Organizational Status Identities and the Mobility of Professional Football Players in Europe

• In Event: 161 - Section on Organizations, Occupation and Work Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 18. Job Mobility and Labor Markets

Abstract

The mobility of high-skilled professional workers is one of the factors behind the reproduction of organizational status hierarchies and inequality between organizations and individuals in the market. To understand how organizations affect the mobility of their employees, and thus the level of inequality in the market, this study uses the institutional logics perspective to examine how multiple organizational goals, divergent organizational status identities in the market, and the importance of the professional employee in question within the firm affect the labor movements of professional workers.
Using event history analysis, this study analyzes the labor mobility of professional football players in the top seven countries in European football. Results indicate that high status organizations facilitate the movements of their players to reinforce their status position in the market, but retain their key employees to ensure their performance reputation. In contrast, low status teams hang on to their players to protect their performance reputation, but facilitate the movements of key players to prestigious clubs to improve their status rank.
The study implies that the status identity of an organization in the market acts as a heuristic device to make sense of the market which, together with the importance of an employee within the firm, informs organizational decisions about the mobility of employees. These factors reinforce the status hierarchy and inequality in the market through the actions of individual firms.

Author

• Thijs Alexander Velema, National Taiwan University