Executive Migration and Interorganizational Competition 1 Jesper B. Sørensen University of Chicago June 1998 Forthcoming, Social Science Research Approximate Word Count: 9,000 1 This is a revised version of papers presented at the 1995 Annual Meetings of the Social Science History Association, the Social Organization of Competition Workshop at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and the 1996 Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association. Funds from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago supported the writing of this paper. This work has benefitted from comments by William Barnett, James Baron, Diane Burton, David Grusky, Heather Haveman, David Kang, Rakesh Khurana and Joel Podolny. Discussions with Ron Burt, Toby Stuart and Olav Sorenson led to substantial improvements. I am especially grateful for advice from Michael Hannan and Patricia Mei Yin Chang. Please direct correspondence to Jesper B. Sørensen, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, 1101 East 58th St., Chicago, IL 60637 or
[email protected]. Abstract This paper examines how the patterns of managerial careers affect change processes among formal organizations. By conceptualizing interorganizational mobility as a form of interorganizational relation, I operationalize the idea that the career choices made by individuals result in structures that constrain organizations. An analysis of the television industry shows that stations perform worse in the market for viewers when they recruit managers from the same sources as their competitors, net of controls for the station’s overall recruitment activity. Theoretically, the results suggest that managerial mobility is a mechanism by which firms move through the competitive landscape, both intentionally and unintentionally, and that careers therefore are a source of evolutionary change in organizational populations.