Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
7-2019
Abstract
Socioeconomic mobility, or the ability of individuals to improve their socioeconomicstanding through merit-based contributions, is a fundamental ideal of modern societies.The key focus of societal efforts to ensure socioeconomic mobility has been on the provision of educational opportunities. We review evidence that even with the same education and job opportunities, being born into a poorer family undermines socioeconomicmobility because of processes occurring within organizations. The burden of poorerbackground might, ceteris paribus, be economically comparable to the gender gap. Weargue that in the societal and scientific effort to promote socioeconomic mobility, the keycontext in which mobility is supposed to happen—organizations—and the key part of thelife of people striving toward socioeconomic advancement—that as working adults—havebeen overlooked. We integrate the organizational literature, pointing to key withinorganizational processes impacting objective (socioeconomic) success with research,some emergent in organizational sciences and some disciplinary, on when, why, and howpeople from poorer backgrounds behave or are treated by others in the relevant situations.Integrating these literatures generates a novel and useful framework for identifying issuespeople born into poorer families face as employees, systematizes extant evidence andmakes it more accessible to organizational scientists, and allows us to lay the agenda forfuture organizational scholarship. Our hope is that the current review will help bringorganizational science—in our view, the best equipped domain of scholarship for studyinghow workers from different backgrounds fare in organizations—to the forefront of thequest for promoting socioeconomic mobility of workers coming from poorer families.
Discipline
Organizational Behavior and Theory | Organization Development
Research Areas
Organisational Behaviour and Human Resources
Publication
Academy of Management Annals
Volume
13
Issue
2
First Page
737
Last Page
769
ISSN
1941-6520
Identifier
10.5465/annals.2017.0115
Publisher
Academy of Management / Taylor & Francis (Routledge): SSH Titles - no Open Select
Citation
PITESA, Marko and PILLUTLA, Madan M..
Socioeconomic mobility and talent utilization of workers from poorer backgrounds: The overlooked importance of within-organization dynamics. (2019). Academy of Management Annals. 13, (2), 737-769.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/6408
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2017.0115