A Vacancy Chain Perspective on the Mobilities of Chinese Bureaucrats

Speaker: Yuze Sui, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Stanford University

Job vacancy filling is a central organizational process to any organization. Despite the growing commonality and importance of external hiring in organizations, most of the organizations remain as “internal labor markets” (ILMs) (Doeringer and Piore 1971) that vacancies are filled by current employees. Vacancy filling decisions have two key characteristics. First, they come in “bundles”—filling one vacancy “opens a vacancy for another” and vacancies trickle down the “vacancy chain” until they are filled from outside or the job is abolished. Second, not all employees compete for the same vacancies that opportunities are segmented into “job clusters”. Opportunity eligibilities are influenced by overlapped institutionalized organizational boundaries—geographical regions, and departments or divisions. However, vacancy chains do cross boundaries. To reduce localism and to better enact top-down control, decision makers often laterally rotate across departments or/and geographical regions to fill vacancies. By empirically tracing the vacancy chains—a long proposed but surprisingly under-utilized empirical approach for the study of ILMs—within a large Chinese civil service bureaucracy for nearly three decades, I aim to address three interrelated questions on the mechanisms and the consequences of boundary-cross vacancy chains. 

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Thursday from 1 - 2 pm. Afternoon refreshments will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present.