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Institutionalization of athletic conferences for wage comparison in collective bargaining in High Schools in the US: A natural experiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2018

Heejoon Park*
Affiliation:
College of Business Administration, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
*
Corresponding author: hjpark@snu.ac.kr

Abstract

Social comparison plays an important role in collective bargaining. However, due to self-serving bias, the bargaining parties rarely agree on appropriate referents. In this respect, Wisconsin teachers’ collective bargaining provides an intriguing case because there is consensus on an appropriate comparison group: the schools’ athletic conferences. The purpose of this study is to examine whether the use of athletic conferences as referents is institutionalized beyond their technical merits. Using conference realignment as a natural experiment, this paper shows that when the bargaining parties experienced conference realignment, they changed their comparison groups. Because this realignment can be regarded as exogenous to collective bargaining, such changes in comparison groups are unlikely to be accounted for by technical factors, thus providing support for institutional theory.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press and Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management 2018 

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