Introduction To The Study of Careers and Their History

INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF
CAREERS AND THEIR HISTORY

Chapter 1
The History of the Modern Career: An

Introduction
John Brown, Marco H.D. van Leeuwen, and David Mitch
Introduction
Both historians and those interested in current labour market policy have recently
expressed renewed interest in the history of working lives. The development of the
‘new labor’ and ‘new social history’ has turned attention to the experience of the
lives of members of the working class beyond their involvement in labor
organizations (Van der Linden, 2001; Kocka, 2001). Historians and sociologists on
both sides of the Atlantic have recently stressed occupations more and social
classes less (e.g. Sobek, 2001; Sorensen, 2000). They have placed particular
emphasis on the transformation of the working lives of women and on the
continuing rise in educational attainment. An important part of this history has
consisted of what will in this volume be termed the career. The career is the
sequence of training, education, jobs, and non-market work that has marked the
lives of individuals from when they began schooling or entered the work-force
until their retirement.
The task for historians of understanding the patterns of careers and the forces
that have shaped them has become particularly urgent with the perception that in
developed economies, the stable career paths for blue and white collar workers
alike that characterized the half century after World War II are potentially in
jeopardy. Institutions such as on-the-job training or apprenticeships for the
acquisition of skills, well-defined job ladders, and systems of training and
promotion within large corporations and lifetime pensions following retirement
that once supported the stability of career paths appear to be giving way to much
greater fluidity in movement among jobs and among sectors. Since the 1980s, the
rapid decline of unionization, the decline in the importance of the manufacturing
sector, and rapid technological change have prompted concerns in the United
States about the survival of well-defined or ‘modern’ career paths. In Western
Europe, two decades of stubbornly high unemployment have prompted calls for a
rethinking of job protection and other mechanisms designed to enhance the
stability of the working life that remain a key components of the post-1945 social
contract. Concerns about the consequences of these developments for working
lives across the spectrum of incomes, but particularly for blue- and white-collar
members of the middle class, have prompted a re-examination of what they may
4 Origins of the Modern Career
portend for the future of employment relationships and indeed, of work in general.
This volume considers the historical origins of the ‘modern’ career beginning in
the mid- to late-nineteenth century. It explores the structures shaping the modern
career and the forces leading to the institutional innovations associated with
modern career structures. It expands our understanding in other directions as well.
It offers insights into alternative paths to career formation other than the ‘modern’
trajectory, whether for professional chemists, working class migrants to Munich, or
women graduates of the prominent women’s college of Cambridge University. The
essays explore the forces shaping the paths of the working lives of individuals, the
scope for individual men and women to respond to these forces and the factors that
have influenced their responses.
Recent developments in the collection and analysis of longitudinal data on
individuals have allowed historians studying careers to merge the insights of two
disparate historical literatures. The career implies that the work-life of an
individual is not just a random sequence of work-place experiences, but instead
follows a temporal structure. The historian of the career faces the challenge of
relating the career structures present in the economy to the inherently idiosyncratic
work-life experiences of actual individuals. One historical literature documents the
presence of myriad career structures, whether in the traditional crafts from
apprenticeship to master, up the agricultural ladder from the labourer to the farm
owner, or through the corporation from the management trainee to the chief
executive officer. Another literature documents the economic and social mobility
of individuals (or members of broad occupational groupings) over the course of
their working lives with limited consideration given to the institutional structures,
conditions in the labour market, or role of individual investments in education or
training that may have all shaped patterns of mobility (Hershberg, 1981; Kaelble,
1986; van Leeuwen and Mass, 1996; Lynch, 1998).
During the past decade, economic and social historians have been able to draw
on important new sources in firm, municipal, and national archives that allow the
reconstruction of key moments in the careers of individuals. New approaches to
organizing and analyzing these data have supplemented the use of more traditional
written sources. Furthermore, several theoretical and statistical tools are now
available to analyze information on job-to-job mobility (or immobility), sequences
of occupations, and patterns of economic and occupational activity. These
analytical tools permit exploration of several key questions, including the causes of
career trajectories and the role of education or learning and the importance of
socio-economic background on shaping careers.
This volume emerged out of two conferences on the theme of making a career.
The first was held in 2001 in Luxembourg and laid the groundwork for the second
meeting, which was a session at the 2002 International Economic History
Association Congress in Buenos Aires. These conferences for the first time brought
together economists, historians, and sociologists who all shared an interest in
describing and explaining the social and economic history of careers over the past
one and one-half centuries. Although the individual contributions can not form a
definitive history of careers, they offer significant geographic and historical scope.
They address the social and economic history of the Americas and of Europe and
The Modern Career: An Introduction 5
they address the working lives of all classes of men and women in industry, the
services, and agriculture. As a group, they highlight what we believe are the key
questions to be answered in an economic and social history of careers:
• What is a career? How is it best described?

• What sources are available for an historical study of careers?
• What accounts for the emergence of modern career structures?
• What explains the contours of careers for those working outside of formal
structures of careers?
• How do social or economic structures pose barriers to the realization of the
career?
This introduction turns first to the task of definition. Defining the term ‘career’
as an object of historical study highlights the importance of formal versus informal
structures of careers and raises basic questions about how to characterize the
pattern and outcome of the working life. This is followed by a review of possible
explanations for the emergence of the modern career in order to highlight some of
the key themes in the historical literature and some of the significant debates that
the papers in this volume address. A survey of key sources is then provided to
underscore an important strength of the new research being conducted on the
history of careers: the diversity of sources. New methods have also been applied to
the question of the history of careers. The concluding summary of the papers in this
volume highlights the contributions they make to our understanding of the history
of careers and suggests some potential directions for future research.
What Is a Career?
The most straightforward definition of a career is as synonomous with the work-

life history of an individual; this approach effectively encompasses the open-ended
range of historical situations considered in this volume. However, a variety of
alternative approaches to defining the career will be considered here because they
have influenced common understandings of what a career is, because at some
points these alternative approaches will influence the way a career is conceived in a
particular historical context, and because the contrast highlights what is assumed
by defining a career as a person’s work-life history.
Defining a career as identical to a person’s work-life history is the broadest
approach. It implies that anyone participating in the workforce, no matter how
modest their status, will have a career. At the other end of the spectrum from this
approach is the common view that the term career should only be applied to
working lives of distinctive achievement. An intermediate view is that attaining at
least a moderate degree of prosperity and respectability is required. Examples
implied by this approach would include a doctor or lawyer with an established
practice. However, a definition of career for which progress and advancement are a
requisite feature raises the issue of whether large segments of a working population
are necessarily excluded from pursuing a career because they have no prospect of
obtaining sufficient success. Form (1968) argues that ‘in contemporary industrial
society only a minority of the work force participates in careers.’
A second issue that has arisen in the literature on careers is whether the term
career should only be applied to situations in which an underlying structure shapes
the occupational progression and sequence of training and work. The presence of
some sort of occupational hierarchy has been frequently been implicit in the use of
the term career in the social sciences. The Dictionary of Sociology (Marshall, 1998,
p. 55) defines a career as ‘a patterned sequence of occupational roles through
which individuals move over the course of a working life, implying increased
prestige and other rewards, although not excluding downward mobility’ where the
phrase ‘patterned sequence’ implies some additional structure to the presence of a
hierarchy. At this point, one can note a number of different influences from various
social science disciplines regarding the nature of any structure leading to a
‘patterned sequence.’
Psychology is the social science discipline that makes the most explicit use of
the term career. The literature on vocational guidance and career development has
refined the concept and developed a range of applications. A psychological
approach to the career characterizes distinctive traits of individuals with the
objective of providing guidance to the employer on how he or she could make most
effective use of the individual as an employee (Lancashire, 1971; Betz, Fitzgerald,
and Hill, 1989; Cytrynbaum and Crites, 1989; Dalton, 1989; Van Maanen, 1977, p.
6). Sociological approaches to the career focus on interrelations between people
and the setting in which the career develops rather than upon the experience of the
individual in a particular setting. Some sociologists emphasize the role of
institutions and organizations in structuring career paths. Others stress the interplay
between the individual and the work environment (Barley, 1989). Sociology also
investigates the influence of the career (or work-life) on mobility and social
stratification. One can also view the work-life of the individual as shaped primarily
by the larger organization by which the person is employed. Finally, industrial and
occupational sociology focus on the experiences of individuals as workers and
members of occupational groups. Further exposition of some basic sociological
models of the career is provided in Chapter 3 by Maas, in the literature review of
Chapter 4 by Miles and Savage and in the discussion of recent theory primarily
from economic sociology in Chapter 11 by Van Leeuwen and Mass.
Economics has devoted less attention to careers per se. Rather, research has
focused on the development and rationale for internal labour markets, which
include a progression of positions (‘job ladders’) that can be attained by promotion
within the firm and the role of prior training and experience on-the-job for
acquiring skills. Some of the debate is over the extent to which job ladders are
formal and rigid (Doeringer and Piore, 1985; Osterman, 1984). The remainder is
over why internal labour markets exist. Doeringer and Piore (1985) argue that they
reflect class power relationships rather than profit-maximizing behaviour. Elbaum
(1984) suggests that internal labour markets reflect institutional interactions
between labour and management. Wachter and Wright (1990) interpret internal
labour markets within a neoclassical framework as a means of establishing implicit
contracts and coping with transactions costs in employment policies. The emerging
field of personnel economics focuses on important features of internal labor
markets. It examines the incentive structures that firms and other organizations
utilize to more effectively monitor their employees and to increase their efficiency
on the job (Lazear, 1999). It also investigates organizational systems that use
career paths as means of sorting workers by ability (Rosenbaum, 1989). Both the
sociological and economic approaches recognize that the outcome of the individual
career includes more than movement up (or down) a hierarchy of job titles and
occupations. It also depends upon the growth in earnings, which can vary with job
tenure and experience, and job security. As Laura Owen’s discussion brings out
more fully in Chapter 2 of this volume, a key issue in the economic approach to the
career concerns the degree of worker attachment to a given firm and the degree of
worker turnover and movement between firms. Career paths depend not only on
occupational structures established by firms and other organizations, but also on
decisions made by individuals about when to move between firms and when to
change occupation. Economics casts these decisions within a decision-making
framework that emphasizes the goal of maximizing life-time earnings (Barney and
Lawrence, 1989; Sicherman and Galor, 1990). Career patterns reflect as much
choices by the individuals who experience them as they do the institutions and
organizations that individuals encounter over their working lives. Or to paraphrase
Van Maanen (1977, p. 8), people make careers as much as careers make people.
All of these approachs expand the scope of the concept of a career beyond
individuals of exceptional accomplishment and ability to those in the middle and
working classes (on the concept of blue collar careers see Thomas, 1989). Indeed,
the internal labour market literature has proposed that blue-collar work-life
experiences can be more definitely structured than white-collar ones (Doeringer
and Piore, 1985; Osterman, 1984). In this regard these approaches are consistent
with the emphasis in social history of the last several decades on history from
below. However, these approaches all presume the presence of some organizational
structure shaping occupational choice and compensation incentives. In other words,
they presume that an individual’s work-life is determined by an employer-
employee relationship. However, as Vincent (1993) notes, the tenure of an
individual employee with a specific firm is only one of a number of distinct career
pathways that can be distinguished from historical evidence on worklives. In
addition to career paths based on advancement in a formally defined hierarchical
bureaucracy, Vincent following Kanter (1989) distinguishes a professional career
model based on non-hierarchical practice of a specific craft or skill (whether
professional or artisanal), an entrepreneurial career based on development of a
successful business enterprise, and a dynastic career based on transmission of
property and other resources to one’s descendants. Based on evidence from the
‘Family life and work before 1918’ oral history project completed at the University
of Essex, done with a range of British subjects, Vincent proposes four career paths
that have characterised the century between 1850 and the first world war: ‘Gold
watch’ pathways in which the individual remains with the same firm over the entire
career; ‘migration’ pathways in which a recognized skill or trade shapes the
movement through a sequence of jobs; the ‘meander’, or ‘the shapeless drift
through a sequence of largely unrelated positions’; and the ‘fracture’, a career

