Organizations in America: Analysing Their Structures and Human Resource Practices

Based on the findings of The National Organizations Study, Organizations in America provides a comprehensive review of the first national survey of organizations in the United States. Using a statistically representative sample, this work is the most authoritative database on the workings of organizations available. The principal investigators of the study use this data set to define what we know about the structures and human resource practices in American organizations and describes:

• The National Organizations Study and its implications
• Specific employment practices--hiring, training, promotion, performance measurement, benefit packages, contingent work--and how they compare between different businesses and business sectors
• Differential treatment of employees according to ethnicity and gender This breakthrough publication is an indispensable reference tool for those in the areas of organizational studies, human resources, sociology of work, industrial psychology, social stratification, labor, and labor economics.

David Knoke (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1972) is a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches and does research on diverse social networks, including political, economic, healthcare, intra-  and interorganizational, and terrorist & counterterror networks. In addition to many articles and chapters, he has written seven books about networks: Network Analysis (1982, with James Kuklinski), The Organizational State (1985, with Edward Laumann), Political Networks (1990), Comparing Policy Networks (1996, with Franz Pappi, Jeffrey Broadbent, and Yutaka Tsujinaka), Changing Organizations (2001), Social Network Analysis (2008, with Song Yang), and Economic Networks (2012).

 

PETER V. MARSDEN is the Edith and Benjamin Geisinger Professor of Sociology at Harvard University.  His research interests center on social organization, social networks, and survey research.  He teaches about these subjects as well as on quantitative methods for data analysis.  He received the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award recognizing a career of distinguished contributions to methodology in sociology from the Section on Methodology of the American Sociological Association in 2016.

 

Marsden was a co-principal investigator of the General Social Survey between 1997 and 2015, and a lead investigator of three National Organizations Studies conducted between 1991 and 2003.  He edited Social Trends in American Life:  Findings from the General Social Survey since 1972 (Princeton University Press, 2012), which won the Book Award given by the American Association for Public Opinion Research in 2015.   With James D. Wright, he edited the second edition of the Handbook of Survey Research (Emerald Group Publishing, 2010).  His articles and chapters concentrate on studies of social networks―especially egocentric networks and their measurement―as well as work orientations, social trends, and issues in organizational analysis.