A General Theory of Certification

By a "certificate" we will mean a summary of information about some performances of a worker or a candidate for a job that has been subjected to some sort of special procedures that are thought to make it more trustworthy (the general approach of this section is taken from Heimer 1984; see also Shapiro 1987). The first thing we have to do, then, is to distinguish different certificates according to the degree of formalization of both the sampling of performances and the protection of the trustworthiness of the judgments. At the extreme low end of formality is the "certificate" of seniority in a particular job. The universe sampled in the knowledge that a person has held a job for some time is the correct universe for assessing performance in that job (insofar as the job is not predicted to change much), but the sampling process tells us only that no negative information has come to light that was sufficiently serious to fire the worker. No particular efforts have ordinarily been made to check and protect the trustworthiness of the information, to make sure that everyone who should be fired has been fired.

At the high end of the variable of formality is the degree (with a transcript) from a particular college or other school, which ordinarily specifies in what courses performance was sampled and certifies that the judgments were made by people relatively uninterested in providing spurious information. One can be reasonably confident that much of the information was derived from pencil and paper tests or from writing assignments, and that the subjects of those tests would be recognizable by someone who had taken a similar course at another school.

Certificates can be produced as an offshoot of all the types of informa-

tion systems described above, by fellow workers or bodies of peers, by superiors giving an overall judgment, by systematic performance measurement systems of a more or less numerical and auditable sort. Those providing the information may have sampled performances highly predictive or less predictive of job performance, may have more or less commitment to providing the hiring or promoting organization with accurate information, and may be providing information in a common metric (such as Graduate Record Examination scores) or in noncomparable form. The central sociological point of all this is that all information that is taken into account in recruitment, retention, or promotion tends to need legitimation. The main reasons for this are practical: performance measurement requires observation of a worker or recruit in performances that are relevant to the work he or she is to do; judgment of that information requires that the judge too be competent in the same performances; and transmission of the information requires honesty and discretion on the part of the transmitter.

Second, it is not only performances in school that become certificates. Seniority is almost always a part of the formal record, and is roughly of equal importance to education in determining job level, job security, and pay. Seniority is a crucial certificate of qualification, particularly for the job a worker now holds, because what it lacks in systematic measurement and trustworthiness of the judgments it makes up in relevance. The performances of which it is a sort of record are those that are crucial for doing the job. If labor market segmentation is due to differences in various populations' opportunities to give acceptable certificates of their competence in a job, then a big source of segmentation is the tendency of most jobs to be awarded next year to the person who holds them this year.

Seniority is also one of the components in promotion systems or "internal labor markets" that characterize large bureaucratic firms, the various levels of government (especially in educational, health, and military branches), and certain large nonprofit organizations such as private universities. Since in general not all workers get the same number and size of promotions, and since educational qualifications determine which promotion ladder different people are on within the same organization, seniority in this case is more complex than in the case of a job qualifying a worker for that same job. Most promotions go to whatever groups are now employed in large bureaucratic organizations, especially to those who entered from college. We have suggested in Chapter 2 some of what seniority in positions to which one is recruited from higher education may be certifying.

The other main source of certification in internal labor markets, again especially in those career ladders that start with recuitment from higher education, is the formal opinion of superiors. As one gets nearer to the top of the hierarchy, more of such opinions are formed in committee rather than by individual superiors, which means that to some degree the top ranks of the "internal labor markets" of large organizations must be treated as a subtype of craft and professional certification. At the top people are certified by a body of peers.

The third main type of certification is based on observation of work by people already certified as skilled in that work, and it is protected from the most extreme forms of interpersonal logrolling by a "committee of peers"–type structure. As Amitai Etzioni has pointed out (1975), committees of peers are actually made up of one's superiors, not one's peers. (The original notion presumably was that the peers are peers of one another, like the House of Lords, not peers of the candidate.) What the committee of peers structure means is that no one person is a particular hierarchical superior who has the certification within his or her own power. Instead, for example, the associate and full professors of a department meet as a committee to recommend to the dean whether a given assistant professor should be promoted, or the body of craftsmen meet to certify someone as a journeyman. Internal labor markets in corporations and large bureaucracies tend to be more craftlike toward the top than they are in the middle, because as one advances influence over promotion chances begins to pass away from a single hierarchical superior toward a group, the "management committee" or, in the extreme, the board of directors.