characterized by a break in momentum, only to be resumed at some later point with
an entirely different trajectory.
Vincent’s typology reminds us that a variety of career paths is possible and that
one must look beyond formal organizational structures to become aware of the full
range of possibilities. It points to the importance of understanding the historical
context in which work-lives developed rather than simply employing a theoretical
model from psychology, sociology or economics or simply using occupational
mobility measures. It is striking in this regard that a 1989 survey listing ‘examples
of social science viewpoints on the career concept’ reports under the heading of
History, ‘looking at the reciprocal influence of prominent people and period events
on each other’ and cites as example Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s account of the
Kennedy White House (Arthur, Hall, and Lawrence, 1989, p.10).
This volume present studies of the working lives of ordinary individuals, the
historical socioeconomic settings in which those lives occured and the reciprocal
influences they exerted on each other. This we understand as a career. As Arthur,
Hall, and Lawrence (1989, pp. 11-13) point out, casting the work-life in terms of a
career offers distinct analytical advantages. It allows consideration of the interplay
between the individual and institutions, organizations, and the social environment
more broadly. It permits exploration of the development an individual’s work
experiences over time the changes in an individual’s relative social position over
working life.1
In sum, the term career as used here will be in its broadest meaning of any
series of work experiences over the life course. It includes the ‘modern’ career or
formal career and other forms of highly structured paths for the work-life. It also
includes the informal career.
Key Historical Influences on the Modern Career
The emerging historical literature on careers has focussed its attention on providing
a typology of careers. These sources suggest that we can divide career structures
into two groups, formal and informal. Formal careers take place within a well-
defined structure of training or education and advancement. Their structure rests
with an organization that can be a firm, a government bureaucracy, or a quasi-
independent organization such as a professional organization. Informal careers also
meet the definition set out in the previous section, but their structure can only be
reconstructed from information on the actual career pathways of individuals. Most
of the historical literature on the emergence of the modern career has focussed on
the rise of the modern career within two forms of formal career structures: the
development of management bureaucracies for predominantly white collar
employees and the creation within firms of opportunities for training and
advancement for blue collar employees (Jacoby, 1984). Two key questions have
1
For further discussion on the concept of a career compared with that of work-life history,
see Arthur, Hall, and Lawrence (1989) and Barley (1989).
been posed in this literature. First, why did these forms of the modern career
emerge? Second, did they result in material improvement in the well-being of those
whose careers they shaped?
The Logic of Industrialism Thesis
One strain of argumentation focuses on the transformation of European and

American economies that took place over the long nineteenth century (1815
through 1914). The sociologists and historians of the ‘logic of industrialism’ school
emphasized that the process of modernization brought about by the industrial
revolution fundamentally changed the logic of the work place (Inkeles, 1960; Kerr,
1960). Labour recruitment and promotion had formerly been driven by ascription or
an individual’s status at birth. The national and international competition of the new
industrial order compelled managers to recruit efficiently in a similar way in all
countries. In addition, the process of modernization introduced a growing fraction of
workers to ‘modern universal’ values. One consequence was a greater willingness to
take advantage of the opportunities for upward mobility offered by the industrializing
society (Landes, 1969, p. 564). For example, one recent contribution (Stovel, Savage,
and Bearman, 1996) argues that the transformation of British banking after 1900
prompted Lloyd’s Bank to abandon the ‘static’ career path of the typical middle class
bank clerk. The only entry point for that career was a starting clerk. Under the
‘traditional’ system, most (middle-class) clerks gained stability, a rising income, and
a pension if they remained at the bank, but they had only modest prospects of
promotion. The new career system was much more achievement-oriented.
Opportunities for advancement were available, but they required much greater
geographic mobility and a willingness to acquire additional education or training.
One could make a similar argument for the changes the political and economic
transformation of the nineteenth century wrought on the career path marked by
traditional European guilds for skilled craftsmen and the services. Guilds restricted
entry to member trades to those who had completed apprenticeships with masters
who were members of the guild. Guilds often excluded Jews, women, agricultural
labourers and non-residents from being admitted as apprentices, and thus from
entering the trades. Sons of those who already practiced a given trade received
preference in the admission into apprenticeship. Unlike the situation in England and
the Americas where they had lost their grip on productive life, guilds maintained
positions of authority in the affected trades through much of the eighteenth century.
They lost power for political and economic reasons. The French Revolution and
Napoleon’s conquests overturned existing institutions of the Ancien Regime,
including guilds, in the areas under direct rule. Competition from alternative ways of
organizing production, particularly proto-industrialization, also undermined the
economic position of guilds. Doctrines of economic liberalism completed the process
of decline by the last third of the nineteenth century.
The ‘logic of industrialism’ thesis has served as the starting point for a
considerable number of sociological and historical studies on intergenerational social
mobility. Van Leeuwen and Maas (1996) and Maas and Van Leeuwen (2002) offer
overviews of the results of these studies. These studies have not yet reached a
consensus on whether or not industrialisation has led to more openness in societies.

This can perhaps be attributed to the difficulties of isolating the impact of changing
attitudes with respect to mobility from those attributable to changes in the
occupational distribution of the labour force or in the demands for skills. It certainly
can be seen as a consequence of the lack of a sufficient body of data that is analyzed in
a comparable framework. The task of creating such data has been taken up by the
Historical International Social Mobility Analysis group, or HISMA. The absence of
agreement can also be attributed to the lack of specificity in the thesis regarding how
the industrialization process would produce more occupational openness. Indeed, a
general claim that ‘achievement’ replaced ascription as a primary determinant of
occupational choice and advancement presents an oversimplified view of the nature of
labour markets before the onset of industrialization.
The Rise of Hierararchical Bureaucratic Management Structures
A more specific link between the economic change of the nineteenth century and
the emergence of modern career structures focuses on the rise of hierarchical
bureaucratic and managerial organizations. The intellectual underpinnings of this
connection can be traced to Max Weber and his work on bureaucracy. According
to Weber there are three key elements in what he calls ‘modern bureaucracy.’ First,
the agency in question assigned activities as part of official duties rather than as a
matter of personal perogatives. Second, the authority to perform those duties was
based on stable rules. Finally, regular procedures governed how those duties would
be performed. Weber argued that bureaucracies arose to replace personal and
particularistic values as key influences on the process of supervision with
rationality, achievement, and objectivity. At the same time a hierarchy was
required to establish authority for decisions reached. Weber argues that an agency
guided by these elements could only arise in the modern state and in large modern
corporations (Weber, 1978, p. 956).
On the face of it, the transformation of the business structures of the developed
economies that began in the second half of the nineteenth century offers a striking
verification of the importance of the rise of bureaucracies in shaping career
structures. Chandler’s Visible Hand (1977) offered the first comprehensive account
of the spread of what he termed ‘managerial capitalism.’ Chandler has noted that
the work of Weber was a far more important influence on his thinking about the
modern corporation than was modern micro-economic theory, hence his choice of
the title (Chandler, 1988, pp. 297, 304-5). Managerial capitalism separated
ownership from management of the firm. The vertical managerial structures that
resulted were staffed by professionals—middle management— with little direct
financial stake in the firm beyond their salaries. A new range of careers emerged
that was associated with personnel offices, evaluations of performance, pensions,
and the opportunity to advance through the internal managerial hierarchy of the
firm with strong performance. Chandler’s subsequent treatment of the management
structures of the largest German and British firms in Scale and Scope (1990)
suggests that this form of management was particularly important in Germany. The
forms of ownership in Britain—family ownership or holding companies—
continued to allocate managerial positions to family members or key shareholders.

This structure of ownership diminished opportunities for upward mobility
compared with the purely professional staffing of the managerial capitalist firm.
Owen details the role of hierarchical organization in the development of formal
occupational structures below in the Chapter 2. The chapters in Part One of this
volume by Shpayer-Makov on English police forces and by Miles and Savage on
employment at Lloyds Bank, the Great Western Railway, and the British Post
Office explore specific examples of the creation of bureaucratic structures in the
workplace.
Two kinds of evidence suggest, however, that a focus on the creation of a
particular form of organization (the bureaucracy), particularly as a product of the
nineteenth century, might be insufficient to explain the emergence of the modern
career. Stovel, Savage, and Bearman (1996) explicitly addresses the question of
whether bureaucratic organizational structures per se can account for modern
career structures. In the case of Lloyds Bank, they find the evidence wanting. In
addition, studies of several organizations of the medieval and early modern periods
have discovered several examples of large organizations employing bureaucratic
systems of organizing the workplace. Late medieval Florence (then one of the
wealthiest cities of Europe), the Dutch East Indies Company in the Golden Age (a
trading company with a large fleet of ships that served a far-flung network of
trading ‘settlements’ across Africa and Asia), the armies and the navies of
emerging nation-states, and colonial administrations from the seventeenth century
onward employed bureaucratic organizations.2 Structured patterns of employment
were also found over the life course of ecclesiastical and bureaucratic elites under
the Old Regime (Ago, 1992; Benadusi, 1994). Although these examples may not
conform to career structures in the Weberian sense, their existence suggests caution
in an attempt to pinpoint when the modern career first appeared. Understanding the
appearance of the modern career is best thought of as the quest for the factors that
gave rise to it. While these factors may have grown in importance from the late
nineteenth century onward to such a degree that it may be excusable to speak of the
rise of the modern career in societies at large, the possibility cannot be excluded
that some of the same factors operated long before that time on a limited scale in
certain sectors of the most advanced economies.
The Development of Internal Labour Markets
The earliest examples of modern careers were available to those in the upper
echelons of the social hierarchy. Even Weber’s bureaucratic structure appears to be
best applied to the middle and upper reaches of the management structures of large
organizations. One key development of the nineteenth century was the emergence
of internal labor markets, which could had the potential to impose significant
structure on the jobs and positions held by blue collar labor workers. Internal
labour markets emerged even in organizations or firms that lacked a bureaucratic
2
See Bruijn (2002), Burkholder (1998), Ku (1984), Lieven (1984), Oosterhuis (1993),
Schouwenburg (1988) and Strieter (1991).
system of management. The contribution by Owen in Chapter 2 reviews key

