Employment Relations and the Labor Market: Integrating Institutional and Market Perspectives

From a market perspective, workers' access to bureaucratic personnel structures at work is related to the transferability of their occupational skills. An institutional perspective emphasizes "normative and coercive" factors like union power, establishment size, occupational status, and extent of government employment. Building on these two perspectives, we examine the impact of an occupation's external market--the extent to which it offers systematic within-occupation movement among employers--on internal job mobility and protection structures and the availability of grievance procedures. Data from a sample of Chicago workers and their employers confirm aspects of both market and institutional theory. Results also support our core hypothesis, that incumbents of occupations embedded in strong external markets are less likely to have these governance structures available.