The basic idea of peer certification systems is that the true requirements of a role can be taught and judged only by those who can do the role themselves, who have teaching and supervisory responsibility for the candidate for the role, and who have multiple informal contacts with the candidate. Quite generally a strong seniority element is built into these certifications, as in the fixed term of apprenticeship in many traditional crafts or the fixed term of internship or residency of physician trainees. The expectation is often that anyone admitted to the peer tutelary period can learn to perform the roles involved, so years spent in the apprenticeship are in effect the only measures of competence in the certificate.

Quite often, however, there are additional examinations or performances (e.g., the traditional "masterwork" of some artistic crafts) or additional examination of the work (e.g., the assessment of published work by a committee on a promotion in a university). So while assistant professors rarely get promoted without a respectable five years' seniority in

the job, they may not get promoted even with the seniority because their work is not judged to be up to the standard of the profession.

We will expect the features of the certification system for particular positions to vary with the character of the information problems involved in those positions. In general, the more the crucial uncertainties of the system in which a role is placed are dealt with in the role itself (as, for example, medical diagnosis in hospitals is dealt with by physicians, not managers), and the more the information to deal with those uncertainties tends to be concentrated at the lowest level, the more one has to rely on role holders (peers) for judgments. Thus in general, the higher the skill level of a role, and the more important the uncertainties dealt with by workers' skills in the organization as a whole, the more the organization must tap the information held by peers, that is, by the senior people who perform the role themselves and who work with the candidate.

When it is difficult for peers to explain what it is they do and to judge whether someone else is doing it well, and when bureaucratic superiors cannot measure output well because of poor observation or incommensurability of outcomes, as in secondary school teaching or police patrol work, then very general certificates of appropriate character and background for the work are combined with seniority (for a general description of police and teaching promotion and salary systems, see Spilerman 1986, 54–65), but usually with relatively small reward for seniority. Where the skill itself is obscure, but the output of interest to the organization is readily measurable and auditable, as among wholesale or real estate salespeople or athletic stars, certificates of competence and seniority usually play a very small role and rewards are based on measured performance. Where crucial uncertainties have to be dealt with by teamwork, making individual performance difficult to measure, as in continuous process manufacturing, seniority mixed with hierarchical superiors' judgment tends to dominate.

These general considerations are combined in different ways into five main kinds of institutional systems for certifying people for jobs in modern economies, which we will outline in the next five sections; these systems are based on (1) continuity or tenure in the present job; (2) promotions from within in large organizations; (3) craft and professional certification by peers; (4) recruitment of a person from within the family or of oneself as owner; and (5) the odd case of certification through work in a union shop. After examining these main institutional systems for certification of competence, we will look at how the opportunities to provide information and to have it disseminated to the people doing the

hiring are distributed. If all people needed to get a job was to have the competences to do it, the labor market would be much more competitive than it now is, because competences can be learned in all sorts of ways. But one has to learn a competence in such a way that trustworthy information about that competence can reach a potential employer at a time when that employer is making a decision about whom to hire (for a fuller analysis, see Heimer 1984). Since one of the main forms of certification is being already in the job, and if someone satisfactory is in the job an employer does not make a decision, competition takes place mainly on the rare occasions of job vacancies.

But even in the case of job vacancies, only certain types of information are acceptable certificates to a potential employer for predicting a potential recruit's future performance. And since the information embedded in those certificates is generated in institutions that produce the opportunity for a person to perform, produce observations on that performance, and guarantee to some degree the integrity and comparability of the report of those observations, not everyone could conceivably provide certificates of competence because not all have access to those institutions. This situation produces a stratification of opportunities in the labor market. In general, those who cannot produce certificates of special competence occupy places in the "secondary" labor market, a market of open competition for bad jobs.