Organizational Theories of the Employment Relationship

Catalog description

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…