elements of the literature on internal labor markets. The phrase internal labour
market is commonly associated with the influential book by Doeringer and Piore
(1971), although as Osterman (1984, p. 2) notes, its origin can be traced back to
such institutional labour economists as John Dunlop and Clark Kerr. Internal labor
markets share characteristics of the bureaucratic management structures noted
above. Workers have the opportunity to progress up a ladder of jobs, perhaps even
attaining positions (such as a foreman) with some managerial responsibilities. This
form of structure typically includes clearly defined job categories, work rules,
schemes for discipline, and wage scales. Doeringer and Piore (1985) argue that a
central feature of internal labour markets is the rigidity of their rules and
procedures. In addition, they conceived of the internal labour market approach as a
radical alternative to mainstream neoclassical theory. However, the existence of
such arrangements within the firm has prompted considerable research in
mainstream labour economics. One important branch of this research is the new
field of personnel economics (Lazear, 1999).
One explanation for the emergence of internal labour markets is the rising
demand for what Becker (1964) termed firm-specific skills. As Owen points out in
Chapter 2, the general skills associated with skilled workers (particularly those
trained in apprenticeships) could be applied across a wide range of jobs. In
addition, the institution of apprenticeship ensured that the skilled worker, not the
firm, bore the costs of training. Firm-specific skills are by contrast only applicable
within a particular firm’s configuration of machines and work organization. Semi-
skilled workers, who were often operatives of specialized machinery associated
with mass production methods, constituted a growing share of the industrial labour
force by the end of the nineteenth century. Firms required systems of
reimbursement and other incentives, including promotions and worker welfare, to
ensure that they could recoup their investment in training workers in firm-specific
skills. One common feature of internal labor markets is a method of compensation
that rewards workers for lengthy job-tenure. Workers in such firms show age-
earnings profiles that penalize early depatures and reward longer tenures (Akerlof
and Yelen, 1986, pp. 1-2). Rewards for seniority, either through scheduled
increases in wages or internal promotions, constitute an essential element of this
personnel policy, with its stress on predictability, transparency, and fairness.
Internal labor market policies will also attempt to select for workers who are more
likely to prove reliable and yield a higher ex post return on the firm’s investment in
their training.
Much of the historical literature on internal labour markets focuses on
developments in the United States. Sundstrom (1988) finds evidence that key
elements of internal labour markets were present in firms in New York and Iowa
before the First World War. Others (Jacoby, 1985) date the innovation to a later
period. Seltzer and Simons (2001) also provide comprehensive evidence for such
practices at the Union Bank of Australia during the period prior to World War I.
Nonetheless, all agree that the cost to firms of high turnover were critical reasons
for the adoption of the policies. Owen (1995) identifies moves to adopt these
policies before 1920 in her firm case studies. Jacoby (1985) and Jacoby and
Sharma (1992) provide a comprehensive account of how in the United States, large
firms in the first half of the twentieth century introduced personnel departments to
reduce turnover of their blue-collar workforces. The Departments were more
systematic in the selection of employees likely to be satisfactory. Workers also
received incentives to remain with the firm for an extended period of time.
The Spread of Unionization
Another important institutional development that may have influenced the spread
of formal career structures was the spread of unionization through much of Europe
and the Americas from the last third of the nineteenth century onwards.
Unionization initially took hold among some of the most skilled workers and then
spread to other sectors of the labour force. Union contracts essentially combined
two developments previously discussed. An essential part of many contracts was to
grant unions the role of gatekeeper for the hiring of new workers into unionized
jobs. Applicants for specific jobs were required to meet formal requirements for
training and experience. In its most developed form the union restricted the hiring
of skilled workers to those who had already completed apprenticeships of five to
seven years, which may have also been supervised by unions themselves. The
effect of this policy was to limit the supply of skilled workers and ensure union
members higher earnings because of that scarcity (Penn, 1984; Bennett, 1986). As
Badoza points out in her contribution in Chapter 8, the gatekeeper strategy also
ensured that new employees would be likely to be sympathetic with the aims and
strategies of the union.
Another key element of union contracts noted by Jacoby and Sharma (1992)
complemented the emphasis on formal training and experience. Contracts sought to
replace what might have been viewed as an arbitrary system of termination of
employment or promotions by company managers with elaborate rules governing
procedures for promotion and dismissal of workers. The foremost criterion for
advancement (or for layoff) was an obvious observable characteristic of a worker,
his or her seniority. Other rewards included compensation that rose with the
number of years a person had been employed and benefits that accrued to the
worker over the time of employment, but which could be forfeited if the employee
did not meet a minimum period required for vesting. Rules could also lead to the
loss of seniority if a worker assumed a new position within the company. Chapter 7
by Hirsch and Reiff highlights the effect these kinds of seniority-based job rules
had on the choices of workers who had careers at the workshops of the Pullman
Company Sleeping Car Company in the United States.
The development of informal career structures has also shaped the modern
career. The emergence of informal structures reflects several importance social
changes. Most of the contributions to this volume focus on the mechanisms
through which social and economic change generated new patterns of careers. The
discussion here will focus on three of them: rising levels of education and training,
the surge in geographic mobility during the last half of the nineteenth century, and
the presence of legal and social discrimination against women and ethnic, racial,
and religious minorities.
Education
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the widespread diffusion of educational
institutions that took on the task of providing informal and formal qualifications for
many occupations. For a growing range of career paths, acquiring the appropriate
formal education became essential. By the late nineteenth century, advanced
primary education through about the age of fourteen was widely available in most
advanced economies. For young people 15 to 18 years old, new alternatives for
formal certification emerged that increasingly substituted for on-the-job acquisition
of skills. In the United States, the high school, with its coursework in the sciences,
higher-level mathematics, and the humanities, offered young people general skills
that enhanced their ability to adapt to high geographic mobility and rapid
technological change. In 1900, only a small minority of American eighteen-year
olds graduated from high school. By 1940, the majority did so (Goldin, 2001). The
high school diploma became a credential essential for entrance into growing
numbers of occupations. European countries developed systems that tracked
students according to their expected lifetime occupation. The vast majority of
young people were expected to remain in blue collar or lower-level white-collar
occupations throughout their lives. In Europe, the formal qualifications provided
by specialized technical education became part of a process of certification that
increasingly defined the career path within an occupation or industry. This trend
was especially advanced in Germany. In the late nineteenth century, German craft
chambers in occupations such as construction and metalworking established formal
apprenticeship programs that combined classroom instruction, continuing
education, and on-the-job training. By the mid-twentieth century, this system had
been extended to include most of commerce and industry (Hansen, 1997).
The development and spread of specialized knowledge during the nineteenth
century in fields as diverse as medicine, chemistry, engineering, and public
administration worked in tandem with other political and social changes to reshape
the course of professional careers.3 In the same way that guilds regulated entry and
access to training for a wide range of skilled trades and commerce through the
middle of the eighteenth century, in traditional European society ‘corporations’
operating independent of the state often set the requirements for access to
professions such as law or medicine. One of the best-known examples is the Inns
of Court of British barristers. Those seeking a career in the law, in medicine, or as
an apothecary received practical training through the relevant corporative
organization. The church maintained control over the clergy, and local or
provincial governments regulated most other professions. Access often depended
upon the ability to pay or having political connections rather than a demonstrated
level of expertise. Lundgreen (1988) notes that for virtually all professions, a
general humanistic education, whether an American liberal arts college (or
3
For this discussion, professions include the clergy, lawyers and judges, physicians,
teachers, architects, engineers, chemists, and upper level managers of firms. Siegrist (1988)
provides a helpful overview of the development of professions.
university) bachelor’s degree, a diploma from Oxbridge, a German Abitur, or a

French bacculauréat was a necessity though not a formal requirement.
The early nineteenth century brought about a unification of policy at the level
of the nation-state, albeit in two contradictory directions. The abolition of most
elements of state regulation in countries with a strong democratic tradition—the
United States and Switzerland—initially opened up most professions to free
competition; market forces determined the suitability of the practitioner for the
position. In Europe, Napoleonic-era reforms that initially opened up access as part
of the general process of liberalization gave way to a system of state-sponsored
examinations and licensing, although formal educational requirements were not yet
included. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the modern day practice of
requiring that professionals complete a specialized education had taken hold across
Europe and the United States. The development of faculties of law and medicine
and the sciences within the universities and the creation of specialized schools of
engineering, teaching, architecture, and business administration provided the
formal education required prior to entering the career. For most professions,
passing formal examinations and meeting other requirements for certification were
also required.
The transformation of the education of professionals arguably enhanced the
importance of formal qualifications for achieving access to the professions even as
other influences, such as family background, wealth, or even practical experience
declined in importance. The creation of formal certification and the development of
specialized knowledge also led to the expansion of white-collar employees relative
to independent professionals. By the early twentieth century, professional careers
within firm hierarchies or government bureaucracies had become much more
common as Chapter 15 in this volume by Mackie and Roberts emphasizes.
Migration and Emigration
The last half of nineteenth century also witnessed an unprecedented surge in

geographic mobility. Modern analyses assign migration an important role in the
development of career strategies, since a change of job is quite often associated
with a move to another city or region (Yankow, 2003). For the 60 years prior to
1914, it is plausible that migration was an essential element of the work lives of
millions on both sides of the Atlantic. Migration increased in response to rapid
shifts in opportunity, both as industrialization took hold and as the farming sectors
of most European countries faced intense competition from the Americas and then
Russia. The development of railroads and the shift from sail to steam in
transoceanic shipping cut the cost of passenger transportation substantially,
primarily by reducing the time required for the journey. Effective information
networks developed to inform potential migrants or emigrants of opportunities
elsewhere. The surge in mobility is difficult to quantify. Trans-oceanic migration
resulted in the transfer of about 13 percent of the potential working age population
from Europe to the Americas over the period 1870 to 1910 (O’Rourke and
Williamson, 1999, p.155). For the preceding period, the transfer could only have
been significant for Ireland and some of the German states.
Estimates of migration within national economies are more difficult to develop.

