Crafting Jobs Around People

Miner's (1990) Idiosyncratic Jobs and the Limits of Job Descriptions

A common way to think about jobs is to look at the organization chart, which visualizes all the positions in a hierarchical structure. Then attached to these jobs are job descriptions, which are typically used in the hiring process to identify candidates.

If you have ever spent a substantial amount of time in an organization, you may recognize that the job descriptions and hierarchies of the formal org chart only loosely map onto what occurs in practice. Meyer and Rowan (1977) in a seminal article in the sociology of organizations describe how organizations use “myth and ceremony” to gain and retain legitimacy as respectable, well-run organizations with which others should do business. Formal organization charts and job descriptions are part of this myth and ceremony.

Now myth and ceremony might sound like mockery, but this isn’t the intent. Rather organizational researchers are invoking the classic image of the stage or a performance; “all the world’s a stage” in the words of Shakespeare. What scholars have in mind is more akin to wearing the proper clothes to a wedding, one of the more common ceremonies in our society. I wear appropriate clothes to a wedding because what my family and friends think matters. My legitimacy is at stake.

What do the myths and ceremonies of organizations have to do with careers and economic mobility? My key argument is to not be so distracted by the finery of the myth and ceremony as to miss other processes besides the formal ones that affect how jobs work within organizations. This is not to say formal HR practices don’t matter. They absolutely do, for example at crucial junctures when HR is involved like in hiring, promotions, and exits.

Introducing Idiosyncratic Jobs

Miner (1990) introduces the concept of idiosyncratic job as “jobs designed around individuals”. The prototypical formal job system is a highly bureaucratic organization with detailed descriptions of rules, activities, and boundaries for every job. In contrast, idiosyncratic jobs ignore or bend the rules and boundaries between jobs.

Pulling from a case study studying hiring at a major research university, Miner describes three common ways idiosyncratic jobs come about: (1) a manager recognizes a workers talents and adds new tasks or responsibilities that don’t typically “fit” within the current role or (2) through drift where a worker’s interests or expertise leads to the person being recognized as the “go-to-person” within the organization on a topic, or (3) through entrepreneurship, where the worker makes a pitch to management to create a new role or position designed around their expertise.

Notice that two of these three approaches operate within the structure of manager-worker relations. The formal aspects of the system are at work and this could lead to updating of job descriptions and re-formalization of a new way of operating.

Organizations are constantly responding to their environments and have shifting workforces. As a result, Miner agues these dynamic changes provide opportunities for managers, teams, and workers to shuffle and take on new tasks that through these processes and create idiosyncratic jobs.

The concept of idiosyncratic jobs is part of Miner’s theory of organizational change. He argues that idiosyncratic jobs are good for organizations because they introduce “unanticipated variation,” meaning that people do jobs differently. This makes idiosyncratic jobs an organizational source of innovation.

Idiosyncratic Jobs and Being “Overeducated”

The U.S. workforce has experienced large increases in educational attainment in the last 50 years. In 1970, 44.8% of the U.S. population over age 25 had less than a high school degree and only 11% had 4 years of college (Census Bureau 1970). In 2022, only 9% had less than a high school degree, 23% had a BA degree, and a remarkable 14% had an advanced degree (Census Bureau 2023). This is while the U.S population grew by 63 percent from 204 million to 332 million over the same period (USA Facts).

The educational expansion rightly elicits questions: do all jobs now require a college degree? are workers overeducated? The question of whether U.S. workers are over- or under-educated seems to move with the economic cycle: when jobs are plentiful there is less talk of higher education, when jobs are scarce the narrative shifts to focusing on the value of higher education.

The typical approach to measuring the share of workers who are overeducated is to use occupations and take the average education of the worker in the occupation. All workers who have more than the average level of education are overeducated. Using this type of approach, the educational expansion has led to more workers being overeducated (see Vaisey 2006; Horowitz 2018).

Beware of the average. Workers in the same occupation have a wide range of education (explore the educational distributions in the O*NET occupational database). This could mean workers are overeducated. It could also mean as Chambliss’ analysis of swimmers suggests that there are different worlds with in the occupation that are accessed by different levels of education and training.

Miner’s concept of idiosyncratic jobs suggests an alternative hypothesis: are more educated and particularly college educated workers more likely to engage in job-crafting and be in an idiosyncratic job?

Miner’s analysis comes from the 1980s. If there is one clear change in organizations since then it is a decline in formal structures, an increase in the use of teams, and a shift from jobs with routine tasks to analytic tasks. These changes correspond with technological change (the computer and internet) and also the educational expansion. These changes are intrinsically linked: technological change requires a workforce that make use of the technology and find new innovative ways to use it.

A key stumbling block in theorizing by economists is that earnings reflect skills. This is why economists have typically assumed low-wage jobs are low-skill, despite the evidence (e.g. see Ehrenreich’s classic Nickle & Dimed where she tries to work low-wage jobs and make ends meet).

Idiosyncratic jobs can lead economists to stumble in the same way. Rather than being overeducated, college educated workers in jobs that on average have less than a college degree, could be underpaid. They could be driving innovation within organizations as they use their expertise to change how the work is done. Wages may not reflect skills, but rather a labor market imbalance that benefits employers.

The concept of idiosyncratic jobs should make us pause and consider how well we understand workers’ jobs from job descriptions and occupational classification systems.

As far as I know, there has never been a large-scale survey that tried to measure how common idiosyncratic jobs are and how workers shape their jobs. There is arguably more opportunity for workers to do so, at least as judged by the myth and ceremony, with employers talking about job crafting, boundaryless careers, and supporting professional development.

A final note on higher education: the conversation around 4-year BA degrees can get sucked into the skills vortex. What if the value of the college experience is in learning to be independent, to take risks, to work in teams, to understand where we’ve been as a society, and for a person to find their own voice? These features aren’t reducible to a skills paradigm. They are criteria for the kind of person who I would shape a job around to maximize their abilities.