An Analysis of Mobility in Organizations

Abstract

This paper aims to construct a model of mobility in organization such as promotion or lateral transfer. We distinguish two types of mobility. One is “relational mobility” : mobility along “mobility cluster”. Internal labor market theory of Doeringer and Piore is the theory of this type mobility. The other is “compulsive mobility” : mobility caused by scrap-and-build of jobs with the introduction of new technology or to save labor cost. Labor economists in Japan suggest that this type of mobility is one of distinct features of Japanese Labor-Management relations.To measure these two types of mobility, we re-examine the studies of mobility on the level of total society. Especially, we take notice of Yasuda's argument about compulsive mobility and pure mobility. We will show that “mobility table” analysis is not adequate to analyse mobility in organizations by three reasons : (1) ambiguity of times to be compared; (2) closed-system assumption; (3) confusion of moves and movers. Then, we propose open system “mobility accumulation table” analysis, which allowes people to enter and/or leave the organization in question. The frequency of moves from strutum i to strutum j is written in the (i, j) cells. From this table, we measure compulsive mobility to compare marginals of rows and columns, and measure relational mobility to standardize marginals. These two and the method of mostellerzing enable us to build a model to predict mobility in organizations. This model is applicable to the system where vacancies and superfluous members take place at the same time, which vacancy-chains model is not applicable to.