Assembling Data on Employment Relations

Abstract

Inherent in the employment relations perspective is the idea that data need to be gathered on structures, arrangements, and processes that are neither purely individual nor purely organizational. The premise of our investigation is that, to uncover underlying patterns in how these relationships are organized, one needs to consider not only individuals and their career experiences, but also organizations and their managerial policies. Thus, from the outset of the project, we knew that we wanted to survey both a representative sample of workers and a sample of their employers. It was also apparent that other large-scale structural units (e.g., occupations) were important contexts in which these individual-to-firm relationships played themselves out. In this chapter, we describe how we gathered data on a sample of workers and their employers in a metropolitan labor market and how those data were supplemented with information from other relevant information sources.