Job precarity is increasingly present in Western economies, even in sectors once known for stable careers, such as the public sector. Gender disparities also persist, as women are overrepresented in these temporary jobs and face wage gaps. This dissertation examines how organizational leaders play a key role in distributing organizational resources such as permanent jobs and wages.
Project info
Project consists of following studies
History and persistence in organizations and institutions
Becoming an Agent of Change. Organizational Founding Context and Female Leaders’ Influence on Wage and Employment Equality
Change Agents with a Past: Female Executives’ Early-CareerContexts and Gender Equality at Workplaces
Imprinting and contested practices: early-careers of public sector directors and the adoption of temporary employment in Dutch public sector organizations
Description
Job precarity is increasingly present in Western economies, even in sectors once known for stable careers, such as the public sector. Gender disparities also persist, as women are overrepresented in these temporary jobs and face wage gaps. This dissertation examines how organizational leaders play a key role in distributing organizational resources such as permanent jobs and wages. By identifying how history influences present-day organizations, the chapters explore how leaders’ past careers experiences and the founding conditions of organizations shape precarity and inequality in the workplace. Based on quantitative analyses of large-scale administrative data, the empirical chapters illustrate that early-career private-sector experience among public leaders contributes to growing precarity in the Dutch public sector. Additionally, the chapters show how specific early-career experiences and organizational founding conditions affect whether female leaders challenge gender inequalities, particularly in employment and wage outcomes for female employees.
Project start
01/09/2019
End date
31/08/2023
Behavioral theory
- Identities
Researchers
Subjects
- Contested terrain
- Diversity and inclusion
- Employees
- Gender equality
- Imprinting
- Institutional change
- Institutional entrepreneurs
- Sociology
- SociologyHistory
- Temporary employment
Audience
- Employers’ organizations
- HR managers
- Managers
- Organisation science
- Policy advisors
- Sociology
Work package
- Work
Sustainability threat
- Spillovers
Challenge
- Reconfiguring-roles-and-relationships
- Reshaping organizational forms
Theoretical background
This dissertation builds upon existing theories that acknowledges that organizations carry the influence of past occurrences on present-day events an decisions, in specific: imprinting theory.
Research design
The first year of this PhD project consists of a literature study to identify gaps in literature, gaps in data, and develop new theoretical frameworks and methods to address our research questions. In the following years, four chapters are written. One theoretical chapter, that outlines and compares existing theoretical mechanisms of how the past persists in the organizational present. Then, three empirical chapters build upon imprinting theory and illustrate how the past affects the present in organizations; with precarity and inequality as the outcomes. These empirical chapters utilize linked employer employee register data from the Social Statistics Database (SSB) of the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS).
Related sources
Funders
Name
Grant ID
NWO
024.003.025