'Making' and 'hunting'? Practices of employee selection in organizations

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Sylvia M. Wilz
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2015 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 277614273

Employee selection is one of the key tasks organizations undertake. It is of major importance to the organizations themselves, but also to society and individuals: through the decisions organizations make on how posts are filled, they distribute social opportunities for status, prestige, income, recognition and identity. The research to date has dealt with employee selection primarily with regard to decision making at an individual level and to the effectiveness of selection procedures and performance of candidates. The planned project wishes to broaden this view by considering employee selection as a multidimensional and extended social process, which begins with a perceived need for personnel changes in an organization and ends with the signature of the newly recruited or transferred employee. From this perspective, employee selection is an ongoing decision making process, which is tied up with organizational rules and resources, material working practices, social relations, knowledge and standards, and the interpretations and value judgments of actors. It is a process in which various actors and groups of actors are involved in different constellations. The project therefore focuses on how decisions are arrived at communicatively and interactively in terms of a) the interplay between internal and external actors (recruitment consulting) and b) the communicative construction of matching organization and individual in formal procedures and subjective practices. The planned analysis of decision-making processes in employee selection will be approached on the basis of two intensive case studies of major business organizations from a sociology of knowledge and practice theory perspective. The project focuses the internal and external recruitment of experts and management. In the course of the comparative case studies (electrical and mechanical engineering/insurance industry), participant observation over a period of several months will be accompanied by interviews in the relevant actors' field of interaction, and document analysis. This approach is intended to achieve triangulation of data and methods (content and hermeneutic data analysis). The goal of the planned project is to establish an empirical basis for social and scientific debate through in-depth analysis of employee selection practices and simultaneously to contribute to the theoretical development of the organization as social practice debate.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants