The Idiosyncrasy Credit: Advantages to Category Spanning in a Virtual Labor Market

• In Event: 382 - Regular Session. Jobs, Occupations, and Professions

Abstract

This article challenges the notion that working across disparate categories, or generalism, is often disadvantageous (Zuckerman et al 2003). In labor markets, employers face the fundamental challenge of gaining insight into the underlying ability of potential employees. Economic sociologists have relied on theories of categorization to explain how this assessment is navigated. Those who span multiple categories are consistently found to be disadvantaged. Be it firms diversifying across industry groups or films incorporating disparate movie genres, spanning provides an incoherent identity to a prospective buyer. They are therefore ignored or devalued and otherwise assumed to be of lower ability. We do not believe this is always the case. This is because spanning can be an ambiguous indicator of quality (Leung 2014), so how it is perceived should be dependent on other indicators. We advance the notion that evidence of spanning is moderated by how relevant a seller is and how reputable they may be. We hypothesize that those who evince the necessary attributes a buyer is looking for, that they are more relevant, are advantaged when they also span disparate areas. This is because jobs are not always well-defined, so broad skills are attractive. Second, we also expect to see highly reputable sellers garner additional benefits by spanning because demonstrating success across disparate areas indicates broader skills. In short, we identify idiosyncrasy credits. We test and find support for these hypotheses in the context of a virtual labor market for freelancers – elance.com.

Authors

• Ming De Leung, University of California-Berkeley

• Weiyi Ng, University of California-Berkeley