Galenson (1991, p. 584) reports decade-to-decade persistence rates of 30 to 40
percent for a variety of American cities and rural counties in the mid-nineteenth
century. For England and Wales over the period 1841 through 1911, rural areas lost
more than 80 percent of their natural increase to out-migration (Cairncross, 1949,
p.85). Nipperdey (1993, pp. 39-42) notes that for Germany from 1871 to 1910, at
least one-half of the labor force migrated some distance as part of the transition
from rural to urban employment during this period of rapid industrialization. By all
accounts, a period of substantially decreased mobility followed from the onset of
World War I through the end of World War II. Emigration from Europe to the new
world plummeted after the imposition of restrictions on immigration. Evidence
from Germany suggests that inter-city migration declined substantially as well.
While one might presume that rising geographical mobility would be associated
with increasing mobility between employers and occupations over the course of
one’s life, the actual extent and nature of this association are matters for
investigation. Migration plays a central role in the accounts of the careers presented
in a number of the studies in this volume, including the contributions by van
Leeuwen and Maas, Raspadori, and Brown and Neumeier.
Discrimination by Race, Religion, and Sex
Even as career opportunities were unfolding, a new set of influences on careers

emerged as societies on both sides of Atlantic: barriers to employment faced by a
variety of social groups. In the United States, the emancipation of the large
enslaved African-American minority in the mid-1860s prompted social and
political responses to reserve access to many careers for white Americans. The
legal efforts to discriminate culminated in the Jim Crow laws of the late nineteenth
century, which enforced strict racial segregation in the American South until the
last third of the twentieth century. With the exception of agriculture, the informal
practice of firms and (white) employees generally restricted African-Americans to
the most menial jobs within the occupational hierarchy. The contribution by Hirsch
and Reiff highlights the importance of racial discrimination in the external labour
market for the differences in the career strategies of white and black workers at the
Pullman shops. Various groups of immigrants during the nineteenth century faced
lesser, but no less pernicious barriers to career paths. Restrictions aimed at Jews
were particularly effective at limiting professional careers. In the United States,
leading universities and colleges discriminated against the admission of Jewish
students. In Germany, emancipation had opened most careers to Jews by the
establishment of the Empire in 1871. Nonetheless, practicing Jews were still barred
from the officer corps and most upper level positions in the government
bureaucracy and executive positions. Antipathy among the faculties of German
universities, which still retained corporative privileges, prevented Jews from
receiving professorships. Varying degrees of discrimination against Jews can be
found in other countries of Europe as well.
Women faced remarkable shifts in the social and legal acceptability of creating
a career outside of the home. The longer-term trend since the early 1800s has been
the removal of social and legal barriers. The contributions by Kay and Thane
illustrate two periods, the second half of the nineteenth century and again after
World War I, when this trend was reversed. Until recently, the range of socially
acceptable work was quite limited. The demands of child care, social pressures,
and firm policies including ‘marriage bars’ restricted careers for a large share of
women to a short period up to marriage or the birth of the first child (Vincent,
1993, pp. 228-229). Marriage bars first appeared in the United States towards the
end of the nineteenth century. By the Great Depression, they were apparently
widespread in both public employment (teaching) and in the private sector. They
either prohibited hiring married women or they required women to quit if they
became married. They were found in other countries as well and only were
removed during the second half of the twentieth century (Goldin, 1990, pp. 160-
179).
Form (1968, p. 253) has suggested that the range of developments just
surveyed could have conflicting and offsetting influences on trends in careers.
While the spread of bureaucracy in government and in the private sector may have
cultivated more definite career patterns, industrialization could have introduced
instabilities in technologies and organizations that introduced more irregularity into
career patterns. Similarly, rising educational attainment and rising rates of
migration could have enhanced career prospects for some. These speculations
suggest the need for understanding both the development of formal and informal
structures in concrete historical settings and the influence they exerted; this volume
addresses that need.
Historical Sources Used in the Study of Careers
Studying individual working lives places heavy demands on information that most
commonly used historical sources, such as censuses or population counts, are
unable to meet. Any source used to study careers must provide information on
occupational status and perhaps income at more than one point in time. Preferably,
this information is available at several points during the working life. In addition,
information on the place of employment (its size and the kind of technology it
used) and the type of positions the individual held is very useful. Personal
characteristics of the individual that may matter include the date of birth, prior
training or education, the place of origin, marital status, religion, the number of
children, and the occupation (and income) of the individual’s parents. In short,
longitudinal information on the path of the career is required along with key
personal characteristics.
Developing longitudinal data on an individual in historical settings poses three
challenges. The first is ensuring that the same individual is being tracked over time.
Variations in the spelling of names (and even places of birth) and varying accuracy
in the information on the actual year (or date) of birth can complicate the task of
matching information on an individual from two different sets of records (nominal
linkage). This problem is particularly severe in societies where the maiden name of
the bride is no longer recorded after marriage. Limitations on available sources,
such as restrictions on access to manuscript census records or the lack of records

for earlier periods, can also pose obstacles to capturing longer periods of the
individual’s career history. Finally, adult mortality, outmigration, poor record-
keeping, or variations in spelling can all lead to to the failure to link information on
the same individual from different sources. If the attrition or matching bias is
correlated with causal variables of interest, the failure to complete nominal linkage
of all individuals in an initial sample could bias the resulting sample.
Each of the contributions to this volume has been able to surmount these
challenges through the ingenious use of an historical source (or sources) that allow
reconstruction of longitudinal information on the working lives of individuals. The
sources include the payroll or personnel records of firms, farms and the police;
labour counts and censuses; insurance company records; surveys based upon lists
of alumni maintained by colleges and universities; marriage records; migration
lists; records of local churches; population registers; municipal records; and
obituaries. Each contribution provides more detail about the actual archival or
other sources. This discussion provides an overview and a brief summary of the
some of the chief advantages and limitations of each source.
Company records can offer rich information for the history of careers. Payroll
records, such as those of the Italian steel factory studied by Raspadori, the printing
firms examined by Badoza and the farm labour books of the kind used by Mitch,
offer a starting point for the study of working class careers. A longer run of these
records can offer valuable information on the development of the working life
within the firm or farm, including earnings and often information on the kinds of
jobs performed. Re-entry after an absence provides additional information on a
potential relationship with the employer. Of course, the problems associated with
nominal linkage can apply to these records as well, although they are most likely
much less severe. It is also unusual to find payroll records that span long periods of
time.
Personnel dossiers, which were records maintained by the employer over the
employee’s tenure with the firm, already carry out the task of nominal linkage.
They provide the researcher with ready-made longitudinal profiles. Ideally,
relevant dates (e.g. of hiring, promotion, dismissal), occupations, functions, and
salaries of the employees have been recorded along with other material such as an
assessment of performance. Records may also include information on the reason
for a voluntary or involuntary departure from the company (e.g., a strike), the kind
of reference provided when the employee was first hired, and the employee’s age,
family circumstances, and family background, including race. Access to company
policy documents is invaluable for interpreting this information. Several of the
contributions to the volume have drawn on these kinds of records, including the
Pullman Company of the United States (see the chapter by Hirsch and Reiff), the
London Metropolitan Police (Shpayer-Makov), two printing firms in Buenos Aires
(Badoza), Lloyds Bank, the Great Western Railway, and the British Post Office
(Miles and Savage) and the Canadian Pacific Railroad (MacKinnon).
Since they have the potential to provide detail on earnings and job assignments,
personnel records are particularly well-suited for the analysis of internal labour
markets, Indeed, as Hirsch and Reiff mention in their study of the Pullman
Company, the existence of detailed personnel records before the 1930s is often a
testimony to the rise of bureaucratic methods of managing labour relations.
Nonetheless, smaller family-run firms of the kind studied by Badoza also
occasionally kept these kinds of records.
The chief drawbacks of company records are their narrow focus, the potential
in them for selection bias, and their idiosyncratic collection of information.
Company records are more likely to survive for larger manufacturing organizations
that were still in operation in the last part of the twentieth century when large-scale
efforts were being made to archive historical business records. Sectors in which
smaller firms were the norm, including local transportation, most other services
including retail and hospitality, food preparation, clothing and construction have
been less likely to leave behind personnel records. Using other sources (cadastral
records, population censuses, or population registries) to supplement the
information in firm records can partially overcome their narrow focus. The
contributions by Raspadori and Mitch offer ingenious approaches to broadening
the information beyond the firm-level sources that are the core of their studies.
Firm records may also be difficult to interpret because of the ways that jobs are
defined or because supplementary information required for the interpretation of
records is missing from the archival collection.
Records kept by professional organizations and educational institutions
constitute another source for longitudinal information on working lives.
Professional organizations also collect biographical information about their
members as part of the routine of maintaining membership lists and publishing
directories. The contribution by Mackie and Roberts draws upon a large database
of the working lives of professional chemists who were members of one of the
three British organizations of professional chemists. Obituaries in the scientific
journals sponsored by the organization, membership lists, directories, and various
editions of Who Was Who enable the creation of collective biographies that span
the late nineteenth to the middle twentieth century. Similar to personnel records,
these sources permit detailed reconstruction of education, occupations, and
positions of a large professional group. Aside from some modest problems with
nominal linkage of these disparate sources, they also suffer a problem of attrition.
Only those who remain active professionally as chemists remain in the sample.
Those exiting for other forms of employment are lost.
Many British and American secondary and post-secondary institutions
maintain records on their graduates and often update occupational information. The
contribution by Thane draws upon surveys sent to alumni of an all women college
(Girton College) of Cambridge University and uses follow-up interviews to
reconstruct their careers, which included periods of paid employment, significant
unpaid work for the voluntary sector, and child care. Although concerns about
privacy may restrict access to these kinds of records (and reduce the response rate
on surveys), they do hold the promise for a comprehensive perspective on
professional working lives since changes in occupation or moves out of the labour
market will not lead to their exit from the sample.
Other studies also draw upon biographical or autobiographical material, either
from collections of individual biographies or through the use of oral history. For
example, Requate (1995) developed a collective biography of almost 800 editors of

