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Response and Reflection
Baron. J. N. , Bielby, W.
T. (1980). Bringing the Firms Back in: Stratification, Segmentation,
and the Organization of Work, American Sociological Review, 45, pp.
737-65.
This article was tremendously difficult for me to fully comprehend.
First off, it was written in 1980... they year I was born.
Also, I feel comfortable saying that many of these ideas
have emerged, matured, and faded in research literature. I also
found the article to use a tremendous amount of language that I have
not come into contact with or have very limited experience with in my
previous studies, which include: neo-Marxism, structuralists,
segmentation, institutional economics, and dualists. To try to
understand these words, I searched online with limited success. I
think my only other exposure to this type of content came from my
economics and organizational theory course. I do believe that I
understood the underlying focus of the article, however.
To make sense of what the authors are talking about, I am going to
attempt to connect this information with my prior knowledge. The
authors are primarily concerned with the organization of work, how it
should be analyzed, at what levels of granularity is should be studied,
and in summary, the development of more complete explanations of social
inequality. Relating to the organization of work, the authors
emphasize structures that are largely bureaucratic and functional in
nature. At a higher level, they differentiate between center
versus periphery organizations. However, more recent
organizational literature in business and private organizations
are focused more on organic structures. Businesses are no longer
interested in becoming large, functional, and tall. Instead,
organizations are moving towards the more decentralized structures that
are characterized by their organic structures, short hierarchies,
flexibility, and adaptiveness to change.
The article also emphasizes how we should study the organization of
work and at what level it should be studied. This is an important
consideration. Coming from an industry that is constantly
changing, I have noticed the effects of using traditional methods to
study to study at level of firms, industries, and sectors are imprecise
and not meaningful. I have realized that most are really
uninformed about the information technology industry. For
example, we use job descriptions that really have no meaning.
Programmers, software developers, software architects, computer
system analysts, and more recently, software engineers are often
the same thing. Further, when studying careers at a higher level
of abstraction, we often consider these titles different, but the work
is often the same. More disturbingly, certain sources, such as
the BLS's occupational handbook show slow growth in programming and
high growth in software engineering. Yet, both positions,
depending on the firm and industry, will often be doing the same type
of work.
I see the problem as trying to understand the differences between trees
by staring at the forest. I agree with the authors that studying
the firm will provide more meaning. Since the IT industry is
traditionally a support function to any industry, it makes it
especially perplexing. Both the industry and the firm are really
the combination necessary to understand the type of work in the IT
industry. Different government regulations, transactions, general
resource allocation problems, and how information and communication
technologies are used dictate the type of work in the IT industry.
Attempting to segment this industry is difficult because of these
reasons. Interestingly, the government states that the IT
industry is the fastest growing industry in the US at an estimated 68%.
Are they talking about firms that develop information and
communication technology, or the support function found in every
industry? This distinction is also unclear.
What's more, the educational degrees in the broad field of information
technology are also not clearly differentiated. Information
systems, computer science, information science, information technology,
management information systems, and many more are all titles of varying
degree programs. While some, such as information systems and
computer science are more matured, graduates of any of these degree
programs will often fall into any of the job descriptions that also
have little meaning.
In attempting to study social inequality, I think the authors fall
short in their discussion. They build up to it, but do not
deliver. It may be that I did not understand the full context of
the prose, but they address topics such as education, occupational
attainment, and the characteristics of a firm or industry to
differentiate these things. However, that does not translate - in
my opinion - to an understanding of social inequality. I believe
that trying to understand the type of work at different levels of
abstraction is important. |