Doctoral Dissertation Research: Status and Authority in Small Organizations

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We know that status, or how much people defer to one another, and authority, or whether one individual gives orders to another, operate separately in organizations. However, much scholarship combines these two social structures under the notion of hierarchy, making it difficult to detect how each might be unique. We also do not know how each structure may change over time. This project addresses these gaps by asking how organizational status and authority hierarchies co-evolve. The project investigates whether higher status is associated with exercising authority; whether exercising authority changes a person's relative status; and what the temporal patterns of these changes tell us about the mechanisms linking them. The project studies user actions from over 90,000 workers in 1700 organizations over nearly three years. These findings help us understand the evolution of inequality at work, with a focus on how authority operates in smaller organizations, where two thirds of net new jobs in the United States are created. In doing so it will provide policy guidance regarding how smaller workplaces can be organized to reduce social inequality. This project analyzes hierarchies in motion by asking how status and authority hierarchies co-evolve in small organizations. To measure these hierarchies, the project uses uniquely detailed anonymized metadata from five billion user actions taken in a project-and-task-management software system. These data make it possible to separate the exercise of authority from other actions for 90,000 individuals in 1700 organizations over nearly three years. These data are combined with three months of participant observation at one of these organizations and interviews with managers and employees at it and eight other organizations. The project provides insights into expectation states theory as well as organizational theory regarding status, authority, hierarchy and their evolution.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.