German newspapers for the nineteenth century using obituaries, records of the
police and the Ministry of the Interior and commemorative publications of
newspapers. In Chapter 10, Kay draws upon the autobiographies of women from
Victorian England to orient her research into the working lives of middle class
women who gained a livelihood as proprietors. A large oral history project of the
University of Essex, The ‘Family Life and Work Experience before 1918’,
conducted interviews in the mid-1970s with over 450 individuals with memories of
the period before 1918. Vincent (1993) draws upon these interviews to map the the
qualitative dimensions of careers. Burnett, Vincent, and Myall (1984-1989) have
compiled an extensive annotated bibliography of printed and manuscript working
class autobiographies for Britain from the last two and a half centuries; they
include short digests of the salient events of each autobiography included. Both the
biographical and autobiographical approaches have the advantage of filling in
detail on individual working lives that would not be preserved in company records.
They have the disadvantage of potential gaps in records because of missing
information or faulty memories. Only some will include information on income at
various points in the working life, and the timing of occupational changes can be
rather vague.
Insurance records constitute another kind of historical record that can provide
information on occupations and occupational change. Kay’s chapter uses records of
London fire insurance companies to look at careers of men and women who were
proprietors from the early 1760s through the early 1860s. By the time of her
analysis, most businesses purchased some form of fire insurance. These records
could include information on the type of business the proprietor was engaged in
and the value of goods insured. They offer valuable insights into the distribution of
proprietorship during a period when there are no other counts of businesses, and
they allow comparison with the mid-Victorian era. Kay takes advantage of census
manuscripts to find further detail on the female proprietors in her sample, including
their marital status.
If fire was an important risk for proprietors, the loss of income because of ill
health was—and remains— a key concern of wageworkers. Laws mandating
comprehensive health and accident insurance created another set of records that
can be drawn upon for the study of careers. By the mid-1880s, German federal law
required compulsory membership in a sickness fund for all workers between the
ages of 16 and 70 whose work lasted longer than a week. The registers for
membership in accident and sickness insurance funds that are found in archival
collections of firm records offer an alternative and more widely available source of
information on employment at German firms than extant payroll or personnel
records (Neumeier and Brown, 2001). In addition, the records of Local Insurance
Funds (Ortskrankenkassen) would present another source if they were preserved.
By the early 1900s, these funds covered large shares of the labour force of most
German cities. An unusual collection in the Munich City Archive that forms the
core of the dataset used by Brown and Neumeier for their contribution to this
volume includes extracts from the Munich local insurance fund for large numbers
of recent migrants to the city for the decade prior to World War I. The records
permit the compilation of complete work histories for periods of seven to fifteen
years. A key advantage of this source is the comprehensive coverage of all kinds of
employment, including small firms and employers in the service sector. Since the
archive has also preserved registration records that essentially function as a
population register (see below), it is possible to reconstruct key information about
the socio-economic background and approximate the income of many in their
sample. Two disadvantages are the absence of information about the type of job
with a particular employer and the high cost of linking firm names with other
information on the sector of the firm.
The sources with the potential for providing the most comprehensive coverage
of careers include records of vital registration maintained by churches or
governmental authorities, censuses of population, and population registers. All of
these sources have the potential to capture most of the population. Marriage
registers provide a valuable source of information on the occupation of the groom
(and often, his father) at a known date. As the contribution by Mitch illustrates,
combined with other sources, for example information from census manuscripts,
this kind of data can be used to identify the occupation (and place of residence) at
two different points in the working life.
Census manuscripts offer another source for detailed information on occupation
and other personal information of men and often, of women, that are useful for
understanding influences on occupational choice (Wolfgang, 2001). Hall, McCaa,
and Thorvaldsen (2000) provide an overview of the samples from historical census
manuscripts that are currently available. Researchers must take account of the
problems of under registration, particularly of women. Occupations for the head of
a household are usually provided; the treatment of occupations by other members
of the household, whether women or children, varies greatly. For the analysis of
careers, it is necessary to link data on individuals from two or more censuses.
Along with the classic studies by Thernstrom (1973), Landale and Guest (1990)
and Long and Ferrie (2003) offer recent examples that study occupational mobility.
Successful rates of linkage will be higher for more complex families, unusual
names, and the geographically immobile (Galenson and Pope, 1989). Studies must
account for these sample selection problems. Censuses often included questions on
wealth, religion, home ownership and other forms of property, race, religion, and
school attendance. When linked, census records offer the potential for both
describing career paths and understanding determinants of careers.
Population registers have one important advantage over censuses: the nominal
linkage of individuals has already been completed to provide longitudinal records.
Brown, Guinnane, and Lupprian (1993) and Hall, McCaa, and Thorvaldsen (2000)
offer surveys of population registers, which were maintained in Italy, Netherlands,
Belgium, Scandinavia, and some German cities and states. Registers maintained
lists of all residents of a locality, typically arranged by family group. If they are
well maintained, they will provide updates of information on the family (births,
deaths, marriages, and other types of data) for the period the family remains in the
locality. They may also provide information on in- and out-migration. This also has
its drawbacks. Population registers only exist for a few regions and then they
appear rather late in time. They were not always continuously updated, nor were
changes necessarily dated. Following an individual who changes house often

through the pages and volumes of the population registers can be a time consuming
task.
In their chapter, Maas and Van Leeuwen draw upon the Demographic Data
Base at the Umeå University in Sweden for data from the Sundsval province of
northern Sweden. The Demographic Data Base combines a marriage register, a
birth register, a migration register, and an unusual source maintained in all Swedish
parishes, the catechetical registers. The registers served as population registers for
the local parish. For the period of their study (1800 to 1890), all of these sources
have been linked and computerized, thus offering multiple records of occupation
(in sequence) for many of the 42,000 men in the database. The authors are able to
examine changes in occupation over fixed periods of time for the full population of
the region. Similar to most population registers, the catechetical registers only state
the occupation, not the firm where the person worked or the functional
classification of the work performed within the firm.
Comparing occupations and occupational change over time and across various
countries is very difficult, since it requires a single occupational grid that could be
used to classify occupations that take on different names over time. The problem is
compounded when occupational titles are expressed in different languages. A joint
effort of researchers in many countries, the Historical International Standard
Classification of Occupations, or HISCO in short, was created to address this
problem. It is described in detail in Van Leeuwen, Maas and Miles (2002). With an
emphasis on the nineteenth century, the data used to compile HISCO actually span
the time period 1690-1970. The HISCO classification scheme follows the
classifications of the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO)
of the International Labour Office of 1968. Linkage with the ISCO permits cross-
referencing with contemporary data on occupations, which typically use the ISCO
scheme.
This overview does not exhaust the list of potential resources for the study of
careers. The two most obvious sources that have not received much attention to
date include electoral lists and tax rolls. Electoral lists are lists of citizens who were
deemed worthy to be elected or met particular income or property requirements for
voting (see e.g. De Vries, 1986; Van Leeuwen and Maas, 1991; Brown, 1987).
Although lists may be restricted to certain subgroups of the population who were
typically wealthy, they have the advantage of uniformity and were often published.
They will often note the financial position of an individual and less frequently his
occupation. Tax rolls are less likely to be preserved by archives, but they could
also provide information on income for the urban population. When matched with
city directories that provide occupational information, they may offer insight into
occupational and economic mobility. Neither of these sources will provide much
additional information about the individual.
Volume Overview
Disciplinary and Methodological Perspectives
The historical study of careers necessarily involves an organizing framework

within which to define such key questions as the measurement of career patterns,
the determinants of those patterns, the appropriate tools with which to explore
causal relationships, and how to measure the outcomes of careers. The volume
opens with two chapters discussing key contributions of contemporary economics
and sociology to answering these questions. In chapter 2, Laura Owen highlights
the application of economic models of skill formation, job attachment and turnover
to the study of careers in history. She contrasts the implications of acquisition of
skills specific to employment with a given firm that would tend to lead to a ‘life-
time’ job (defined as lasting at least 20 years) with skills general to many
employers in an occupation or industry. Acquisition of general skills could
encourage the worker to move between employers in order to diversify the range of
work experiences and portfolio of skills. Owen offers the example of the U.S.
teaching profession in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as one in which
general rather than firm-specific skills were acquired and surveys the literature on
how school districts dealt with problems of high rates of teacher turnover during
this period. She argues that the rise of mass-production methods in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may have increased the importance of
firm-specific skills in manufacturing in contrast with earlier apprenticeship in
which contractual arrangements were made for the apprentice to bear the cost of
training. She considers measures and determinants of worker tenure and turnover.
The contribution concludes with an overview of the debates over when the
importance of lifetime jobs in the United States increased over the period from the
mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century and whether it has declined.
Chapter 3, by Ineke Maas, provides a summary of recent developments in the
use of event history analysis of longitudinal patterns of individual work histories to
explore themes developed by sociological analyses of careers. Also known as
duration analysis, this approach shifts attention from the change in status or
occupational mobility over an entire career to the individual career moves—
changes in jobs or occupation—that constitute the key discrete events of a career.4
Event history analysis allows for an examination of the causal factors that affect
the timing of these moves. The added explanatory power is gained at the cost of
much more detailed information about individual’s work history. An analysis of
occupational changes would require information on all occupations between
entering the labour market and the point in time being analysed. Such increased
information requirements are a drawback in applying event history analysis to
historical situations. The survey reviews some of the statistical models employed in
event history analysis. Maas considers how these approaches and models can be
used to analyse such basic issues in historical career studies as determining the
4
The contribution by Brown and Neumeier uses the related technique from the econometric
literature to analyze the determinants of the duration of jobs for migrants to Munich.
influence on subsequent occupational change of individual characteristics such as

