Sociology Department Colloquium: Adina Sterling

Date
Thu February 16th 2017, 12:30 - 1:45pm
Location
Mendenhall 101
Sociology Department Colloquium: Adina Sterling

Please join us for a colloquium being given by Adina Sterling, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.

Shared Education Affiliations and Workplace Relationships

Numerous organizational studies document how individuals’ social structure, including their social networks and ties, affect employees’ resources and career outcomes in the workplace. However, less is known about how social structures emerge within organizations and how such social structure links to broader structural patterns that exist outside organizations. In this paper, using data on more than 85,000 lawyers employed by 304 large U.S. law firms as well as a detailed case study of a single firm, we find that prior institutional affiliations affect how employees are allocated to work groups and supervisor-subordinate pairs. Two lawyers who graduated from the same law school are more likely to be allocated to the same work group than two lawyers who attended different law schools.  Also, the likelihood of a hierarchical work relationship between a partner and an associate is greater for two lawyers who attended the same law school than for two who did not. Additionally, these patterns are affected by the positions of organizations within the broader market. We close with a discussion of the complex ways organizations, institutions and markets affect intra-organizational networks, and how this informs a broader understanding of the structural underpinnings of inequality in the workplace.