In a large national sample of college and university faculty, individual earnings were affected by individual-level power, controlling for other individual, departmental, academic, field, and organization-level determinants of salaries. Specifically, having an outside job offer, having more extensive communication with individuals in other institutions, bringing in outside research grants, and being active and influential in departmental and institutional governance had both direct effects on salaries and increased the return to individual productivity, experience, and credentials. Individual influence was substantively important in affecting salaries and offers a theoretically coherent interpretation of many results in the literature on the structure of earnings inequality.
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