education and prior work history, the influence of one’s family and other
significant relationships, the impact of macro characteristics such as trends in
economic growth and economy-wide inequality and changes in occupational
structure. She also explains how event history analysis can be used to address the
problem of multiple time clocks, which involves disentangling the influence of age
or experience and cohort effects.
The Creation of Formal Career Structures
This section offers chapters that describe the formal structures influencing careers
that emerged after 1860 and some of the most important explanations for the
emergence of those structures. The countries covered include Britain, Canada, the
United States, and Argentina.
The contribution by Andrew Miles and Mike Savage in Chapter 4 on the
development of career patterns at three large British employers is also informed by
contemporary sociology. Their effort to explain the emergence of formal
bureaucratic career structures at these firms towards the end of the nineteenth
century draws upon several alternative explanations from the sociological literature
on careers. Their discussion outlines the basic elements of a Weberian human
capital model of careers that emphasizes the potential for the new structures to
meet the growing requirements of bureaucracy and administration. It then sketches
the surveillance perspective drawn from Foucault, which credits structured careers
with achieving greater management control and power over workers. The cultural
framing model emphasizes the role of cultural context. Finally, a social closure
model focuses upon the hierarchical structure of the modern career, which may
have facilitated stratification and the creation of barriers to mobility.
Their analysis challenges appeals to bureaucratic or economic rationality as the
main reason behind the creation of career structures. Using detailed employment
records from Lloyd’s Bank, the Great Western Railway, and the British Post
Office, they reconstruct career patterns for a large number of blue and white-collar
workers. The records also include the careers of women. In all three organizations,
they detect common phases in the development of the career: a period of
foundation and growth in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period
consolidation during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and a period of
crisis during the inter-war period. Detailed analysis of the job ladders that emerged
within these organizations leads them to conclude that formal career structures
hindered rather than prompted mobility across classes for men and mobility tout
court for women. The barriers to upward mobility built into these career structures
rose through the interwar years. The development of the modern career in the early
decades of the twentieth century was primarily consistent with a process of social
closure entailing the reinforcement of class and gender boundaries rather than a
process of human capital formation.
Haia Shpayer-Makov’s study of English police forces during an overlapping
period in Chapter 5 describes the emergence of a career structure that seems to
have been common for many organizations. From her perspective, the job ladder,
the procedures for promotions and the rewards for long tenure that eventually
emerged in English police forces reflected an ongoing interaction of two forces.
The employer sought desperately to diminish high turnover in an effort to reduce
the costs associated with recruitment and to capture some of the benefits of
stability for more effective functioning of the organization. The members of the
police force sought upward mobility, job stability, and predictability in the pattern
of promotions. Drawing upon the voluminous contemporary discussions of the
issues facing the force, Shpayer-Makov traces the evolution of the terms of the
implicit agreement reached by both sides. During the middle third of the nineteenth
century, the Metropolitan London and provincial police forces began offering
enhanced prospects of employment security and career advancement as well as
welfare schemes involving provision of medical care and pensions in an effort to
improve retention. Unlike in many other organizations, these benefits extended
past middle and upper management to include the entire workforce. The police
force created a career path that was a well-defined way to improve the social
position and the pay of an officer. This career path was particularly attractive to
those of working-class origins even if only a minority actually realized the fullest
potential for promotion. As members of the force came to expect advancement,
resentment grew when the expectations were not realised. In response, the police
force created a `horizontal path of advancement’ based only on length of tenure,
not on distinctive merit. The modern structure thus evolved as the result of the
interplay of the narrow interests of the police and the rising expectations of those
who benefited the most from the opportunities the new organization provided
compared with alternative careers.
Chapters 6 and 7 examine the careers of workers in the mechanical and car
repair shops of the railroad industry. This industry exemplifies the vertical
management structure and bureaucratic organization that typify organized career
structures. The contribution by MacKinnon on the Canadian Pacific Railway
(chapter 6) explores the importance of the emerging bargaining relationship
between the workers in the mechanical department, which was responsible for
repair and maintenance of the equipment on the system, and the company’s
management. The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was the largest single employer
in Canada at the time, and its policies in many respects foreshadowed those of
many Canadian employers later on. Two key episodes of crisis, the strike of 1908
and the unrest associated with the introduction of centralised wage bargaining
between 1917 and 1922, were important for the establishment of mutual
recognition between the trade unions and management. Conditions of the Canadian
labour market, which on the surface would have favoured the railroad’s initial
resistance to unionisation, actually resulted in a more amicable agreement than
would be reached by unions and the railroads in the United States. Although the
railroad won the strike of 1908 with the use of replacement workers from Britain
and the United States, it also learned that the British and American strikebreakers
were less productive. The bargain that emerged resulted in a closed shop for the
union (the CPR would only hire members of the union) and the acceptance of
seniority as a key determinant of layoffs during downturns in business. Pensions
and other benefits rewarded longevity with the firm. This resulted in a workforce
that over time ‘aged’. The median age of the workers rose and the median
employment tenure increased. Union policy essentially protected the career
interests of the most senior members to the detriment of both the unemployed and
those who had been with the railroad only a short time. Most opportunities for
moving up the skill hierarchy in the CPR Mechanical department seem to have
occurred during boom periods such as the First World War. MacKinnon also
studies the episode over the period 1917 to 1922 of centralized wage bargaining
and considers the tensions that arose as workers in the western part of the country
lost their wage premium relative to the East. Mackinnon relates this to trends in age
and skill level between the western and eastern regions. Over the thirty years of the
study, the CPR shifted from primarily a confrontational approach to the unions to
incorporating them into an internal labour market structure; union foremen dealt
with worker grievances and addressed discipline problems. This shift in the
approach of the CPR is consistent with Freeman and Medoff (1984), who argue
that trade unions assist members in exercising voice in their relations with
management.
In Chapter 7 Susan Hirsch and Janice Reiff look at a similar group of workers
in the United States. They study the careers of skilled and unskilled men, black as
well as white, who worked in three repair shops of the Pullman Company in the
United States over the period 1915 to 1970. The American railroads contracted
with the Pullman Company to provide, staff, and service sleeping cars for long
distance passenger routes. The study covers the last period of expansion for the
company during the 1920s, the period of crisis during the Great Depression and the
rapid decline following 1945 as the development of airlines eliminated the
profitability of virtually all long distance passenger service by rail. As was the case
with the CPR, strikes at Pullman were defining moments in the history of careers at
the company. They revealed the strategies of individual workers, their unions, shop
managers, employers and the state. They also created contracts that attained a
permanence that could only be broken up by a shock, such as a strike, major
changes in the economy or war.
The period covered by the contribution reflects an ongoing struggle between
the company and the union over the shape of the internal labour market. The craft
unions sought the continuation of union control over the definition of jobs and
qualifications for them. To the extent possible, workers hired by Pullman would
have completed training in one of the traditional crafts. In an effort to take
advantage of new technologies and also to secure control of the shop floor, the
company sought to increase specialization by task. Unskilled workers would be
hired and trained to perform a particular speciality. An important part of this
strategy was hiring large numbers of African-American workers for whom the
potential security of employment and higher wages at Pullman were highly prized
when compared with other jobs on offer. The final compromise reached when
union representation was re-established in the early 1930s reflected a blend of both
approaches. Jobs were defined by craft, but unskilled workers could be brought
into the company as helper-apprentices with prospects for advancement after they
received sufficient training. As was the case with the CPR, layoffs were on the
basis of seniority. Hirsch and Reiff emphasize one important feature of the system:
it created a clear trade-off between job security and advancement to a better

position. Moving up the job ladder meant abandonment of accumulated seniority.
Particularly during the Great Depression and then the period of general decline, the
terms of this trade-off led to significant reductions in job turnover and mobility for
older workers and particularly for African-American workers.
Maria Silvia Badoza’s account of the typographical industry of Buenos Aires
is presented in Chapter 8. Her contribution presents an overview of the main
influences affecting working lives in the industry over the period 1880 to 1930 and
then examines in much more detail the careers of workers at two of the largest
printing shops over the first three decades of the twentieth century. The rapidly
expanding printing sector, which grew sixteen-fold in employment over the period,
constituted one of the few islands of skilled work and longer-term jobs in an
economy dominated by the high turnover and mobility among occupations of the
agricultural export sector. Even as the demand for printed matter and graphical
products such as matchbooks expanded rapidly, technological change increased the
scale of printing firms. Innovations in machinery substantially increased the
volume of printing per press by the last quarter of the nineteenth century and
created a bottleneck in the composition stage of production. Firms responded
initially with new methods of payments for large numbers of less skilled workers.
They eagerly took up the new composing machines of the early twentieth century,
the linotype and monotype. Introduction of these semi-automatic machines held the
potential of replacing the skilled work of the typographers, with their high levels of
literacy and manual dexterity, with the semi-skilled work of operating machines.
Typographers feared that the new technology could also result in the replacement
of skilled male adult workers with young people or women. As is the case with
other studies in Part I of the book, the development of career paths in this industry
reflected the interplay among the printing companies eager to employ the newest
technology, their search for appropriate management methods, the unions that won
the right to represent all workers at the printing shops, and the self image of those
workers. As a result of a successful strike in 1906, the union won two key rights. It
gained the right to fill new openings in the print shops with workers of its
choosing. The old typographers also won the `first right’ to become a linographer,
or operator of the new machines. The typographers also accepted piece-rate wages
(instead of time pay). This decision reflected their willingness to abandon the old
model of career advancement in the industry, which had held out the hope of
allowing them to eventually set up their own small printing shop. The system of
union representation and control over entry into the industry lasted until the 1970s.
Badoza’s examination of the career patterns of workers found in the extant
personnel records of two Buenos Aires printing firms reveals the presence of a core
labour force with a record of long-term attachment. The critical role the union
played in the careers of typographical workers may have contributed to this
apparent stability. Virtually all new hires secured their job on the basis of a
recommendation from a current employee of the typographical firm or the union.
Skilled workers who had been fired during a strike would often reappear in the
firm’s personnel records.
Gender and Careers
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, American and European courts and
legislators have explicitly acknowledged the presence of discrimination against
women in the workplace and have sought suitable remedies. The two chapters in
this section of the volume focus on the historical roots of these restrictions in the
case of two groups of middle- and upper-middle class women: the widows and
single women of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the graduates of
an all-women’s college of the University of Cambridge in the twentieth. They both
offer insights into how the presence of social or economic discrimination can shape
the career strategies of ‘marginalised workers.’
Chapter 9 by Alison Kay examines one common strategy adopted by middle-
class London women over the period 1761 through 1861: establishing a small
business. Neither very poor nor of sufficient wealth to live independently, most of
the women of her study were either single or had become widowed. Social norms
of respectability were increasingly critical to maintaining middle class standing for
these women, particularly by the second third of the nineteenth century. Kay
employs literary sources such as contemporary vocational guides aimed at the
young and autobiographies to map the boundaries of the occupations deemed
acceptable for women who lacked the means to remain entirely within the domestic
sphere. Her examination of this diverse evidence reveals the emergence of a clear
differentiation according to gender of occupational and economic roles by the mid-
nineteenth century. By that time, the socially preferred position of the middle class
woman was at home. The process of differentiation had progressed so far that in
the eyes of some reformers, the discovery that some middle-class women could not
adhere to this norm because they lacked the means to support themselves was
creating a crisis. The reformers responded by suggesting a short list of occupations
that in their view were respectable, and then drawing up plans for training.
Drawing upon this extended discussion among early Victorian contemporaries,
some historians have argued that Victorian society was characterized by a ‘separate
spheres’ model of gender roles that included a strict separation of home and
workplace activities. Women would be confined to the domestic sphere.
Kay challenges this view. Drawing upon the records of the Sun Fire Insurance
Office and census manuscript information, she points to a wider range of career
choices available to women than has often been supposed. Proprietorship figured
prominently in the career strategies of many middle class women, both those
heading households and those who were married. Proprietorship offered an
opportunity for women to be active in both the domestic sphere and the world of
work. The small shop could be close enough to home to permit women to perform
domestic duties and earn a livelihood. Ownership of a small business may have
also required a lower initial investment of capital. Kay’s discussion traces the main
contours of female proprietorship over the period. Throughout, the types of
businesses operated by women differed from those operated by men. The patterns
reflect both the shift in social attitudes towards the role of women emphasized by
the existing historiography and some long-term continuities that reflect the kinds of
skills women were able to acquire. Although the proportion of insured businesses
owned by women fell, there were still a significant number of female-headed

