Browsing by Author "Ruef, Martin"

This dissertation examines how knowledge is developed and deployed among employees inside one of the largest internal labor markets in the United States: the federal civil service. Each chapter lays out the theoretical background behind career- and capabilities-based processes, discusses the application to the federal employment context, and tests hypotheses derived from theoretical review, extension, and development. This dissertation uses data from two similar but distinct datasets, which come from the US Office of Personnel Management’s administrative records database. These datasets cover different periods of time (either 1974-2014 or 1989-2011), but both contain core information on civil servants and their employment.

The dissertation begins with a short introduction to organizational theory and sociological research on bureaucracies. The first chapter shows, contrary to standard economic and sociological theory, generalists in the federal civil service experience higher downstream pay than specialists. Several competing mechanisms are discussed, laying the groundwork for the next chapter. The second chapter explores the mechanism of coordinative capability as a key component of civil servants’ career success, finding that integration with the skillsets of co-workers positively predicts later salaries and levels of authority. This effect is most pronounced in larger divisions of the government, where the need to coordinate among employees with diverse capabilities is greatest. Thethird chapter moves from individual processes to organizational aggregates, demonstrating the influence of public-sector personnel capabilities on private-sector research and development (R&D). This final chapter evaluates the impact of the government’s geographically-bounded scientific capabilities on private R&D funding mechanisms and the downstream likelihood of patenting by federally-funded firms.

As a whole, this dissertation traces the historical dynamics of career progression for hundreds of thousands of individuals over multiple decades, elucidating both the career dynamics experienced by civil servants as well as the external influence of those collective dynamics as allocative processes that influence non-governmental outcomes.

While men account for 93 percent of the U.S. prison population, women have seen an increase of over 700 percent in incarceration rates since the 1980s. Despite this, most sociological and criminological research examines the incarceration and reentry experiences and consequences of men. Existing research on system-involved women rarely disentangles the role of race in women’s criminal justice involvement. Thus, this dissertation uses an intersectional approach to explore how formerly incarcerated women navigate various institutions during the incarceration and reentry period. For this project, I use 40 semi-structured interviews with women primarily in North Carolina. The chapters in this dissertation explore the following research questions; 1) How do institutional responses to women’s childhood victimization and adult entrapment shape women’s pathways to prison? 2) How do mothers define and construct their maternal identities while imprisoned? 3) What strategies do women use to navigate reentering the paid labor market?

This dissertation is a three-part analysis examining how the welfare state in advanced Western democracies has responded to recent demographic changes. Specifically, this dissertation investigates two primary relationships, beginning with the influence of government spending on poverty. I analyze two at-risk populations in particular: immigrants and children of single mothers. Next, attention is turned to the influence of individual and environmental traits on preferences for social spending. I focus specifically on religiosity, religious beliefs and religious identity. I pool data from a number of international macro- and micro-data sources including the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), International Social Survey Program (ISSP), the World Bank Databank, and the OECD Databank. Analyses highlight the power of the welfare state to reduce poverty, but also the effectiveness of specific areas of spending focused on addressing new social risks. While previous research has touted the strength of the welfare state, my analyses highlight the need to consider new social risks and encourage closer attention to how social position affects preferences for the welfare state.

Over the last few years, so-called “legacy of slavery” research has made great strides in helping us to understand how the Trans-Atlantic slave trade continues to affect contemporary life. New and improved data sources have allowed this work to become increasingly complex, with a combination of sub-national, cross-national, and individual level analyses. This research focuses on the former, where a number of questions remain, namely: do the long term effects of slavery remain robust to other historical factors; does slavery exacerbate color stratification among black Americans; and does slavery have a net-positive influence on the contemporary social outcomes of white Americans? A use regression analysis and Census data to answer this questions. Ultimately, I find that the answer to questions are “yes” to varying degrees. The effect of slavery remains robust to historical covariates, though the relationship is complex. Slavery seems to exacerbate color stratification among black Americans through its disproportionately negative effect on darker skinned black people. And on four of six contemporary measures, slavery improves the life outcomes of white Americans. I discuss the implications of these findings for the future of sociological research and the discussion of reparations for black Americans.

Since the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, many federal education policies have recommended states and districts close, restructure or open new schools in order to improve their district’s academic performance. However, few studies address the extent to which these actions can disrupt the educational landscape. In this dissertation, I employ concepts from organizational ecology, institutional theory and the neighborhood effects literature to examine whether the restructuring, closure or opening of new schools produces spillover effects for other schools or has consequences for spatial inequality within school boundaries and neighborhoods.

