The Hughes Award: Who is they? Inquiries into how individuals construe social context
研究人们在做职业决策时提到的“他们”究竟是谁，发现个体感知的社会情境由自我认知、共享认知和实际分布构成，且在大组织中每个人会形成独特的组织参照群体。
When people are asked about their career decisions, they often invoke the influence of they. They may include family or teachers, but it repeatedly includes some amorphous group of generalized others. This article describes my inquiries into the question: Who is they? Initial studies examined individuals’ perceptions of career timetables within organizations. The results suggested that individuals experience their social context as an intricate territory informed by self-perceptions, shared perceptions, and actual distributions. However, these studies assumed they equalled the employee population. Later work showed that in large organizations this assumption is unwarranted. Each individual acquires his or her own non-random version of social context: an organizational reference group. These individual-level reference groups and the neighborhoods in which they cluster are distinctive because they include distant associations defined only by awareness. Both concepts offer opportunities for exploring the social structure that emerges between individuals’ informal social networks and the organization.