Origins of the Modern Career (review)

Here is a sturdy volume that presents the theory, methods, and evidence involving employment patterns that constitute the modern career. This information is especially important to scholars of labor studies who are interested in making historical comparisons across disciplinary frameworks. While the audience is likely to be small, the book's concerns traverse central junctures in social history.

For an edited volume the essays presented here are unusually cogent, especially given the range of topics. In good measure this is due to the fact that the book's several introductory essays successfully establish the key parameters that are used to demarcate the "modern career." Much in these explorations pits an institutional history that describes the growth of bureaucratic personnel administrations against analyses based on human capital theory, in which one goal is to understand how investments in human capital are secured. The sheer variety of occupations and circumstances addressed within this volume suggests that idiosyncrasies are so rampant that they are unlikely to produce a broadly accepted reconciliation. Nonetheless, readers will walk away with a clearer understanding of how the "logic of industrialism" is imagined to have shifted production from tradition and status toward heightened economic efficiency.

Clearly evident, as well, is that market rationality did not dictate a single pathway toward the realization of an idealized "career." The desire by employers to reduce turnover and by workers to maximize earnings yielded great variety in wage-age profiles and patterns of skills acquisition across industries and places. Understanding those patterns requires insights into the politics and sociology of organizations. The studies in this volume help us see that unionization, education, migration, and discrimination are drivers in the politics that produce this variation.

This book provides scholars a treasure trove of information about diverse employment data sources and methodologies, as well as their pitfalls. Ineke Maas leads the way with a sure-footed introduction to the event-history analysis that is applied in several of the later studies. The diversity of circumstances discussed within the text's fifteen essays constitutes its riches, as well its poverty. Variety in the occupations studied and the sources used illustrates the complexity of workers' careers in the modern period since the mid-nineteenth century. Three studies signal the range of work found in this book. By examining their insurers' records, Alison Kay tells us that women, especially widows, were better able to achieve self-employment than is typically thought to have been the case. Ineke Maas and Marco H. D. van Leeuwen describe social class mobility in northern Sweden by using logs recorded by Lutheran priests, who were required to document their parishioners' occupational and educational status. Robin Mackie and Gerrylynn K. Roberts, on the other hand, record and tabulate the obituaries of British chemists that appeared in journals to show how professional employment patterns changed and appeared to increase the rewards to mobility in knowledge-based industries.

Only the railroad industry is the subject of study in more than one of the volume's essays, though the three that did so were divided between Canada, Britain, and the United States. Still, the importance of the railroads in industrialization, as leaders in industrial management, makes these essays extremely useful in establishing the likely effects of unionization, describing the extent of job ladders, and making comparisons with other industries.

Unfortunately, complexity and variation in the careers, methods, and evidence make synthesis extremely hard to achieve. This is especially so because it is often unclear how far specific careers are representative of larger trends. If it were not for depression studies that showed increasing tenure among those lucky enough to keep a job, it would appear that greatest commonality across the findings presented is that industrialization created new opportunities for employment, which increasing numbers of workers parlayed into career advancement.

Thus, the main disappointment of this volume resides in its failure to reconcile conflicting evidence found among individual studies. Even the concept of career seems...