.................................................
FUTURE STUDIES
.................................................
Focusing on the Organizational Life of Prestigious Individuals
Although some attention in my dissertation is paid to the relative importance of individuals and organizations, more work is needed to understand how they relate to each other.
Key questions to focus on include:
Are individuals important because of their organizational position or visa versa?
How much influence do individuals carry from one sector with them to their new organizational positions?
Does an organization become important when it becomes home to relocating prestigious leaders?
Can actors transcend their organization and carry high levels of prestige with them when they leave the organization in which they established themselves and join new ones?
How is it that organizations give individuals their prestige?
Is it by the virtue of the organization’s position in the community that an actor has prestige?
Chances are, actors use the assets of an organization that are available to them to establish an identity in the inter-organizational networks that are part of their organizational life and that some of those networks, especially smaller networks, transfer to new organizational affiliations. When a company in the community recruits a high prestige actor from another organization in the same community it might be an effort to, in effect, recruit the network as well.
Understanding the strategies of organizations to recruit prestigious community members, and the strategies of prestigious community members to market themselves, can offer interesting insights into how power flows through a community.