The Proliferation of Job Titles in Organizations

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1985 American Sociological Association annual meeting, Washington, D.C. The authors were supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES 79-24905) and by generous research funds from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The Occupational Analysis Division of the U.S. Employment Service graciously provided data and assisted us in this research. Teri Bush, Kelsa Duffy, and Ann Bucher worked wonders on the manuscript. Howard Aldrich, Glenn Carroll, Paul DiMaggio, Frank Dobbin, John Meyer, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Peter Reiss, and the ASQ editors and reviewers offered assistance and helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. This paper develops and tests hypotheses about the characteristics of organizations and their environments that favor the proliferation of detailed job titles to describe work roles. A method for measuring the proliferation of job titles is proposed and applied to a sample of 368 diverse work organizations. It is hypothesized that proliferation is linked to four main factors: technical and administrative imperatives; internal political struggles over the division of labor; the institutional environment and its role in shaping personnel practices; and the market environment. Crosssectional and longitudinal analyses indicate that job titles proliferate most in organizations that are large, bureaucratic, rely on firm-specific skills, have a professionalized workforce, and are in institutional sectors. We describe howfragmentation among job titles imposes status gradations and gender distinctions in organizations, noting some important theoretical and practical implications of the phenomenon.*