Over the last few years an expanding group of social scientists, mostly sociologists, have been working under the banner of the Comparative Organizational Inequality Network (COIN). We have an intellectual center of gravity in inequality, organizations and economic sociologies, but we also include economists, management, and industrial relations scholars working at last count from sixteen countries.
Our network has been developing methods and theory to exploit the far reaching and exciting potential of linked employer-employee administrative data that is increasingly available from national governments. Sociology, since Jim Baron and Bill Bielby told us we should bring the firm back into studies of inequality, has been waiting for such rich data. In most countries we can track people within and between firms and know a lot about both people, their workplaces, and the network structure of labor market movement of people between workplaces.
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