INTRODUCTION

In large organizations, people often fail to see the institutional structures that affect their lives. Students are often unaware of the school structures that affect their careers in schools and in later life (Rosenbaum 1976, 1980a, 1980b), and employees and managers often do not see organizational practices that constrain their careers (Kanter 1977; Rosenbaum 1984). Why do these misperceptions occur? Their occurrence in diverse organizations seems to imply systematic causation.

This chapter investigates whether our conception of organization careers is defective and whether it creates these misperceptions. This chapter indicates the limitations of the dominant model of careers in American society, proposes an alternative, and presents empirical tests of the two. After examining how these two models are related to employees' misperceptions, this chapter considers the implications of mistaken models and misperceptions for organization policies and practices.

Employees' careers in organizations have been conceived in at least two ways. The individualistic model, the dominant model of careers in the United States, contends that individuals are the main agents determining their job progress. The structural model views careers as “a structural aspect of an organization,” and it contends that individuals' careers in organizations are structured by internal labor market structures, vacancy chains, and organization policies (Slocum 1974: 6). While each model has strengths, each also has serious limitations.

Formal structural models, such as internal labor market and Markovian models, are limited in not being easily related to individuals' attributes or their actual career paths, and these models sometimes require restrictive assumptions (Doeringer and Piore 1971; Milkovich et al. 1976; Nystrom 1981; Vroom and MacCrimmon 1968; White 1970).