Institutional constraints on executive greed: stratification systems in American art museums

This paper examines the stratification systems of over 200 organisations, individually represented by the internal income distributions of each organisation, in turn seen as products of executive decision-making. As a first principle, I assume that in any decision-making situation in which organisational leaders must choose between their own welfare and the welfare of their employees, they will almost always select the selfish course of action. In accordance with this axiom of executive greed, the majority of intra-organisational income distributions exhibit a substantial positive or right skew (that is, many people in the lower income levels and very few in the highest). Yet there is sufficient variation to suggest that there are forces which constrain executive greed. Combining the new structuralist perspective on stratification with resource dependency and organisational fields models, the paper examines hypotheses which maintain that the shape of internal distributive systems is affected by: (i) organisational properties, such as size and structural complexity, which empower the employee in labour relations with management; and (ii) highly-institutionalised resource dependencies which constrain income disbursement decisions. Data are taken from a US sample of art museums. The results of the analyses seriously contradict the new structuralist's empowerment accounts of the effects of size and structural complexity on stratification, and suggest that their propositions have been posed at a level which may be far too general. Certain highly-institutionalised resource dependencies are found to promote equality in internal distributive systems.I thank Ann Rotchford, Charles Perrow, Helmut Anheier and three anonymous reviewers for the useful comments that they provided on an earlier version of this paper. I am grateful to Ann Rotchford for her help in preparing the Appendix.