Careers, Labor Market Structure, and Socioeconomic Achievement

The objective of this paper is to develop the notion of the career as a strategic link between structural features of the labor market and the socioeconomic attainments of individuals. In the first section we review the treatment of careers in the occupational sociology literature and consider limitations of the traditional conceptualization. In the second section the main features of career lines, their structures and reward trajectories, are described. In conjunction with this dis-cussion, the virtues and drawbacks of several strategies for delineating career lines from empirical data are addressed. In the next section we sketch the determinants of career-line structures as they reside in industry organization and labor market composition. In the con-cluding pages we consider the implications of a labor market overlaid with career lines for investigations of the socioeconomic-achieve-ment process. There are many points of convergence in the literatures of occupational sociology, industrial sociology, organization theory, and labor economics. In this paper we employ the perspectives of these subdisciplines to illumi-nate the nature of work careers; as a second concern, we discuss the relevance of the career concept to a comprehension of the socioeconomic-attainment process. By a "career line " or "job trajectory " we shall mean a work history that is common to a portion of the labor force.2 Our focus, therefore, is on a life-cycle phenomenon, typically a sequence of jobs, rather than on the employment situations of individuals at a given time or at a particular age. Elucidating the properties of these job sequences-their entry portals, number of constituent positions, availability of transfer options to alternative career lines, and shapes of their returns in earnings