I use school-level data from the National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data, the Private School Survey and the School Attendance Boundary Information System to estimate weighted fixed effects models and difference-in-difference models that assess whether schools located near closed and restructured schools have different organizational characteristics or structures than those not near a closed or restructured school. I also use neighborhood Internet traffic and a survey experiment to measure whether the opening and closing of schools affects the perceived desirability of neighborhoods using difference-in-differences and multilevel ordinal logistic regression. I find these actions do produce spillover effects for school boundaries and impact perceptions of neighborhood desirability in nuanced ways.

US corporations currently orient their activities to perform to the expectations of financial markets and maximize shareholder value. Corporations actively manage their earnings and accumulate financial assets to make their performance more easily quantifiable for markets. This emphasis on performing to the expectations of financial markets is a relatively modern phenomenon, and many studies have illustrated how corporations transformed as they increasingly focused on maximizing shareholder value. The collection of studies presented here expands this work by examining how some types of corporations have avoided the pressures of shareholder maximization. I analyze a panel of recent quarterly financial reports from S&P 1500 companies and supplemental data from multiple other sources to investigate how the extent of shareholder value orientations differs across US corporations. Using linear regression models for panel data, I find that (1) employee-owned companies manipulate their accruals and (2) real activities less than non-employee-owned companies, and (3) the degree a company stockpiles financial assets is partially a function of its board interlocks. Combined, these studies show that the extent corporations adhere to shareholder value orientations is partially dependent on corporate ownership structure and interorganizational relations.

Researchers have long sought to understand how income disparities contribute to other forms of inequality. Inquiries into this subject, however, are constrained by data limitations. These constraints create challenges both for the measurement of income inequality and for the identification of geographically fine-grained economic data. In the chapters that follow, I address these issues separately. To begin, I propose a new statistical method for estimating U.S. income inequality and use Census data to demonstrate the accuracy of this method. I then draw from two data sources to examine the stratifying effects of income inequality. First, I use mobile phone data to explore how income and occupational differences contributed to social distancing disparities in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Next, I draw on mortgage data to examine how the composition of incomes within and between neighborhoods shapes opportunities for homeownership. The methodological contributions of the first chapter open new possibilities for research into how income inequality generates other forms of social stratification. The subsequent chapters provide evidence that rising income inequality in the U.S. has contributed to occupational, health, and wealth disparities.

The goal of this dissertation is to articulate specific modes and mechanisms by which the process of an individual choosing an organization is shaped by (1) the status of the organization, and (2) the attributes of the chooser. I do this with three types of chooser attributes: individual demographics, neighborhood context, and cultural values; and in two settings: choosing a hospital for cancer treatment, and choosing a church to attend and contribute to financially. Chapters 1 and 2 use data from the SEER-Medicare linked database to demonstrate the relationship between chooser (patient) demographics, at both the individual and neighborhood levels, on the likelihood of choosing a "high-status" cancer hospital in California. Chapter 1 does this in multiple ways. First, it shows that a patient's propensity to seek treatment for their cancer is a function of the patient's race, sex, and age, and by the racial makeup of a patient's neighborhood. Second, it shows that a patient's propensity to leave California for treatment is a function of both patient attributes and attributes of the hospitals they choose. Finally, it shows that patient choice of high-status cancer hospitals is moderated by the educational level of the patient's neighborhood. Chapter 2 shows that patient choice of high-status cancer hospitals is moderated by both individual-level race and the racial composition of the patient's neighborhood. Chapter 3 uses data from multiple sources to describe the ways that congregants' cultural values interact with organizational status (denomination) in the church choice process. Specifically, I use the National Congregations study to demonstrate the organization-level returns to nondenominational status on both legitimacy (attendees) and performance (tithes). Nondenominational churches are uniquely successful, even when compared only to conservative churches. I then use over 45,000 individual-level responses from the nationally-representative Religious Landscape/Faith in Flux Survey and Congregational Life Studies to demonstrate the individual-level valuative mechanisms behind organizational returns to categorical ambiguity. Though the settings and attributes differ across the three chapters, they all point to a similar conclusion: candidate choice processes are shaped by attributes of both candidates and choosers, and a neglect of chooser attributes misses important stratification in the choice process.