Nathan Wilmers' Paper on Job Turf Wins Award

MIT Sloan faculty member Nathan Wilmers has won the 2021 ASQ Dissertation Award, which recognizes a paper published in Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ) in the previous year that was based on a dissertation and best exemplifies the criteria for publication in ASQ, combining significant theoretical advances with extensive data collection and rigorous analysis. Wilmers’ sole-authored winning paper, published in ASQ in 2020, is entitled “Job Turf or Variety:  Task Structure as a Source of Organizational Inequality.”

Wilmers is the Sarofim Family Career Development Professor and an Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is in the core faculty of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER) and is affiliated with the Economic Sociology program.

The award, usually announced in person during the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, was (due to the pandemic) announced recently in an ASQ letter from the Editor, which states that Wilmers’ “novel paper reveals the importance of the job itself—and the task structure within the job—to explain pay inequalities.” The award committee noted that Wilmers identifies “a really intriguing research question, develops novel theory to explain it, and writes with the requisite clarity for those not doing research on labor markets to read, understand, and appreciate.”

You can read a Good Companies, Good Jobs Initiative interview with Wilmers about his job turf research here or view a video discussion about the paper here.