Effects of structural position in the network of academic job placement among PhD-granting sociology departments

Min Yim, Purdue University

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to study the effects of the prestige of a PhD-granting sociology department in the academic community on its decisions and behaviors as an organization. This dissertation is composed of four independent but closely related studies of PhD-granting sociology departments in the United States. All of those studies share a common independent variable: the prestige of each department in the academic community. Although many reflexive studies by sociologists on the academic community of sociology have found a stratified structure of the academic community of PhD-granting sociology departments that had varying levels of prestige, little has been said about the effect of the different prestige of each department on its organizational behavior. Considering that many sociological studies have been done on the relationship between a social actor's status and the various aspects of its decisions and behaviors, the lack of research on the relationship between a department's prestige and its organizational behavior is exceptional. To fill such a research gap, this dissertation studied whether and how a department's prestige status affects two different types of its behaviors and decisions: normative (when the main concern of a department is institutional legitimacy) and strategic (when the main concern of a department is its competitive advantage over other departments). Depending on whether a department's consideration is normative or strategic, tow different theories were tested: the middle-status conformity theory the resource partition theory. The former theory was tested to predict (1) a department's act of academic inbreeding and (2) its preoccupation with quantitative methodology. The latter theory was applied to predict a (3) department's specialty diversification and (4) its choice of niche position. The main findings of this dissertation are the following. First, a U-shaped pattern has been found in the relationship between a department's prestige and its practice of academic inbreeding. Sociology departments with a middle level of prestige are less likely to employ a PhD from the same department. Such a result is what is predicted by the middle-status conformity theory, according to which, middle-status actors try to abide by the conventional ways of behavior and practices in the community they belong to, while both low- and high-status actors feel relatively free to deviate from the norm. The second study, however, failed to find any pattern of relationship between a department's prestige rank and its preoccupation with quantitative/qualitative methodology. The third and fourth studies, based on the resource partition theory, hypothesized that highly prestigious departments with "excess capability" would be "generalists" engaging in central and diverse specialty areas in sociology. The result of analysis showed highly prestigious departments tended to engage in central, but not diverse specialties.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Feld, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Higher Education Administration|Social studies education|Organizational behavior

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