How Employees’ Prior Affiliations Constrain Organizational Network Change
研究了组织依赖员工的教育和工作背景关系如何导致组织网络僵化，发现教育声望差异会降低人际共职和组织共同投资率，而共享背景则促进这些关系，从而巩固优势组织地位、限制劣势组织流动。
This paper investigates how organizations’ reliance on employees’ prior educational and employment affiliations for both employment relationships and interorganizational relationships contributes to inertia in organizational networks. Analyses of data from U.S. venture capital and private equity firms support the theory I develop. First, increasing differences in educational prestige decrease both interpersonal co-employment rates and interorganizational co-investment rates. Second, two individuals who share a prior educational or a prior employment affiliation are more likely to be employed by the same organization than are two individuals who do not share such an affiliation. Third, the likelihood of two organizations forming a co-investment relationship increases with the number of prior educational or employment affiliations shared by their employees. I propose that these tendencies stabilize advantaged organizations’ positions and limit disadvantaged organizations’ positional mobility, thereby constraining change in interorganizational networks. Implications for studies of network evolution and socioeconomic inequality are discussed.