Organizational ecology and labor market mobility in periods of social change - The example of East Germany

The main subject of this article is the structure of intragenerational mobi lity in the labor market. The author attempts to integrate the effects of t he establishment and termination rates of organizations into an analysis of labor market mobility under an organizational ecological approach. The Eas t German labor market transformation in the first two years after 1989 is c haracterized by high mobility in the labor market as well as by a high numb er of newly founded organizations and an increasing number of shut-downs. T he empirical results show that the extreme mobility during the "window of o pportunity" in the period of transformation can be explained by the high le vel of organizational foundings. Moreover, it is demonstrated by means of a simple simulation model that the proportion of job shifts evoked by the es tablishment and termination of organizations is sufficiently sizeable to in dicate that the environmental change described by the organizational ecolog y approach deserves independent theoretical status within mobility research .