A foundational claim in social stratification research is that occupational hierarchies are largely invariant across societies, a phenomenon known as the Treiman constant. However, recent research in social stratification has focused on the role of local social spaces in generating inequalities, casting doubt on the validity of the idea of a universally invariant occupational hierarchy. In this paper, we focus on organizations as a local space in which occupational hierarchies may vary. We ask three questions: (1) do occupational hierarchies vary across workplaces, (2) why do occupational hierarchies vary across workplaces, and (3) what can explain why some occupations move up or down the occupational hierarchy in specific workplace contexts? Using novel administrative data from Sweden we measure and model the correlation between a workplace’s occupational hierarchy and the national occupational hierarchy, finding substantial variation across workplaces in the matching of a given workplace’s hierarchy to the national hierarchy. We then develop a set of contextual and relational variables at the organizational level to potentially explain this variation, as well as to explain which occupations move up or down the workplace hierarchy. This paper points toward an important and novel empirical finding – variation across workplaces in occupational hierarchies – both confirming the power of the Treiman constant while opening up avenues to explore deviations from it. It also reveals the need to develop theories than can explain this workplace-level variation.

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We conceptualize within job group income distributions as the outcome of claims-making over organizational resources. We examine same job group co-workers by race/gender in all U.S. state and local government workplaces. Findings show that 81% of the time White men earn more than the average worker with whom they share a workplace and job group. Conversely, Black and Hispanic women are disadvantaged respectively 83% and 84% of the time. On average White men’s earnings are higher when they share jobs with almost all other status groups, most robustly with all women and Black men. White women see consistent earnings advantages when their co-workers are Black or Hispanic women, but often also profit when working with Black men. Other race/gender groups experience more variation in their earnings relative to co-workers, but within racial groups men tend to benefit from same race women co-workers. We further explore variation in these patterns based on organizational racialization, finding that when managers are predominantly Black or Hispanic, White earning advantages shrink. This advantage is not sensitive to whether management is dominated by White men or White women.

The authors examine intersectional earnings inequalities in U.S. state and local government workplaces during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2011. Corresponding to closure and exploitation mechanisms as proposed in Relational Inequality Theory, the authors decompose pay gaps into between-workplace and within-workplace segregation components and within-job disparities. Between-workplace closure mechanisms tend to be absent or weak for all comparisons, but within-workplace occupational closure and within-job pay disparities are present for all and quite large for most groups. Within-job earnings inequalities tend to be largest for Black, Hispanic, and Native American women and smallest for Asian and Native American men. During the Great Recession, organizational resources to make claims on shrank, as low-wage job layoffs surged and resources contracted. This resulted in a shrinking of within-workplace and within-job, but rising between-workplace, inequalities.

This is a three paper dissertation examining between-workplace and between-industry income inequality and their relations with changing labor market institutions and economic structures since roughly the early the 1990s. All three papers use large scale administrative linked employer-employee panel data (LEEP) for multiple years (roughly, 1993-2013) for a set of countries that span North America, Western and Eastern Europe, and East Asia. In the first chapter, I examine country differences in levels of between-workplace income inequality. Countries strongly vary in levels of between-workplace inequality. On the high end for example, over 60% of Germany’s income inequality occurs between workplaces. On the lower end, less than 30% of the Netherland’s income inequality occurs between workplaces. I use fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to identify institutional configurations that lead to high levels of between-workplace inequality. Ultimately, I find three distinct configurations, and that all three configurations are mainly composed of items related to labor union dynamics such as between-union conflicts, collective bargaining coverage, or union membership concentration. The second paper looks at trends in between-workplace inequality rather than levels. Recent evidence has shown that rising between-workplace inequality has become the dominant driver of rising income inequality, but less is known about the specific processes that have facilitated rising between-workplace inequality. I examine how labor union dynamics (e.g. declining union density), employment institutions (e.g. legal regulations around permanent and temporary work contracts), and economic structure (e.g. rising rates of globalization and the decline of the manufacturing sector) have impacted trends in between-workplace inequality. I find that many of these items significantly impact both between-workplace and within-workplace inequality, but that their effects tend to be stronger on between-workplace inequality. Finally, the last paper examines industry-level trends in low-wage work since the early 1990s for a set of European countries. Low-wage work has become increasingly important to study as income inequality has risen across much of Europe. Many European nations have likewise undergone significant shifts in their labor market institutions. Using earnings data from administrative sources, industry-level trends in the concentration of low-wage work since the mid-1990s are examined for six European countries (Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, Czechia, and Slovenia). Previous studies found that low-wage jobs were less common in core industries such as manufacturing and plentiful in service sector industries such as retail. These early findings are broadly confirmed here, but significant industry-level variation in levels and trends in low-wage work are found across these countries. Industry-level trends in low-wage work are related to industry-specific industrial relations.

This study examines how workplace technological innovation is associated with individual-level employment turnover. We advance the literature by studying how the impact of technology differs for Dutch native workers and workers with non-Western immigrant backgrounds. Furthermore, we examine the disparate impacts of organizational context, as indexed by the proportion of workers with non-Western immigrant backgrounds and workplace job volatility, as well as industry-level unionization. Using large-scale Dutch matched employer–employee longitudinal data for the period 2001–2014, we find technology implementation to decrease chances of job ending, but this innovation protection is smaller and sometimes absent for workers with non-Western immigrant backgrounds than for native Dutch workers. This pattern is most marked for first-generation immigrants and immigrants from non-Dutch-speaking countries. We also find evidence of organization-level ethnic competition effects among low and middle educated workers, but not for workers with tertiary degrees. Among lower educated workers technological displacement is exaggerated in workplaces that employ many workers with immigrant backgrounds, although unionization mutes this effect. Among middle educated workers technological displacement is exaggerated in high-turnover workplaces.

We use the case of Israel to analyze the relationship between ethnonationalist conflict and workplace inequalities, arguing that escalation of ethnic conflict in the political environment induces social closure behaviors within organizations geographically more proximate to the conflict. Combining data from Israeli population registers and the Global Terrorism Database we find that an increase in conflict, measured by non-state political violence occurring within the state of Israel, leads to a decrease in the likelihood of nearby organizations hiring Arab men and women. Importantly, these effects are typically stronger for women and are diminished in organizations that either depend on Arab labor or have a higher density of Arab workers at the top of the organization. Demonstrating that deepening ethnonationalist political conflicts shape workplace inequalities, this paper extends both the theory of racialized organizations and Relational Inequality Theory.

Merging 2005 to 2015 Internal Revenue Service, Social Security, and Census records, the authors calculate national average gender pay gaps for various population definitions and then decompose trends in the contribution of firm, occupation, and job segregation to these pay gaps, as well as the size of the average residual “within-job” pay gap. In general, observed segregation tends to explain about half of age, education, and hours of work adjusted gender pay gaps, but the other half remains within occupations in the same firm. Although between-firm pay gaps rose and within-job pay gaps declined through 2009, the authors find little decline in firm- or job-level gender pay gaps after 2009. The results indicate that to reduce gender pay gaps, public policy and employers should target gender disparities in hiring and job assignment as well as potential disparities in pay setting.