terrain: organizations as social structures, and the dynamics that govern their creation, transformation, and effects. The employment relationship sits at the heart of this inquiry. Organizations are not simply passive conduits through which market forces flow; they are active structures that shape who gets hired, how work is organized, how rewards are distributed, and who advances. Sociology, organizational behavior, and institutional theory have each developed distinct frameworks for understanding these dynamics at the organizational level — frameworks that complement, and at times challenge, the individual- and market-level models more characteristic of labor economics. Students in strategy and entrepreneurship will find here the organizational foundations that underpin competitive advantage, firm boundaries, and the conditions under which new organizations emerge and succeed or fail. Organized historically, the syllabus traces the intellectual evolution of organization theory’s perspective on the employment relationship, highlighting major shifts in analytical focus: from workers to managers, from internal processes to organizational outputs, from single organizations and their environments to populations of organizations, and from separate supply- and demand-side models of labor markets to integrated approaches that examine their joint dynamics. These shifts matter not just as intellectual history but as live debates — about what organizations are for, whose interests they serve, and how they can be designed and led differently. Substantive topics include the structure of internal labor markets, hiring and promotion practices, gender and racial inequality in careers and compensation, organizational founding and change, and how organizational forms themselves evolve over time. The early weeks combine classic theoretical works with historical materials that provide essential context for understanding the emergence and transformation of core ideas. The latter part of the course turns to contemporary research, with particular attention to how scholars study these questions empirically — drawing on large-scale surveys, administrative and government data, qualitative and ethnographic methods, and field and natural experiments. The seminar is designed for doctoral students at the beginning of their training and presumes no prior specialized background in organization theory. By the end of the course, students will be able to (1) situate current research within broader theoretical traditions, (2) critically evaluate competing theoretical perspectives across disciplines, and (3) develop theoretically grounded research questions about people, organizations, and the markets and environments in which they are embedded. 0.5 Course Units