You are invited to attend…
SPEAKER: Laura Adler, PhD Candidate in Sociology, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University
TITLE: “From the Job’s Worth to the Person’s Price: The Transformation of Organizational Pay Practices since 1950”
DATE AND TIME: Friday, April 15, 2022 at 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM PDT
LOCATION: SB1 2321(Judy Rosener Flexible Classroom); Zoom link:
https://urldefense.com/v3/__ht
TALK ABSTRACT: This article examines a major historical change in employers’ pay-setting practices. In the postwar decades, most U.S. employers used bureaucratic tools to measure the worth of each job. Starting in the 1980s, employers abandoned these practices and relied instead on external market data to assess the price of a candidate. In doing so, organizations tied employee pay more tightly to the external labor market. This presents a puzzle for organizational theories, which propose that organizations aim to buffer internal functions from the environment. To describe this shift, I use a new database of 1,059 publications from the Society of Human Resources Management and 83 interviews with compensation professionals. These data highlight the role of law. When the U.S. courts rejected comparable worth lawsuits in the 1980s, their decisions created an opportunity for employers to reduce liability for discrimination by relying on external, market data. Those legal decisions encouraged employers to abandon bureaucratic methods. The analysis identifies market coupling–using the market to distance organizations from discriminatory outcomes–as a response to the law and highlights how the comparable worth movement backfired by facilitating a change in organizational practices that entrenched inequalities.
SPEAKER BIO: Laura Adler is a PhD candidate in Sociology (expected 2022). Her dissertation examines how organizations set pay for new employees, identifying organizational practices and moral narratives that produce and legitimize gender pay inequality. Past research examines the preference for precarious work among aspiring artists. Laura has built on a background in urban planning in her research and teaching, with papers on the role of physical space on the formation of social ties (with Mario Small) and city efforts to regulate the platform economy. Prior to beginning her PhD, Laura received a Masters in City Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and worked for the New York City’s Department of Information Technology.