businesses at the height of the Victorian era. The range of sectors in which women
operated businesses narrowed; the decline in importance of some sectors such as
food, drink, and hospitality appears to reflect changing notions of respectability. At
the same time, women generally opened businesses either in trades where women
were also heavily employed (particularly in the needle trades) or where prior
experience would have been of only modest value (stationery shops).
Pat Thane examines the careers of several generations of graduates of a
women’s college of the University of Cambridge (Girton College) in Chapter 10.
Her study draws upon responses to questionnaires sent to women graduating from
Girton over the period 1920 through 1990. She was able to conduct follow-up
interviews with many of the respondents as well. Thane’s study outlines basic
changes in the contours of careers for these women and provides summaries of
their own personal assessments of the outcome of their careers. Of particular
significance for the broader themes of this volume, Thane’s research reveals the
value of a broad definition of the working life and of the career. Most graduates of
Girton College were from middle-class backgrounds and thus could not rely on
family fortunes for support after graduation. Since many Girtonians did not marry
and since for those who did, the divorce rate rose over time, the labour market was
important for many of them as a source of livelihood. For most, the primary
occupation was initially teaching or secretarial work, although that proportion
declined over time. New opportunities for these women in the formal labour
market opened up only gradually due to such developments as the elimination of
marriage bars, the dropping of barriers to the admission of women to the medical
and legal professions and the reduction more generally of informal sex
discrimination. When compared with male university graduates of a given cohort,
the graduates of Girton had much more complex work histories; only a small share
appear to have been able to enter the formal career structures that were so
important for male employment and career advancement during the twentieth
century. Compared with their male counterparts, these women changed employers
more often.
Thane argues that these retrospective autobiographies offer a challenge to the
traditional definition of the career. For virtually all of these well-educated women,
marriage and child-bearing (and divorce) fundamentally shaped their lives. Prior to
World War II, marriage generally meant the end of employment. Even after 1945,
the birth of the first child meant withdrawal from the labour market for those in
Thane’s sample. For the most recent cohorts, balancing marriage, child-bearing,
and a career in the formal labour market continues to pose substantial challenges.
In addition to their work as homemaker and parent, many of these women served
for years in the voluntary sector and rose to positions of considerable
responsibility. Their university education was essential to their ability to make
these (usually unremunerated) contributions to society. Thane’s study offers a rare
opportunity to directly assess the impact on personal well being of the careers it
documents. Most women looked back upon their lives with satisfaction, but found
that they could have had more fulfilling careers, and would have been happier, if
husbands, employers and others would have been more co-operative and
supportive of their aspirations and had been more willing to recognise their talents
and abilities. This holds even for women who did not marry or had no children.
Thane argues that these women constituted an under-utilized resource for the
British economy and society in which their careers transpired.
Economic Change and the Emergence of Informal Career Paths
Even in situations in which formal bureaucratic structures were absent, new forces
emerged after 1850 that had important consequences for the course of working life
histories in both Europe and the Americas. Even as industrialization spread to the
European continent, the invasion of inexpensive grain from the Americas and
Russia and innovations in farm technology prompted far-reaching changes in rural
economies and societies. The resultant internal and overseas migration entailed
major shifts of population from farm to factory and from countryside to the city.
During the same period, modern bureaucracy became widespread in business and
government. Rising levels of formal education and the introduction of
examinations to test competence reshaped the contours of careers in the traditional
professions of law and medicine as well as in the ever-growing government civil
service. The contributions in the final section of the volume explore the
consequences of these changes for various types of less formally structured careers.
In Chapter 11, Ineke Maas and Marco van Leeuwen examine intra-
generational occupational mobility for the male working population of Sundsvall, a
province of northern Sweden, during the nineteenth century. Their chapter draws
on the Demographic Data Base at the Umeå University, which offers occupational
information for about 42,000 male residents of the province at one or more points
in their working lives. The experience of the Sundsvall province illustrates the
dramatic impact industrial development and agricultural competition could have on
career opportunities. As a centre of the rapidly growing lumber industry, Sundsvall
experienced high rates of in-migration. From a tiny fraction in 1812, the share of
migrants in the working population reached almost 40 percent by 1890, when their
study ends. The creation of the lumber export industry during mid-century was
followed by the development of large sawmills with specialized tasks. Employment
opportunities, particularly for unskilled or semi-skilled workers, increased
substantially. Employment on the farm, either as an agricultural labourer or as a
farmer, fell by the middle of the century.
While the basic methodology of the study is in the tradition of occupational
mobility research, their rich sources allow them to trace out more carefully than
previously the association between trends in occupational mobility for an entire
male population and the fundamental shifts in occupational structure associated
with industrialization. The study examines patterns of occupational mobility at
relatively short intervals (five years) for several age groups. This contrasts with the
more usual study of inter-generational mobility, which typically includes only one
observation for each working life. Most occupational mobility that they observe is
‘lateral mobility’, or movements within five hierarchically ranked groups of
occupations. Overall, they observe an increase in lateral mobility and a decrease in
upward and downward mobility over the period of their study. In addition, they
note that most occupational changes took place among younger workers. Even as
the share of workers moving up from farm workers to farmers remained virtually
constant, the development of sawmills and the influx of migrants substantially
shifted the composition of the group of lowest-skilled workers away from
agriculture. By the final period of analysis (the 1870s and 1880s), unskilled
workers made up two-thirds of the lowest occupational grouping, which compared
with one-third during the first half of the century. The likelihood of upward
mobility fell for this group as well. The result was a decline in overall mobility for
the lowest group of workers.
Chapter 12 by John Brown and Gerhard Neumeier on migrants to Munich
examines another influence on informal careers, the role of job shopping in
acquiring industry-specific skills and in enhancing long-term career prospects.
Contemporaries held two opposing views of the high frequency with which
workers changed employers and the corresponding small share of long-term jobs
apparent in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America and Europe. Some
argued that work histories reflected a general lack of attention or inability to
structure the working life; that careers were a `completely careerless career’ to use
Vincent’s (1993, p. 219) terminology. Other accounts of high rates of job turnover
suggest that a given worker acquired on-the-job experience in a variety of jobs as
part of a strategy to acquire ‘industry-specific’ skills and that this contributed to the
development of working class careers. The contribution examines these issues by
drawing upon evidence available for ten or twelve years of the working lives of
migrants to Munich during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a
period when Bavaria was experiencing basic transformations of its rural and urban
economies. A large share of the Munich labour force consisted of migrants who
primarily came from small villages or towns. For most, the move to Munich
involved a change of occupation as well as of residence. Even those who continued
the occupation they had practiced or for which they were trained in their hometown
most likely confronted technologies and a labour market that was vastly different
in Munich, which was a town of 400,000.
The study examines the pattern of job moves within the work histories of
Munich migrants to determine whether job-to-job mobility was consistent with the
acquisition of industry-specific skills. It employs duration analysis, which is a
statistical technique similar to event history analysis. It finds that workers acquired
skills by switching jobs as long as this took place within an industry. In addition,
other sources permit a closer look at whether a stable employment pattern within
an industry and the acquisition of industry-specific skills increased socio-economic
mobility. Measures of inter-generational mobility suggest that mobility rose with
the accumulation of industry-specific skills, even for workers initially in skilled
occupations. Migrants who maintained employment within the same industry
experience higher rates of income growth as well as higher rates of upward inter-
generational mobility.
Chapter 13 by David Mitch looks at a large occupational group generally not
associated with the rise of the career: Victorian and Edwardian English farm
labourers. It does so for Norfolk during Victorian times, by looking at the careers
of a group of farm workers reconstructed by linking their marriage records to
censuses. It also looks at sets of weekly farm labour accounts for one farm with a
long run of labour account books, essentially providing weekly payroll
information. Farm workers in mid-career, roughly in their late thirties and early
forties, were disproportionately recruited from those whose fathers had been farm
labourers and who had been labourers at marriage. This suggests that farm work
was a distinctive way of life not readily open to outsiders. Geographical migration
and persistence patterns provide further evidence on the degree of isolation of farm
workers. A substantial proportion of those in the sample who were married in a
given parish had been born there and was still present ten years later at time of the
census.
Two indicators of whether a career in the conventional sense of advance and
promotion was possible for farm workers include rates of upward occupational
mobility within agriculture to more skilled and managerial positions and the age-
earnings profile for those who remained as farm workers. Roughly 60 percent to
two thirds of those who had been labourers at marriage were also agricultural
labourers roughly ten years later as recorded in census records. This implies
substantial amounts of both occupational continuity and mobility for this group.
For those who were mobile, the most common destination was into the non-
agriculture sector, but at least one-third of those who were upwardly mobile moved
to positions within agriculture. Moreover, the rate of upward mobility within
agriculture rose over time despite the shrinkage of the agricultural sector within
Norfolk and, as might be expected, it rose with age. Wage–age profiles for farm
workers were generally flat during the prime adult years, but they did rise
markedly during adolescence. They also shifted upward during World War I. Mitch
argues that these patterns suggest the absence of on-going skill accumulation or the
use of wage-incentives to promote long-term tenure. Macroeconomic conditions
were most important for wage trends.
For the mid-Victorian period, the Eastern English agricultural labour market
has been characterized as subject to considerable transiency with frequent
movement from farm to farm. Farm labour books for a Norfolk farm confirm this
characterization for the 1860s. The labour books also suggest the need to
distinguish between the regularity of employment and the length of overall job
attachment. The regularity of employment appears to have risen dramatically over
the nearly eighty years covered by the account books, with most workers employed
at the end of the period working continuously full-time throughout the farm year.
However, the length of overall attachment, which is defined as the length of time
over which a worker appeared on the account books, showed no such upward
trend. It was roughly the same at the beginning of the period spanned by the
account books as at the end. Despite a non-bureaucratic hiring structure, changes in
employment relationships with the shrinkage of both labour supply and alternative
employment in the region along with possible changes in farm practise following
the onset of the First World War seem to have contributed to the rise in
employment stability observed in the case study farm. Thus, with rising regularity
of employment farm work became more of a career as conventionally defined.
In Chapter 14, Paolo Raspadori provides an account of two different paths for
structuring the careers of workers of the Italian steelmaker, Saffat, which
specialized in production for military purposes. His study covers the first three
decades of the twentieth century. Out of a desire to protect the mill from potential
attack, it was sited in Terni, a town located in an isolated rural part of Umbria that
was several hundred kilometres away from Italy’s industrial heartland. At the same
time, the steel mill demanded two quite different kinds of worker. The rural
location meant that Saffat placed a premium on skilled and semi-skilled
employees. The company responded with the development of an internal labour
market that included opportunities for training and advancement for a minority of
workers. Periodic booms in production and large-scale construction projects
created temporary increases in the demand for unskilled workers. In addition, the
structure of production also offered employment for unskilled workers.
The study reconstructs the careers of these two groups of workers by looking
more closely at long-term employees (those with a tenure of twenty years or more)
and short-term workers employed about one year or less. Surprisingly, the core
consisted in large part of unskilled and semi-skilled persons in addition to those
possessing skills essential to the production process, many of the short- and long-
term employees from the period before World War I could be traced to the
subsequent census of 1921. The cadastral records of the communities they resided
in offered detail on their holdings of land, if any. Linking these records allowed
Raspadori to look at the subsequent occupation of the short-term employees. He
concludes that the short-term workers survived from a mix of subsequent factory
work, other jobs, and the proceeds of a plot of land typically owned jointly with
several others. For both long- and short-term workers, migration was incomplete.
Many long-term employees continued to hold on to a small plot of land and large
numbers of workers maintained their residence in rural villages outside of Terni,
even though for many it required a lengthy commute by cycle or foot. This pattern
of flexible employment, as workers moved between the city and the countryside,
and between the factory and farm, was apparently found in other parts of rural
Italy. It reflects the accommodation of informal careers to new patterns of
employment and opportunities.
Robin Mackie and Gerrylynn Roberts in Chapter 15 examine career patterns
among British chemists during the period 1887 to 1956. The chemists offer an
outstanding example of a growing group of knowledge-based professionals. The
contribution divides the chemists into cohorts entering the profession in three
periods: prior to the First World War, during the interwar years, and during and
after World War II. The analysis examines the interplay of stability within a
particular sector (independent, academic, government, industry) and within
positions across these three cohorts. An important strength of the individual
biographies that they have assembled is the ability to rank the responsibility of the
positions held by chemists. This allows them to explore the links between career
paths and upward mobility (‘success’). On the face of it, chemists would appear to
fit into the category proposed by Vincent of a ‘professional career’ based on ‘non-
hierarchical exploitation of specific craft or skill’ (Vincent, 1993, p.224). Their
research casts doubt on the value of this characterization for understanding the
course of professional careers. Although the expertise was a critical contribution to
entry into the career, the patterns of careers that they have identified suggest
considerable diversity; other influences were also critical in shaping careers.
Over the period of their study, several important trends emerge that reflect on
the dynamics of career paths. First, as a newly emerging profession, chemists
sought to pattern their careers on the example of lawyers and physicians. An
important source of employment for chemists entering the field prior to the First
World War was consultancy. By the interwar years, the dominance of industry
emerged and consultancy virtually disappeared. Consistent with a Chandlerian and
Weberian perspective, a career that included long-term employment with one
employer had become the dominant pattern for chemists in industry, even as it
diminished in importance for those employed in government. This pattern changed
dramatically during and after the Second World War. Mobility across sectors
diminished to the extent that the mobile one-half of chemists now worked in a
smaller number of sectors, but mobility across firms increased substantially. The
analysis of rates of upward mobility across the three cohorts reveals an increase in
the success rates of the stable career, particularly during the interwar years. For the
final cohort, success in the career was more likely when the chemist moved among
different firms.
Implications and Conclusions
The contributions to this volume raise a number of basic issues about writing the
history of ‘modern’ careers and about the contemporary institutions and practices
that have shaped them. The essays of Part One offer insights into the history of
formal career structures found within the firm or governmental organizations. The
essays offer insight into when internal labour markets emerged, the reasons for
their emergence, and some long-term consequences. Historians of North American
internal labour markets have dated their rise to the first three or four decades of the
twentieth century as a consequence of the rise of the personnel management
movement, the spread of unionization and government-mandated labour practices
(Jacoby, 1984; Doeringer and Piore, 1985). Although the two North American
studies of firms in the railway industry by MacKinnon and Hirsch and Reiff as well
as Badoza’s study of printing firms in Argentina roughly confirm this chronology,
other studies do not. Shpayer-Makov and Miles and Savage trace the emergence of
internal labour markets in England during the last third of the nineteenth century.
Raspadori’s case study of an Italian steel firm suggests elements of an internal
labour market were present by 1900.
Understanding why internal labour markets emerged has a critical bearing on
the chronology. The studies by MacKinnon, Hirsch and Reiff, and Badoza offer
some support for the emphasis in the literature on union-management interactions
(Jacoby, 1984; Elbaum, 1984). It is also apparent that the ability of unions to
influence labour contracts depends upon a variety of factors related to overall
labour market conditions and features of the technology in use and markets. The
closer look at the careers of workers provided by these three studies highlights the
emerging trade-off between job security and promotion opportunities. The studies
by Shpayer-Makov and Raspadori underscore the importance of external labour

