English

Firming Up Hierarchy

If an unmarked package arrived at your door, how would you figure out what was inside? The catch is that you cannot open it. As a social scientist, I deal with this ‘black-box’ problem all the time. I (metaphorically) watch people go to work at firms. And I see them come home with income. Then I try to picture the ‘machine’ that gave people money. In my mind’s eye, I see a machine called hierarchy. Inside each firm, I imagine a corporate hierarchy that sorts workers into a chain of command and assigns them income based on their rank. Or in more personal terms, when people go to work they have a boss. And their boss makes more money than them. In a colloquial sense, we all know that this is how firms work, because we’ve experienced it as workers. In other words, as individuals, we get an ants-eye view of the corporate hierarchy. But what we can’t do is play god and study corporate hierarchy by cutting the ant’s nest in half. Corporations tend to dislike that. And so as scientists, we’re left with a black-box problem. If we want to study how hierarchy affects income, we have to do it without opening the corporate box. Our only option is to ‘stand’ outside firms and watch what goes in

Sign in with your free account to read, download EPUBs or listen.