Beyond Microfoundations

In my first semester as a doctoral student, I was privileged to have a course on the social foundations of management co-taught by a sociologist and a psychologist. In it, I was exposed to one of the most fundamental questions in social science: person or situation? Do people make the place (Schneider, 1987) or do they conform to organizational norms (Garfinkel, 1967)? Obviously, both, but listening to Marshall Meyer and Anne Cummings debate (sometimes heatedly) was an eye-opener for me, and the start of what drew me to research about job mobility. Job mobility creates a separation between people and organizations that allows us to develop theory about this most fundamental question. Taking advantage of the disturbance to the social contexts of hiring and losing firms enables researchers to see the benefits and shortfalls that occur when people move, and the frictions that occur as newcomers enter or employees exit existing social contexts. The past two decades have seen a proliferation of work on job mobility that has begun to flesh out when and how the movement of individuals matters to organizations (see Mawdsley & Somaya, 2016 for a recent review).