The allocation of prestigious positions in organizational science: accumulative advantage, sponsored mobility, and contest mobility
研究了组织科学领域博士毕业生和教职人员的职位分配系统，发现声望会随时间向下级联，累积优势模型最能预测相对声望维持，但效果在职业后期减弱。
More than 200 freshly minted doctoral graduates enter the field of organization science every year. A non-trivial number of existing faculty members move from one university to another every year, while other organization science faculty leave academia to enter retirement, consulting, or industry. Despite the importance of this large, complex system of entries and exits, few attempts have been made to explicitly understand how the system works. Drawing upon sociology of science and careers research, we studied the underlying form of the position allocation system by focusing on the relative importance of research success and prior affiliations as antecedents of movement and stability across positions. We used three theoretical models: accumulative advantage, sponsored mobility, and contest mobility. Tracking hundreds of faculty members for 16 years post doctorate, we find a downward cascading of affiliation prestige over time that affects people more dramatically and quickly than we expected, especially women. Accumulative advantage, the most predictive of our models, does help to maintain relative but not absolute prestige, at least until its effects wane in later years of the career. These findings are relevant to scholars interested in the sociology of science, organization scholars interested in the underlying dynamics of their discipline, and individuals making career choices. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.