Who Supports Professional Certification? Insights from Employment Arbitration

AuthorMark Gough,Kyle Albert
Date01 December 2019
Published date01 December 2019
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12475
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12475
57:4 December 2019 0007–1080 pp. 850–869
Who Supports Professional
Certification? Insights from
Employment Arbitration
Mark Gough and Kyle Albert
Abstract
Professional certification programmes became commonplace across the
occupational structure in recent years, with many emerging and established
professions opting to create their own certification programmes for reasons
ranging from collective marketing to reducing malpractice litigation risk.
Theories of social closure suggest that advantaged and established individual
practitioners might want to use certification as a means of distinguishing
themselves and enacting barriers to entry, though research on credentials and
signalling theory leads to the expectation that certification is most valued by
less secure and younger workers seeking to establish themselves in a profession.
We use a survey of employment arbitrators as a case study in the dynamics of
who supports certification, finding a surprisingly low overall level of support for
certification. Arbitrators who are female, racial minorities and those who earn
lower hourly rates are most supportive of creating and earning certification,
suggesting that the most natural constituencyfor a new certification programme
may be those looking to ‘break in’ to a profession rather than those already well
established in their practice.
1. Introduction
In recent years, mandatory arbitration clauses have become common in
non-union employment contracts across the United States, resulting in the
institutionalization of a new system for dealing with conflicts and disputes
in workplaces (Colvin 2017; Seeber and Lipsky 2006). Though some scholars
estimate over half of the private sector workforce is covered by non-union
mandatory employment arbitration clauses, the arbitration profession itself
Mark Gough is at the Pennsylvania State University. Kyle Albert is at the George Washington
University.
Authors contributed equallyand order of authorship was determined randomly.
C
2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Who Supports Certification? 851
is largely unregulated by statutes, licensure or certification (Colvin 2017;
Estlund 2018; Seeber and Lipsky 2006). Indeed, in the United States, there
are no generally accepted standards forcontrolling the quality of employment
arbitrators and decisions are left largely to the selection process and market
demand (Seeber and Lipsky 2006; Winograd2015). Theorists in the sociology
of professions note that professions tend to enact regulations and develop
credentials,such as voluntary certifications, as they growand build institutions
to address concerns about service quality thatinevitably emerge in the absence
of clear standards for professionalpractice (e.g. Abbott 1991; Wilensky 1964).
Little is known, however, about how a profession comes to adopt standards
and develop credentials. This article explores the question of who within an
occupation is most likely to support the creation of a voluntary certification
programme using the example of employment arbitration, a profession that
shares much in common with other high-status occupational specialties
commonly pursued through self-employment. Specifically, we seek to identify
the constituencies within the profession of employment arbitration who are
most amenable to the creation of a new certification programme, and in so
doing we seek to understand the long-standing tension in the sociology of
the professions between the signalling function of certification and the barrier
to entry that certification is thought to represent. In analysing our results,
we will consider contrasting hypotheses: either certification may be sought
disproportionately by less experienced and advantaged individuals in need of
a legitimacy signal to break into the field, or certification may be a form of
social closure that is sought to cement existing advantages in the field.
2. The expansion of employment arbitration
When an employment arbitration clause is signed, employees (and the
employer) sign away their right to pursue all employment disputes in
court and agree to have all disputes, even those involving statutory rights,
adjudicated by a private arbitrator instead. Unlike grievance arbitration,
a staple of US industrial relations for almost a century, employment
arbitration is unilaterally imposed by employers on individual, non-union
employees through contracts of adhesion. This has led some critics to
provocatively label mandatory employment arbitration agreements as the
new ‘yellow dog contract’ (Stone 1996). Despite these criticisms, employment
arbitration is legally recognized and covers as much as half of the US
workforce today (Colvin 2017; Colvin and Gough 2015). From its inception
through its widespread adoption, employment arbitration has been a
provocative and polarizing institution among scholars, public stakeholders,
and arbitrators themselves (Winograd 2015), given information asymmetries
between employers and workers that may result in bias (Colvin 2011; Colvin
and Gough 2015) and fewer protections against incompetence or bias relative
to civil courts (Seeber and Lipsky 2006).
C
2019 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.

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