Differential Job Change and Stability among Academic Administrators.
With the changes occurring in higher education recently, new attention is being paid to career opportunities and marketplace characteristics for college administrators. Often such studies have been motivated by the desire to assess how well institutions are responding to federal mandates to increase the representation of women and minorities. Both Socolow [13] and Dingerson, Rodman, and Wade [4], for example, have attempted to make this assessment by examining the position listings published in the Chronicle of Higher Education and by gathering information on the resulting hiring practices. But studying current job postings is not a totally satisfactory way to determine administrative job opportunities. While such information is useful, administrator mobility needs to be put in the contemporary context of academic organizations. Unfortunately, we lack such an integrative analysis. The majority of research on administrators has been confined to analyses of one position, the presidency, from which knowledge concerning other administrative careers is then extrapolated. The implied administrative career paradigm is summarized in the following statement by Socolow [13, p. 42]: "Senior positions in academic administration have long been the almost exclusive province of those who served a substantial time in academe, moving from one rung of the ladder to the next-most often from professor to chairman to dean to vice president to president." Other research, however, casts doubt on this monolithic career ladder. Scott [12], for instance, has pointed out that there is a large group of middle managers who work in colleges across the country whose back-