Simulating Patterns of Organizational Careers

The study of organizational careers of employees developed in the last 20 years into an important branch of social mobility research. However, a major problem in this branch is the presence of many organizational mechanisms, which are theoretical interesting though hard to study simultaneously in the organizational case studies to which the field is restricted. In order to overcome this problem of theoretical complexity and the scarcity of data, a simulation model CLISP is developed that generates career data of employees under controlled conditions. The output of CLISP is a set of data, which is similar to the well known data sets that are obtained from existing organizations. Some examples are given that reflect the usefulness and possibilities of simulation techniques for the study of organizational careers of employees. For instance, the simulation results can provide us with knowledge about the period in which changes in personnel policies—such as Equal Opportunity measures—will have substantialeffects in the measurement techniques which are often applied.