Status and Career Mobility in Organizational Fields

• In Event: 437 - Regular Session. Occupational Careers and Identity

Abstract

Using a set of user-generated data, we examine the patterns in the careers of professional chefs. Building on previous ethnographic work that finds that chefs understand the logic of their careers as involving a tradeoff between external status (the status of their restaurant) and their internal status (their occupational level), we attempt to parse out how different trajectories are associated with different outcomes. We find that strategies change over the course of the career for all chefs, but divergences in strategy at different points are associated with eventual outcomes.

Authors

• Chad R. Borkenhagen, University of Chicago

• John Levi Martin