Organizational Demography

Conceptual Overview

A demographic explanation of a social phenomenon invokes a claim that the composition of a population plays a key role in shaping social structure and associated outcomes. That is, demographic explanations rely at [Page 1043]base on a decomposition of a population. For instance, Easterlin and others contend that the sociopolitical and cultural turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States arose from the large demographic age bulge in the population reaching adulthood around that time. Similarly, Carroll and Hannan have explained the declining average size of organizations in the U.S. economy in recent decades as resulting from sectoral shifts in the economy from a manufacturing base (where large organizations dominate) to a service base (where small organizations are more prevalent). Likewise, Kanter's theory of token minorities in organizations can be construed as demographic, and so can many fashionable arguments based on tipping points in social processes.

Within organization theory, Carroll and Hannan have identified three distinct demographic traditions: (1) the demography of corporations and industries, (2) the demography of the workforce, and (3) internal organizational demography. The first is associated closely with the theoretical perspective known as organizational ecology. It studies populations of complete historical organizations and models their evolution over time. The second tradition takes the organization as the unit of analysis and investigates the movement of individuals into, within, and out of organizations. The third tradition involves examining the causes and behavioral (and other) consequences of demographic distributions of individuals in organizations.

Theory and research on the demography of corporations and industries focus on the demographic vital statistics of organizations: their rates of founding, transformation, and mortality. The tradition developed in response to Hannan and Freeman's 1977 call for a theory of environmental selection to explain organizational change and was designed to counter prevailing views of organizational adaptiveness. In the organizational world, selection occurs through the emergence and demise of organizational forms as well as individual organizations. The organizational ecology research program blossomed by fostering empirical research within a variety of distinct theory fragments, addressing problems such as age dependence in organizational mortality and long-term population evolution.

The demography of the workforce typically adopts an organization level of analysis; it develops theory from the perspective of a focal organization. Consistent with Baron and Bielby's claims in 1984, much empirical research demonstrates that much inequality in the labor market can be explained only by examining differences across and within formal organizations. Research in this tradition frequently investigates job mobility and the organizational factors associated with it. One research program looks at the workforce of the organization and its demographic characteristics (e.g., the composition of work units, such as described by S⊘rensen); another active program examines various characteristics of organizational structure.

Internal organization demography became an active line of research following Pfeffer's provocative essay of 1983. Pfeffer made numerous arguments about the causes and consequences of demographic phenomena; however, he also made very specific claims about the expected relationships between the tenure (or length of service, LOS) distribution and organizational outcomes such as turnover, power, innovation, and conflict. His speculations proved insightful: Because of the relative ease of getting LOS information, a vast amount of supporting research on the topic followed. LOS research on corporate top management teams became especially prevalent because such data on corporate officers are often publicly available. Both micro and macro analysts take great interest in internal organizational demography, and the range of demographic phenomena examined has broadened considerably.

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