The selection committee for the 2009 James D. Thompson Award Committee (best graduate student paper ) is:
Prof. Michael Lounsbury, Chair
University of Alberta School of Business
and National Institute for Nanotechnology
4-30E Business Building Edmonton
Alberta CANADA T6G 2E7
Email: ml37@ualberta.ca
Prof. Toby L. Parcel
Professor of Sociology
2400 Founders Dr., Box 8107
Raleigh, NC 27695-8107
Email: toby_parcel@ncsu.edu
Taekjin Shin
Ph.D. candidate
Department of Sociology
410 Barrows Hall
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-1980
Email: tshin@berkeley.edu
The winner of the 2008 James D. Thompson Award from the Organizations, Occupations, and Work section is Taekjin Shin, University of California at Berkeley . His paper, “Pay Disparities Within Firms: The Role of the Chief Executive Officers” uses theories of organizational power and conceptions of control to examine the relationship between CEO characteristics and compensation patterns within 254 of the largest US firms between 1992-2005. Despite widespread public concern about soaring CEO salaries and the widening gap between top executives and ordinary workers, Shin’s study is the first to examine the executive pay gap within individual firms. Shin’s quantitative analyses required a herculean effort to compile data from multiple disparate sources. Among the most intriguing findings are those related to institutional perspectives on conceptions of control: Shin finds a significant relationship between CEO background and compensation patterns: all else equal, workers at firms in which the CEO has a finance background earn 5% less, on average, than workers in firms with a general CEO. Moreover, the pay gap, measured as the ratio of executive base pay to other employee pay is 10% higher in firms with a finance CEO as compared to firms with a general CEO. The paper received strong praise for its novelty, theoretical creativity, and political importance. |
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The winner of the 2007 James D. Thompson Award from the Organizations, Occupations, and Work section is Matthew Desmond, University of Wisconsin-Madison (mdesmond@ssc.wisc.edu). In "Making Workers Deployable," Desmond asks the question of how do high-risk organizations persuade their workers "to engage in life-threatening activities." The paper is based on an extensive participant-observation and ethnographic study of a wildfire firefighting crew in Arizona as well as on official documents of the U.S. Forest Service. The key insight is that one must frame firefighters' attitudes towards risk in the context of the organization's socialization efforts as opposed to as a "masculine" quest for recognition and honor, as previous sociological research inspired in the work of Erving Goffman and a large number of social-psychological studies have claimed. Desmond uses colorful but accurate prose to walk the reader through the Forest Service's systematic effort to depict firefighters as being in control of the situation and capable of managing risk. Perhaps the most tantalizing passages in the paper are those describing how the organization and the employees cope with the death of a firefighter in a way that preserves the integrity of the organizational ideology of risk, namely, by framing the tragedy as an act of deviance from established organizational procedures and practices. Due to its theoretical and empirical sophistication, this paper adds a new dimension to the analyses of risk in an organizational context by Lee Clarke, Carol Heimer, Charles Perrow, Dianne Vaughn, and Karl Weick. |
The winner of the 2006 James D. Thompson Award from the Organizations, Occupations, and Work section was Jake Rosenfeld (jhrosenf@princeton.edu) for his paper "Desperate Measures: Strikes and Wages in Post-Accord America." Jake is a graduate student at Princeton University and his paper is forthcoming in Social Forces. This paper draws on previously unavailable strike data in the U.S. over the past two decades to examine the relation between wages and strikes in the post-PATCO era of labor-management relations. Rosenfeld finds that the longstanding association between strike intensity and higher average wages (and thus, lower inequality) no longer holdsnot even in industries and regions with the highest levels of union density. These findings call for a new theoretical model of strikes and wages in the U.S. and have important implications for a struggling U.S. labor movement.
The winner
of the 2005 James D. Thompson Award from the Organizations, Occupations,
and Work section was Dirk Zorn (dirkzorn@alumni.princeton.edu)
for his paper "Here
a Chief, There a Chief: The Rise of the CFO in the American Firm."; This
paper was published by the American Sociological Review in June 2004,
while Dirk was a graduate student at the University of Princeton. It explores
several theoretical explanations for the rise of the CFO position, including
Control-Dependence, The Finance Conception of Control, as well as its own explanation,
which relies on an institutionalist theory of responses to legal/accounting
changes. The paper focuses on an interesting problem and contributes to knowledge
by showing how different theoretical explanations are time inflected and how
the CFO position was reconceptualized before it spread more widely. Overall,
Dirk's paper is a great example of a well-rounded theoretical and empirical
contribution both to organization theory as well as economic sociology.”
The 2004 Thompson Award was earned by Isabel Fernandez-Mateo (ifernandezmateo@london.edu) for her paper, "How Free are Free Agents? Relationships and Wages in a Triadic Labour Market" written while she was a student at the Sloan School of Management (MIT). She earned her PhD from Sloan in June, 2004 and is currently Assistant Professor of Strategic and International Management at London Business School. Ms. Fernandez-Mateo may be contacted at London Business School, Strategic and International Management Department, Regent's Park, London NW1 4SA, U.K.
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Last updated 21 September, 2008