Personnel Flows as Interorganizational Relations.

This paper explores faculty interchanges among 79 graduate schools of business as a form of interorganizational relation. Faculty interchange among schools, the dependent variable, is operationalized in terms of 5 measures, and 11 structural variables are identified as the independent variables. Cluster analysis of a faculty interchange matrix yields six supply and six receipt clusters which are analyzed with the aid of the independent variables. Inbreeding is positively correlated with the tendency toward top-heaviness in faculty rank structure; and 4 other measures of faculty interchange-number of faculty members supplied, number of faculty members supplied as well as received, number of schools interacted with, and number of schools with reciprocal faculty interchanges-are highly correlated with faculty size, growth in faculty size, school prestige, and output of Ph.D.'s. The finding that faculty recruitment tends to be guided by structural similarity rather than by structural complementarity, raises some questions about the functionality of current recruitment practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]