The new institutionalism of occupations
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- During the past few decades, licensure, a state-enforced mechanism for regulating occupational entry, quickly became the most prevalent form of occupational closure. Broad consensus among researchers is that licensure creates wage premiums by establishing economic monopolies. However, licensing has a much broader impact on occupational structure. Using a new occupational dataset, covering thirty years, I argue that, by redrawing boundary lines, licensing recreates occupational institutions and can have an effect on the wages, composition, and culture of an occupation. The first paper reveals that licensing, instead of increasing wages, creates a set of institutional mechanisms that enhance entry into the occupation, particularly for historically-disadvantaged groups, while simultaneously stagnating quality. The second paper shows that licensing eases access into occupations for immigrants, a majority of whom are in the high-skilled primary labor market, while leaving behind the most vulnerable immigrant labor groups. Finally, the third paper demonstrates that, though women enter licensed occupations at a higher rate than unlicensed occupations, they are also disproportionately clustered at the bottom of the wage distribution, resulting in increased within-gender inequality. At its core, closure is the erection of boundaries between groups that struggle for the exclusion of others, in order to monopolize resources. In focusing on the second part of this equation, resource monopolization, past theorists neglected to look closely at the boundaries, even though these boundaries can restructure a group in socially meaningful ways. Taking these effects together, my simple conclusion is that closure is much more than a monopoly mechanism -- it is reformative.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Redbird, Beth |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Sociology. |
| Primary advisor | Grusky, David B |
| Thesis advisor | Grusky, David B |
| Thesis advisor | Snipp, C. Matthew |
| Thesis advisor | Sorensen, Jesper |
| Advisor | Snipp, C. Matthew |
| Advisor | Sorensen, Jesper |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Beth Redbird. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Sociology. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Beth Jane Red Bird
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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