market conditions and the problems posed by high turnover as key influences on
the decisions of firms to create internal labour markets. Miles and Savage see the
creation of internal labour markets as a means to differentiate workers by status
and sex, a point that has some resonance in Badoza’s study as well.
Finally, all of the studies in Part One suggest that the institution of internal
labour market structures creates strong internal advocates for maintaining them,
even after the original impetus for their introduction has disappeared. This is
illustrated by the patterns of task specialization and job assignment and the
tradeoffs between promotion and job security that emerged for the Pullman
workers described by Hirsch and Reiff. Badoza notes that the detailed and rigid
training process along with schedules of wages and tariffs endured for Buenos
Aires typographers for over six decades after the 1906 strike that brought them
about. Similar issues arise with the emergence of social closure in the bureaucratic
structures considered by Miles and Savage. The “horizontal” promotion ladders for
English police reported by Shpayer-Makov became a focus of heated debate by
both management and the police force. In the extreme, these labour policies have
the potential to become dysfunctional and impede labour market flexibility.
The essays in Parts Two and Three highlight the diversity of ‘informal’ career
paths. They also identify some common influences that shaped those paths: prior
education or training, social barriers, and the economic transformation of the last
part of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century. These investigations
reveal the presence of ‘patterned sequences’ of occupations, jobs, and work outside
of the market that for the most part fall outside of existing typologies (Vincent,
1993). Consider the ‘meandering’ or ‘fractured’ careers presented in two chapters
of the volume. Many of the college-educated women who are the focus of Thane’s
contribution moved from teaching positions into full-time motherhood and then
into the voluntary sector or paid employment. The working lives of the occasional
steelworkers—many of who were illiterate— that Raspadori examines also appear
to meander between the factory floor and rural farmstead. Although the extent to
which the jobs taken or occupations followed reflect ‘choice’ may be debated, it is
clear that the sequences revealed an understandable and logical response to
prevailing social and economic circumstances. The diversity among these
contributions suggests a fundamental area for further research in the history of
careers: mapping out trends in lifetime profiles in various historical contexts. This
entails describing and analyzing the career as a whole as discussed in Abbott
(1990). Applying this approach to representative historical populations would help
ascertain long-term trends in the mix of formal versus informal career paths across
cohorts. It would also help identify shifts across different types of career structures.
The contributions reveal a subtle interplay between education and training—or
the lack of it—and career development. The absence of formal training was a key
influence on the choice of middle class Victorian women to go into small business.
Once Saffat had developed its own system of sorting out and training workers, the
lack of skills of residents of the surrounding rural areas could be turned to its own
advantage. Formal education or training did not always preordain a particular
career path. It opened up the teaching profession to large numbers of graduates of
Girton College, but until other social and economic barriers were removed, it
offered full benefits only to the small minority of women who were able to
overcome those barriers. The extensive technical training required for chemists—
and membership in the appropriate professional organization—opened up a wide
range of career paths within particular organizations or across sectors and
positions. Finally, for many of the working lives discussed here, on-the-job
experience, whether in a Munich bakery or on a Norfolk farm, appears to have
been a crucial influence on the acquisition of skills or on the establishment of long-
term working relationships. A key issue arises for understanding the development
of careers in our own time. How have the spread of formal training and education
and the imposition of formal requirements for entry into a wide range of
occupations during the twentieth century influenced the flexibility of individuals to
respond to new opportunities and the ability of economic institutions to respond to
technological and social change?
The contributions also reveal how important discrimination on the basis of sex
or race was for career paths. Discrimination took the most blatant form of legal or
informal barriers to entering certain occupations or positions of authority, and the
consequences of these barriers are clearly outlined in the contributions by Kay and
Thane. More subtle influences were also present. Seniority rules and the condition
of the external labour market clearly placed African-American workers of Pullman,
a company in a declining industry, at a disadvantage relative to their white
counterparts. It also had the unexpected effect of providing the British voluntary
sector with talented and highly motivated leadership.
Finally, the great economic and social transformation of the second half of the
nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth century —industrial development
in tandem with agricultural decline—had a profound influence on career paths. It
opened up new opportunities for millions of migrants and emigrants to reshape
their working lives outside of the geographic and occupational boundaries that
formed the careers of their fathers and mothers. The changes in occupation tracked
by Maas and van Leeuwen and the success experienced by migrants to Munich
who may have taken on an entirely new line of work underscore the value of
mobility in permitting these individuals to adapt to sweeping change. The existence
of intermediate solutions such as those of the rural residents of the district of Terni
underscore the importance of security and the value of maintaining social ties in
many societies. These cases raise the question of whether contemporary societies
offer the same scope for occupational or geographic mobility in the face of
economic and social change.
These twelve case studies suggest one important lesson. Although formal and
informal career paths may ‘create’ careers, they are also the outcome of distinct
historical circumstances and the ingenuity and resourcefulness of individuals in the
past. Current debates about the future of the ‘modern career’ would benefit from a
fuller understanding of this history.
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INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF

CAREERS AND THEIR HISTORY

The History of the Modern Career: An

• What is a career? How is it best described?

The most straightforward definition of a career is as synonomous with the work-

through a sequence of largely unrelated positions’; and the ‘fracture’, a career

Key Historical Influences on the Modern Career

The Logic of Industrialism Thesis

One strain of argumentation focuses on the transformation of European and

consensus on whether or not industrialisation has led to more openness in societies.

The Rise of Hierararchical Bureaucratic Management Structures

continued to allocate managerial positions to family members or key shareholders.

The Development of Internal Labour Markets

system of management. The contribution by Owen in Chapter 2 reviews key

The Spread of Unionization

university) bachelor’s degree, a diploma from Oxbridge, a German Abitur, or a

Migration and Emigration

The last half of nineteenth century also witnessed an unprecedented surge in

Estimates of migration within national economies are more difficult to develop.

Discrimination by Race, Religion, and Sex

Even as career opportunities were unfolding, a new set of influences on careers

Historical Sources Used in the Study of Careers

such as restrictions on access to manuscript census records or the lack of records

example, Requate (1995) developed a collective biography of almost 800 editors of

changes necessarily dated. Following an individual who changes house often

Disciplinary and Methodological Perspectives

The historical study of careers necessarily involves an organizing framework

influence on subsequent occupational change of individual characteristics such as

The Creation of Formal Career Structures

it created a clear trade-off between job security and advancement to a better

Gender and Careers

owned by women fell, there were still a significant number of female-headed

Economic Change and the Emergence of Informal Career Paths

Implications and Conclusions

by Shpayer-Makov and Raspadori underscore the importance of external labour

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